Vienna has a 100-year history of building public housing for all (2018)

The countervailing trend is that the number of people per household has fallen greatly in the last 100 years, so even a city without a growing population needs construction to keep up.

It could also be the opposite, rent stable => population not growing

Yes, increasing population generally leads to increasing land prices, so I think that's a good question. There are other things that drive land values up, however, such as just generally increased productivity due to technology and any other factor (because a more productive population earns more and can thus afford to pay more in rent to their landlords).

For a full assessment I would like to see other Austrian cities that have had similarly stable population sizes but don't have Vienna's policies.

> Vienna's population in 1914 (at the beginning of WW1) was 2 million, vs 1.9 million today.

You can't just take those two data points and assume that they are connected by a straight line. Vienna was down to about 1.5 million around 1990 and has been growing since. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna#Demographics

> Vienna's rents are stable and low

For the record, they are neither. There has been crazy, and accelerating, growth in rental costs over the last ten years.

Interestingly, SF's population has only grown 13% from 1950 to 2020. The housing prices have grown rather differently, though. Curious to see, isn't it?

Not really.

Islington (London)'s population is around half what it was in 1914, but rents are out-of-control.

D.C.'s population has gone down since the 1950s and it still faces affordable housing and homeless issues. I don't think population growth or decline is a clear driver.

Standards of living were vastly different back then. It used to be the norm that 6-7 people were living in the same room, and apartments were about 22m² [1]. Toilets were outside the apartment. etc. Since then, old houses were upgraded and massive amounts of new houses were built to accommodate a rising standard of living. Just in the past 30 years, formerly cheap regions at outer parts of Vienna, with houses that were only habitable during summer, developed into enormously expensive upper-middle class areas with single-family houses.

[1] https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000067989262/wohnhistorike...

I don't have the numbers handy, but household size has shrunk dramatically over the last 100 years. I would guess that today's 1.9M people represent 50-100% more househoulds than 1914's 2M.

Sometimes the taxes on the land are even more burdensome than the land itself when you look at it over even a 30 year mortgage.

When homeowners have the vast majority of their wealth ties up in land values, and not structure values, they become property speculators and rentiers just as bad as any other wealthy rentier.

I think a much better effect has the "Altbaumiete" (old pre world-war-II housing) which are rent controlled. Kinda great living, slightly windy and sometimes smelly and there may be lead in the pipes, but at least affordable.

Objectively, Vienna's housing price index is up 75% in real terms since 1990. While that's not the ideal 0%, it is much better than San Francisco where prices have gone up by 400% since 1990.

A family member moved there recently so anecdotal.

To find an apartment was easy in their case (4-5 days) the total cost is similar to Berlin and about 50% the price of Dublin.

It's generally comparatively easy to find a flat here. Rents are low compared to most other cities of its size in central Europe, but rose by quite a lot in the last two decades. I pay about 650€ per month for a 1-bedroom-apartment in central Vienna, with good infrastructure

Hard to compare it to other Austrian cities, because those are generally much smaller (but can be more expensive than Vienna(.

Small correction:

More like, city imposes a variety of luxury taxes dedicated to fill the gap left by private businesses in providing homes. While the public building program never made up a major share of the total, it still provided housing to the poor and working class and also provided a base line for the market.

When you rent you usually do it via a Makler (real estate agent), who is going to ask for 2 months of rent as his/her fee. This is not the deposit, which is usually 3 months, and not the first month rent, this money is gone forever. So people tend to rent on the longer term, 5-10 years easily, because you have to have about 6 months of rent in cash available just to start.

Which sucks if you find a job somewhere else, or just choose badly and it turns out the neighbours are loud, or the house is a sh*tty concrete building with paper walls built in the 50s...

If you are very lucky or have connections, you can rent privately, and then you don't have to pay the Makler. But the number of apartments available like this is very low, I'd say <10%.

I moved here from the UK, and while the UK (especially London) has its problems, I would choose that system _any time_ over what's here in Vienna.

To add insult to injury, the housing prices are sky-high, almost as bad as in London, while the salaries are much lower. So buying an apartment is not really an option unless you can sell another one, or get some support from family.

On the other hand, my wife lost her job, and for the first 5 months or so she gets more than 50% of her salary as Arbeitslosengeld. So that offsets the extremely high taxes a bit.

