Vienna's approach worked because it happened after WW2 when the country was bombed and broken, land, construction materials and labor were dirt cheap, so the state built over half the city's homes and turned them into public housing cheaply no problem.
But fast forward to today where most of the land and buildings in a city are privately owned, how to you expect a city, any city, to buy up over half the buildings in the city at today's market and turn them into public housing?
The city would probably have to go broke or into huge amounts of debt and everyone would be screaming communism.
Even in the rest of Austria, this approach today would not be feasible due to how insane the cost of urban housing ahs reached no city could afford to buy up over half of it.
The monetary appreciation of housing prices and and turning it into an speculative asset is the west's biggest policy failure. You'd have to undo this first before you can think of implementing Vienna's policies.
> Vienna's approach worked because it happened after WW2
It didn't though, they already started in the 1920ies! The most famous builing, Karl-Marx-Hof, started construction in 1927.
And they are building new public housing to this day, making use of inner city land that comes available from old factories, storage facilities, rail yards or alongside private construction projects etc. Other austrian cities do this too.
>And they are building new public housing to this day,
Sure, a bit yes, but the bulk was acquired/made back when property was dirt cheap, not at today's prices. Vienna couldn't replicate the same move from scratch today.
You cannot start to do today in any city what Vienna started 100 years ago. It's too late now. The fiscal policies of the last decades have made that unfeasible.
>Other austrian cities do this too.
Not even remotely as much as Viena. Graz has next to no public housing, it's mostly private.
Right so you’re saying Vienna’s approached worked but we would have to change things to make it work for us. That is exactly what I am saying too.
I’m also saying that it could be worth considerable effort to try to make those changes, because the reward is a much better system.
For example we might introduce bills now that help stabilize (reduce) housing prices by limiting large scale corporate speculation on housing, such as these two bills [below] introduced into congress. With cheaper housing available, the need for social housing goes down and so does the cost to build it, dramatically lowering the total cost to implement.
Yes and part of what I’m saying is that we might want to stop doing that and think about what is actually going to fix our problems, even if gasp the government is involved. Nobody can afford housing and our planes are falling out of the sky and we’re having a cold-war political debate while every other major country offers cheaper medical care and education.
That would require actually listening to each other and experts, and not using demagoguery to villainize people who disagree with us on minor culture issues. Again, the financial incentives align for the anti-social aspect, since yelling at each other draws in more engagement and viewers and sells more ad-space.
Vienna's approach worked because it happened after WW2 when the country was bombed and broken, land, construction materials and labor were dirt cheap, so the state built over half the city's homes and turned them into public housing cheaply no problem.
But fast forward to today where most of the land and buildings in a city are privately owned, how to you expect a city, any city, to buy up over half the buildings in the city at today's market and turn them into public housing?
The city would probably have to go broke or into huge amounts of debt and everyone would be screaming communism.
Even in the rest of Austria, this approach today would not be feasible due to how insane the cost of urban housing ahs reached no city could afford to buy up over half of it.
The monetary appreciation of housing prices and and turning it into an speculative asset is the west's biggest policy failure. You'd have to undo this first before you can think of implementing Vienna's policies.