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Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

> Rent is the main detractor of disposable income which hurts the rest of the economy, and property owners provide almost no value,

Have you considered that housing might actually be valuable? If it didn’t provide value, why do you think that Vienna seized so much of it to give out to its citizens? Maybe try to find a different way to phrase whatever you’re trying to say.

Assuming you’re referring to property owners getting by doing nothing. That’s false unless they are a slumlord.

Let me ask you another question. What do people do who are not happy with the housing provided by the govt in Vienna?

> The current setup creates guettos by default, by siloing people with different monetary and social capital into different building and areas

This is not how it works in the US for the last 50 years or so. Most places force every new building to include low income units.

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> Let me ask you another question. What do people do who are not happy with the housing provided by the govt in Vienna?

Rent from another landlord mostly. Vienna has close to two million people (give or take some), however only around 500.000 of those live in buildings owned by the city [0]. Those are 1800 buildings by the way, definitely a lot but not unbelievably massive.

Compared to some private companies, such as Vonovia the city of Vienna is just another big player, but by no means massive enough to actually be a monopoly or anything.

It is true that they of course hold a lot of the supply in Vienna itself, housing a quarter of the population, but that still leaves three quarters not living in any of those buildings. It's easy enough to not live in apartments owned by the city if you don't want to.

[0]: www.wienerwohnen.at/wiener-gemeindebau/wiener-gemeindebau-heute.html (Source in German)

> Rent from another landlord mostly.

So the other landlords are providing some value the city is not. That’s my point.

You could argue that they are providing the same value as the city is (housing). It's not like this is some kind of either or situation.

The city is providing value, approximately 500.000 housing units worth of value. Private landlords provide value, the remaining one point something million units worth of housing.

You could of course replace either provider, it doesn't make a practical difference whether you are renting from the city or a private landlord, at least not if we are looking at this from a top down perspective with hundreds of thousands of units.

But the whole point of the city buying into the market was to create competition and ensure that the property market isn't used as an investment/doesn't pay as great as another investment. So with that in mind the current system is actually kind of what they were aiming for.

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