Part of the reason Schranz’s apartment is so affordable is simple: it’s owned by the city. In Vienna, that is (almost) the norm. The landlord of approximately 220,000 socially rented apartments, it is the largest home-owning city in Europe (in London, which has more than 800,000 socially rented apartments, they are owned by the local councils)
Thanks for demonstrating how fucked the rest of the world’s housing is, Vienna! We will proceed to learn absolutely nothing, unfortunately.
Not when there’s “passive income” to be made!
The more I think about landlording the more perverse it seems. It’s right up there with for-profit prisons and hospitals.
And thus a Georgist was born.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
At only 26, he lives in a bright fifth-floor apartment with high ceilings overlooking a European capital city, 10 minutes from the central station and within walking distance of cinemas, theatres and bars.
In the place that last year retained its crown as the world’s most livable city in the Economist’s annual index, Vienna’s renters on average pay roughly a third of their counterparts in London, Paris or Dublin, according to a recent study by the accounting firm Deloitte.
Funded primarily through a hypothecated tax on luxuries such as champagne or horse-riding, the inaugural phase of socialist-governed “Red Vienna” saw 65,000 socially rented apartments shoot up within the city by the time of the Nazi coup attempt in 1934.
The most famous examples of Red Vienna social housing, such as the Karl Marx-Hof in the 19th district or the estates dotted along the “Ring Road of the Proletariat” on Margaretengürtel, look more like castles or monasteries, with art deco flourishes on their facades.
Talk to Gemeindebau residents such as 76-year-old Heinz Barnerth, a retired mechanical engineer who has lived for the past seven decades in the Reumannhof estate in Margareten, and he will be unswerving in his praise of the idea that brought his block into existence in the 1920s.
He criticises Wiener Wohnen for its opaque accounting, suggesting its finances are in direr straits than the Vienna’s senate admits, and that the city’s underspending on maintenance is driving the middle-income earners so desired for the social mix into private rentals.
The original article contains 2,027 words, the summary contains 251 words. Saved 88%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
