Imagine living in a city where you can afford beautiful homes. A city that combines
quality with affordability. Around the world, this
idea of a livable city increasingly seems like a pipe dream. Housing unaffordability
is not just a crisis for the United States. You see it in cities
as diverse as Caracas, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro. The UN estimates that
despite the pandemic, over 60% of the world's population will live in cities by 2030. Urbanization is going to keep growing at a tremendous rate. And so we're really going to
need to look at how do we build in a manner that's
livable, it's affordable. There is somewhere though that seems to be keeping
the housing crisis at bay. The Austrian capital, Vienna, is one of the most affordable
major cities in the world. It also tops the charts
for quality of life. And how they got there,
may offer up some tips for cities globally. This is Aspern Seestadt,
in the suburbs of Vienna. One of the largest new
urban developments currently under construction in Europe. Seestadt is being built
on a former airfield and has a man-made swimming
lake at its center. 60 to 70% of the apartments built here will be allocated to affordable housing. Some of which are designed
by their occupants. We all know how tough it is to bring new urban quarters to life, to make them feel like
the old parts of the city that have this patina that we all love. So we introduce a new model
of collaborative housing. Self developed multi-family
housing originated in Berlin and Freiburg, sort of emanating from
the squatters movements. These are groups of people
and oftentimes families or people who are organized
around a certain ideology like the environment or
living in solidarity. They will work to design and build their own multi-family housing. Collaborative housing is
one of the innovative ways subsidized apartments are
being built in Vienna. Now, apart from being
something really special of having the opportunity
to design your own apartment within a subsidized housing project, what is very important about this project is that they think about so many things. They will introduce
regularly coworking spaces, rooms for seminars, or a big kitchen that can be used by everybody. But the most important
part is that these people that have worked together on
designing their own apartments and their own building form a
community, a lively community. So we have found out that they
work as a community magnet and they are the ones that will bring life to a new urban quarter. When it comes to affordability, Seestadt is not an exception. Vienna is growing rapidly and to meet the demand, every year, it builds at least 7,000
affordable housing units. About half of all the
apartments built in the city. 62% of the Viennese
population already live in this type of accommodation. Public housing blocks,
which are apartments that belong entirely to the city of Vienna are just one part of the
affordable housing portfolio. The city has been building
them at a steady pace since the 1920s. Many other countries also
tried to make this model work, but few have succeeded. Public housing summons this vision of cold monstrous towers. Many were, at the time
of their construction following World War II,
very utopian projects. Their planners imagined a kind of modernist egalitarian society which might have succeeded
if they were funded and maintained and
supported, but they were not. In the United States, the result is that you have public
housing units that lack heating and public housing units
that are just not safe for the occupants. Compounded by the racial composition of public housing residents, this has these deeply
troubling implications. You have both quality of life
issues and then general bias and discriminatory attitudes
toward their residents. That mean that people
perceive public housing as a threat, unfortunately. The stigma of public housing has translated into U.S. policy. And a rule called the Faircloth Amendment currently caps the number
of public housing units at the level it was in 1999. Municipalities need to either sell or demolish existing
buildings to build new ones. And this is all compounded
by restrictive zoning laws. When you have neighborhoods
or parts of entire cities that are zoned for single family homes, those neighborhoods are
effectively segregated. By controlling the nature of construction through zoning codes, you limit how much housing
can be made anywhere. That has had the result of
not a single U.S. county having enough affordable housing for its current population right now. In the '90s, Vienna also
took a radical decision about its public housing, but the city went in
the opposite direction. Public housing was always
well-maintained and high quality, but to maximize its investment, Vienna decided to instead focus on a model offering subsidies
to private nonprofit companies to build what they called social housing. The entire model of
subsidized housing in Vienna is very robust and it is very profitable for the corporations that engage in it. It works on the basis
of a threefold subsidy. Affordable housing stands
and falls with land prices. So the city of Vienna has
a very active land policy, buying land or mobilizing historical land reserves, and then either selling it or leasing it to not-for-profit corporations at a very, very low affordable price. The companies get subsidized
loans for construction. And if the apartments
are still too expensive, there are subsidies for renters. What is special about Vienna
is that social housing is a middle-class subsidy. It is not thought to be only for people that have a weak
socio-economic background. It is thought to be actually
for almost everybody. And as your income
increases, as you get older, you aren't pushed out
of your social housing. And what this does is it keeps
people in these communities. That's a very different way of looking at keeping communities intact. In the '90s, the construction
process also changed. Each company that wants
to build social housing needs to submit their design
in a developer competition. One of the most important mechanisms of ensuring sustainability
and quality are competitions. The designs are judged based
on the architectural quality of the development, the economic function of the building, so that's how affordably
they can build it, the environmental
performance of the building, as well as the social mix. And so this is just ensuring that there's a diversity of unit types, so it's not just singles or couples. You get families, you
have elderly residents. The competitive aspect of
the developer competitions definitely pushes people
to be more innovative on a number of fronts. They're really well designed,
high quality buildings, low energy buildings, just
wondrous amenities, saunas, kindergartens, clinics,
libraries, community spaces. We almost always have balconies. And in many cases there
are even swimming pools on the rooftops. Developer competitions are
also one of the main factors driving down the costs of construction. The construction costs
in Vienna are about half of what they are in Seattle. And so you're getting these incredible high quality buildings
for really a fraction of what we would pay here in the U.S. for what I would say are buildings that are not as well done. Another key element to
