Vienna, known as the European capital of social housing, has long been hailed as the poster child for affordable housing initiatives. But could this tradition be on its way out?
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00:00 [Music]
00:21 Vienna is widely considered in Europe an example in the management of housing and social protection.
00:27 The town hall is the owner of more than half of the residential real estate park,
00:32 which allows it to offer affordable rents to tens of thousands of families.
00:37 It is the perfect and idyllic system.
00:41 It seems that I have come to the capital of Austria to try to understand what is hidden behind the facades.
00:47 [Music]
00:56 Centenary or recent, conventional or ecological,
01:07 classic or colorful or iconic,
01:17 small or immense,
01:27 the official housing is here everywhere.
01:40 Around a million people, almost half of the population of Vienna,
01:44 live in social apartments or other types of subsidized housing.
01:48 I visit one of these apartments in a traditional neighborhood of public promotions.
01:56 Hello, hello, come in, please.
02:00 Desvire, an assistant administrator, has lived with her family for almost 20 years in this 70 square meter apartment.
02:09 I lived in the ninth apartment.
02:12 I already had two children and with two children 45 square meters of the apartment was too small.
02:18 After one and a half years I got an offer to get an apartment.
02:26 I came to look at the apartment. It was very nice, big, as I wanted it, three-room apartment.
02:33 Desvire pays 500 euros a month, well below the market value, for the floor, ideally located.
02:44 The kindergarten is right next to me, opposite me.
02:48 The school is ten minutes away.
02:52 In two minutes I am in the subway.
02:56 Representatives of the city council guide me through some of the oldest social buildings in Vienna.
03:02 Unlike Berlin and other historically land-occupied cities,
03:06 the former capital of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire never sold its extensive public land.
03:12 Its annual budget for housing exceeds 400 million euros.
03:17 It is much higher than those of larger European capitals such as Rome, Madrid or Lisbon.
03:23 Our housing model is secured and financed by a housing tax, which every Austrian pays.
03:32 A small contribution of his gross income, the employer also pays a small share.
03:39 This money is specifically intended for housing in the whole of Austria.
03:44 Social housing has contributed to the reiterated recognition of Vienna as the most habitable city in the world.
03:51 High rents and praised public services, social and transport health care,
03:56 coexist here with low rents and crime rates.
04:00 Design, construction and maintenance of social properties also feed the local economy.
04:06 An architect guides me through some of his latest social projects.
04:11 We are currently working on about five housing projects,
04:16 of 350 apartments, the largest is probably the one at the Nordbahnhof,
04:23 and the smallest has about 60 units.
04:28 450 apartments were built here between open spaces to promote interaction and social integration.
04:37 The large Vienna community buildings from the 1920s are a bit of a reference for such a large development.
04:48 Even then, they tried to build very self-confident, very large objects,
04:53 which are strong enough to establish a neighborhood and a surrounding area.
05:00 We are now actually already in an inner courtyard.
05:04 The approach is to build a very large common open space for everyone.
05:11 Social housing represents up to 20% of the projects in his architecture study.
05:21 The architects work here in collaboration with promoters and urban planners
05:25 on very competitive bids.
05:28 The high quality and the high demand for these housing projects,
05:35 which are designed for social sustainability, ecology, economy, architectural quality, are probably special.
05:44 The system admits, however, improvements and maintains certain critical voices.
05:50 This NGO currently helps about 2,000 homeless people to find a social home.
05:57 Vienna is a paradise for tenants, its experts admit, but things have deteriorated lately.
06:06 A prolonged period of low interest rates caused intense speculation.
06:11 Soil costs, materials and maintenance were shot cornering social housing.
06:17 According to these experts, 80% of the new promotions were social and 20% private.
06:24 Now it's exactly the opposite.
06:27 We used to have two thirds of all apartments being built by social housing.
06:33 10 or 15 years ago, now it's the other way around.
06:36 Two thirds of all apartments are being built by private investors.
06:39 And the result is higher housing prices, of course.
06:42 And we should try to turn it around again.
06:48 What are the solutions that you advocate?
06:50 The main solution would be to get more land and more opportunities to build new social housing.
07:00 The city council is facing a situation where financial circumstances are already beyond their means.
07:09 The financial market was so rich that they discovered housing as an investment.
07:14 That's why in Vienna, in the last three or four years,
07:19 they've built 20,000 new apartments privately financed.
07:23 This number has never been reached before and has now fallen to 3,000 or 4,000 units per year.
07:31 Because of the change in the housing market, it's no longer as attractive as investing in this segment again.
07:41 Other aspects also show improvements, say experts from the Vienna Chamber of Labor,
07:48 the main association of salaried workers and consumers in the country.
07:52 Thomas Ritt supervises the social housing rights of the almost 800,000 Viennese members of the Chamber.
08:01 The city council continues to subsidize between 5,000 and 7,000 new apartments per year,
08:05 but waiting lists are increasing, he says.
08:09 The problem is that affordable, cheap housing is associated with long waiting times.
08:15 For example, you have to be in the same apartment in Vienna for two years to get to this waiting list of the municipality.
08:22 And there are sometimes problems and in general the waiting times are too long.
08:29 With all its limitations, the social housing model seems to be embedded in the identity of the city.
08:35 Around 11,000 people visit this exhibition every year on the so-called "red Vienna",
08:41 a period of social housing collapse in the 1920s and 1930s.
08:45 The commissioners say that this social democratic model has configured the urban past and the cultural and social character of the city,
08:54 and that it still outlines its present.
08:58 It was a city in the city and people didn't have to leave this housing project because everything was available.
09:05 Of course, there were also medical parks, shops and so on.
09:07 When I think of the tuberculosis care facilities in the municipality to fight tuberculosis,
09:13 and even now during the pandemic, the places where the tests were done and where vaccination was done,
09:20 it was all very decentralized, distributed over the city and very low-threshold.
09:26 When my children were little and I couldn't get home from work,
09:33 my neighbors picked up my child from kindergarten.
09:38 It's very nice here, green, quiet.
09:43 I'm very happy, I'm satisfied.
09:48 [Music]