I think Singapore also has some particular relevance to the US because of its multi-ethnic nature.

Often when I talk to Americans about public housing a really common argument is the image of public housing as a sort of racist thing that creates enclaves for certain (usually low-income) groups. Yet Singapore, with its integration policies has virtually completely avoided this, and it basically can only do it effectively because it controls the housing stock.

It's not a utopia but the degree to which people intermingle and live together is quite astonishing if you're used to French Banlieues or the segregation in many American cities today.

This isn't necessarily true, especially for the original building program. Pre-war apartment buildings for the masses (Zinshaus) were raised quickly and weren't maintained well. E.g., before regulations outlawed the cheaper variety in the 1990s, cheap apartments often lacked a bathroom of their own and relied on shared facilities. The public building program, on the other hand, was up to modern standards (and taking pride in doing so), while it was still aimed at efficiency and never intended to rival the residential buildings raised by private ownership for the middle class. So, if you expect high rooms, stucco, etc, you're probably in the wrong market. (Also, you may not be part of the intended audience, anyway.)

Thanks in part to AirBnB, that apartment is approaching 3k/mo in Vienna as well.

| In the US, you get to keep your house no matter how much anyone - including the government - would prefer you didn't.

That's not accurate. The US, state and city governments can most definitely take private land and convert it to public use if enough people benefit from it.

https://www.justice.gov/enrd/history-federal-use-eminent-dom...

There are other means as well, a city could purchase something on the open market, or a county could purchase land and convert into a public park, or what ever suits them.

> In the US, you get to keep your house no matter how much anyone - including the government - would prefer you didn't.

Not true at all. Eminent Domain is a real thing. The controversies have generally been when there is a dispute over whether the taking is for a public benefit, e.g. condeming property to make way for a private business.

I'm your neighbor to the south (slovenia)... here, your house is practically untouchable if you mess up, but most people want other people to be taxed for owning a house. They also want owners of vacant properties taxed a lot more (which they believe would create more rentable apartments, but vacant apartmnts in big cities are rented out without contracts and without tax - usually to students, who prefer a risky cheap apartment, to a contract+more expensive, and vacant houses outside of cities are empty because literally noone wants to live there - you can buy a house with a large yard around it for a price of a used WV Golf in some parts of slovenia, and maybe half a bathroom in our capital). The same people also want people making money by renting out apartments pay more taxes on rent, because they somehow believe that the increase of taxes wont mean increase in rent prices.... i have no idea why.

But our largest problem is the same as in many other cities, including San Francisco.... want to build something? You have to buy a run down house, because you're not allower to build stuff on farming area, literally by the city center... and when you build a house, it can be 2 family house max. We need huge apartment buildings, but finding an area where an invester can build ones is impossible, because our municipality and goverment don't allow it.

> If we don’t want Vancouver to go down this path, then perhaps we should heed Henry George’s advice: tax land and use the proceeds to build the housing we need.

They have a steeply progressive land value tax and further escalate taxes on vacant land. They also slashed taxes on development and construction. This encouraged productive use and efforts to keep assessments low which also drives down housing costs.

It's 1920s Vienna that is looked to for lessons about public housing.

Vienna is the most livable city 10 times in a row now!

I guess it's a matter of taste. Having lived in both Vancouver and Vienna, I would say the latter is without a doubt a better place to live.

Fun fact: It has been growing by 30% over the last 30 years. (from just below 1.5M in 1990 to just below 2M today.)

The article is about the situation the city was left in after a quite rapid growth from 0.5M in 1851 to 2M in 1910, just before WWI.

source?

Unlike some other places (the US?), in Austria property tax is a relatively minor part of cities's finances. It's also computed based not on "actual" property values but on fictional values that haven't been adjusted since 1973 or so. For both of these reasons, the city doesn't stand to lose from sinking land prices (not that they are sinking).

Also, I can't find the numbers right now, but a lot of land in Vienna is owned by the Catholic Church. Religious organizations are conveniently exempt from property tax.

> Why wouldn’t urban land holders sue the city for damages?

As far as I can tell, Austrian courts don't subscribe to a notion that investments in real estate should be guaranteed to be risk-free.

aren't cheaper areas cheaper because less people want to live there?