Practice in Profile
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AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF THE AUSTRO-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I, Austria became a republic. In 1919, Vienna held its first city council election and the left-wing Social Democratic Party won in a landslide. During the period of ‘Red Vienna’, the state enacted major housing reforms, funded by increased taxes on the wealthy. These buildings weren’t just utilitarian, they were grand, innovative structures, designed by some of the country’s most respected architects.1
“Building public housing with better living conditions than the dominant private market was a key ambition… ‘Paläste fūr die Arbeiter’, palaces for the workers,” explained Kurt Hofstetter, the International Building Exhibition coordinator with the City of Vienna (AWIG1, see Instagram links on page 39). “World War II physically and economically damaged Vienna. However, the city’s commitment to social housing remained. From the 1950s to the 1970s, there was very high building activity in the public sector,” says Hofstetter. “Post-war, a federal tax was implemented where Austrians pay around one per cent of their income for social housing.”2
Two main types of social housing are offered. One is the city’s ‘public housing’, which is built, owned and operated by the City of Vienna. The other is tenant-initiated housing provided by ‘limited-profit co-op housing associations’.2 Since the 1980s, new public housing has been built with public-private partnerships and a special type of low-profit housing corporation (AWIG2).
In Vienna, the majority of housing (58 per cent) is in either of these two forms of public rental housing. For both types of public housing, it’s impossible to make a general statement about what a typical family pays in rent. For public housing and other housing assistance programmes in the United States, households pay exactly 30 per cent of their income, including utilities, on rent. However, for Viennese public housing, rent is not based on income but, instead, on the apartment unit: number of rooms, square metres, amenities and other factors.
Residents of Viennese public housing have a wide range of incomes. The focus is on housing for all rather than prescribing specific income ranges: e.g. to join a co-op, some tenants require a modest subsidy in the form of a low-interest, long-term government loan, which means the programme is scalable to actually produce enough housing to meet demand.
In both types of housing, social cohesion within the property and the surrounding neighbourhoods is a big consideration. Vienna (population 1.9 million – potentially Auckland’s population in 2030) doesn’t talk about affordable housing but “affordability of everyday life, where low-profit and subsidised housing can counteract price increases in the property market, thus creating secure, long-term housing and rental relationships, i.e. focused on a secure