making this model work is using space wisely. It would be a waste of money to embark into subsidized
housing and then do low density. Of course, you have to do high density because this results in
many, many more apartments to the benefit of many,
many more young families. But density will work well only if you combine it with high quality. And I'm talking about high
architectural quality, I'm talking about high level
public transport access, and I'm talking about vast green spaces. So the way we go about density is to create really vast accessible parks and to concentrate construction
at the edges of these parks. They don't have a significant
number of high rises, but there is this broad density. The core is five to eight stories for kilometers and kilometers
in every direction. Today, Vienna invests in a mix of public and subsidized housing, but just building new
apartments isn't enough. The city is also committed
to actively maintaining and retrofitting its stock of
over 500,000 affordable flats. There's this process in Vienna called the gentle urban renewal. And what this is is the city
will go into neighborhoods where gentrification is
becoming more mainstream and the effects of it are
becoming more visible. They will upgrade the social housing to ensure that it
maintains a similar quality to the new market rate housing. They will develop amenities to ensure that schools
don't become overcrowded. They'll add a floor or two
to the roof of a building. This could become either
market rate or social housing. What this does is it allows more people to live in the neighborhood. It subsidizes the cost of
the energetic retrofit, because there's also the
energetic component as well. And so they'll rehabilitate
the facade of a building. They'll add ventilation to ensure that these buildings are comfortable, there aren't mold issues, they're healthy. So the city is really
taking an active approach in ensuring that these buildings
are comfortable, habitable and also climate-proof. In the wake of the pandemic, the affordability crisis
in cities worldwide has become even more visible. Rent always eats first, that means that medical
care, clothing, even food are costs that renters sacrifice in order to keep a home
over their family's head. During the pandemic, the kind of plight of low-income tenants really expanded because the number of
people who are out of work, just ballooned and suddenly households were confronting
precarity in their housing for the first time. Vienna's model isn't a solution that can easily be copy and pasted, but all the cities are paying attention. It will take more than just
changes in policy though. Attitudes about how and where we live will need to shift too. In the U.S., there's a lot of desire to live in a detached
house, own a single car. For families like mine
where we don't own a car, we have two children,
we get around by bike, it's density and ample social housing that really allows for
that kind of lifestyle. There is this generational
flip where families like ours and especially those
that are younger than us have no shot at affordable
housing or market rate housing in a lot of cities. And I think that we're going to see places really start to look at adding a density and hopefully in a smart way that doesn't bring more
cars, more congestion so it's more sustainable in the future. Vienna is doing things that
everyone should be aiming for.
the value in the documentary are the great ideas put forth:
Real housing impact requires high density spaces; high density requires higher quality
Raise the standard of quality with developer competition
Get creative with subsidies. Public-private partnerships, land subsidies, renter subsidies
Build more than housing, build real communities. Environmentally sound, diverse residents, transport access, services, large green spaces
Involve residents in the process. Rather than tell people what they want or need, ask them. From design to maintenance
Cities that are looking for new ideas can try these out or add more. No one has the single housing solution but it’s exciting to see more cities trying new ideas to make a change
I didn't watch the video, but i am looking for an apartment in Vienna right now, and with my 1400 Euro i can bearly afford the smallest units. There is the option for a City owned flat, but you have to meet certain prerequisites and wait up to three years. The situation is not good.
Peach Trees
The catch 22 with affordable housing is that making a place nice to live makes it desirable, making it desirable makes it unaffordable to the people you were trying to help. It's the problem with gentrification.
As for housing towers/projects the problem is that they are extremely expensive to maintain. Doubling the problem all the renters in the units are low income. They need to stay near maximum occupancy just to be able to pay for their own maintenance, which naturally didn't happen because once people had the money to move somewhere better, they did.
The 80s and 90s saw movement away from that model in favor of structures with fewer than 3 stories. However, that created the problem of urban sprawl since populations could no longer be concentrated in high rise buildings.
Ultimately the problem comes down to the fact that people have the freedom to choose how and where they want to live. Just using the US as an example, you can draw a 700-800mi circle around Chicago and odds are you will find places with flat or falling property values.
Meanwhile the Gulf and West Coasts have seen a massive boom in population over the last ~50 years which is why there has been a massive boom in housing prices in those areas. The North East Coast is probably the exception from the pattern in US housing having been less effected by de-industrialization than in the Great Lakes.
It's a tad light in discussing the national situation... namely that the rest of the country is being used to subsidize Vienna, the difficulty in actually being eligible for the housing (with Austria on the national level being one of the most difficult EU countries to gain residency or citizenship in), etc.. Also, if you're familiar with the Baugruppen of Germany (the aforementioned housing in Berlin and Freiburg), it's pretty difficulty to export this to a lot of nations for cultural reasons.
No, this is not a utopia, otherwise we would've implemented it the world over. If you're that lucky Viennese citizen, good for you! As an architect though, call me a cynic or call me a realist. I lived in Germany for a brief period and was pretty thoroughly convinced this is not a panacea for the condition of the contemporary western city, let alone the world. Pointing to a lightly detailed video on Viennese housing really is akin to saying "Scandinavia!!!" and proudly proclaiming oneself a socialist. I mean to illustrate this and be blunt, I'm laughing to myself at the notion of trying to apply Viennese style urban planning policies in the context of El Paso, Texas.
This is more one of those fun case studies in learning about different countries from a world history, more touristy type perspective- not a bonafide solution to global housing crises.
Reminds me of that Art Deco buildings in SimCity 2000!
Unless they're putting in roadblocks to investment purchases, nothing else they do will really matter.