[ It remains true today that with so much of the rental market
subsidized and affordable in Vienna, there is downward pressure on
rents overall . ]
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THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE: SOCIAL HOUSING IN VIENNA  
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Ferd Wulkan and Ann Ferguson
November 19, 2022
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_ It remains true today that with so much of the rental market
subsidized and affordable in Vienna, there is downward pressure on
rents overall .  _

Alt-Erlaa municipal housing, Vienna., Rafael_Wiedenmeier via Getty
Images

 

We all know we have a housing crisis all across our country.  Rents
have skyrocketed; there are insufficient numbers of apartments and
houses available; many people in our cities are unhoused; rent control
is considered too radical; there are few protections against
evictions.  The American dream has long included home ownership and
stable safe neighborhoods.  But the dream has become a nightmare as
racism and capitalism leave some without homes altogether, and have
displaced so many more.  Most discouraging, few people see any
alternatives to the current system of how housing is allocated and
paid for.

But there _is _an alternative.  Two members of Franklin County
Continuing the Political Revolution (FCCPR) were in Vienna, Austria
recently and saw how things could be different.  Montague resident
FERD WULKAN was there in September and spent time with several
Viennese residents, all of whom proudly talked to him about housing in
the city.  He visited the Karl-Marx Hof, the largest of the
socialized housing developments - it stretches over 1 kilometer and
houses 5,000 people.  The picture shows a small part of that
development.

Leverett resident ANN FERGUSON was there a few years earlier and
learned how the people in the Karl-Marx Hof complex led the resistance
to the Nazis in the early 1930s.  She was particularly impressed by
the combination of individual kitchens and communal dining services
the original complex offered, including dumb waiters to every
apartment allowing the food from the communal kitchen to be delivered
to each flat, and the communal laundry and child care center.

Between 50 and 60 percent of all Viennese live in permanently
affordable, rent-stabilized subsidized dwellings.  These include
220,000 city-owned units and 200,000 non-profit co-operative flats
built with municipal subsidies. Vienna’s 1,800 municipal housing
estates alone are home to close to half a million citizens (out of a
population of slightly under two million).  All of it together is
referred to as “social housing”, which they think sounds better
than “public housing”.  There has been a conscious effort to
integrate the projects such that members of different social classes
live next to each other, each paying a similar percentage of their
income for rent.

This all started after the devastation of World War I.  In under a
decade, from 1925 to 1934, more than 60,000 new apartments were built
in large developments situated around green courtyards.  The
Karl-Marx Hof is a good example of this. Forty percent of the
building costs came from the Vienna Housing Tax, the rest from the
proceeds of a luxury tax and from federal funds.  From 1919 to 1933,
the city was the only entity building new housing.

While Austria’s national government has been ruled by a variety of
parties ranging from right to left over the years, for over 100 years
(except for the Nazi period 1938-45) Vienna has mostly been governed
by the Social Democrats: indeed, starting in the 1920’s, it was
known as “Red Vienna”. The socialists implemented policies to
improve public education, healthcare, sanitation and, especially,
housing.  Stable affordable housing, how the dwellings were managed,
and what services were provided, were key to  the party’s 
creation and celebration of  a workers’ culture. It was also a way
to increase workers’ power by eliminating a major source of economic
stress.

It remains true  today that with so much of the rental market
subsidized and affordable in Vienna, there is downward pressure on
rents overall .  This means that  owners of private apartments have
to compete with the socialized sector and are thus limited in the
rents they can charge.  In other words, the rental market is not
subject to the forces of the free market or the ideology of
neoliberalism.

Ferd and Ann were also impressed by how apartments are allocated. 
Starting in 1925, persons with disabilities and other societally
vulnerable groups received preference in receiving subsidized
apartments.  Even  today, there continues to be  a complicated
allocation system so that many of the more desirably located
apartments are made available to low-income people. 

So what does this mean for us in the US today?  We need to
acknowledge that housing is a basic human right!  The Vienna example
shows that where there’s a will there’s a way, but we in the U.S.
need a socialist vision that can compete with the dominant capitalist
world view.  Learning from other places, like Ann and Ferd did in
Vienna, can be part of what could get us there. 

Sources, and for more information:

_City of Vienna, _“Social Housing in Vienna
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Miles Howard, “Maybe more of us should live in public housing”,
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_Boston Globe, _3/13/2020

_Wikipedia, “_Red Vienna” 
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“_Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture”_ by Helmut
Gruber [1991, Oxford University Press]

Ann Ferguson,is a retired UMass professor and socialist-feminist
activist

Ferd Wulkan is a retired union organizer

Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution is a multi-issue
political organization that grew out of the Bernie for President
campaign in 2017 in Franklin County Massachusetts.

* Housing
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* affordable housing
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