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

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

#51

Post by alamortsubite »

larsiusprime wrote: post #45
gyulai wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vienna is a bit out of the ordinary in that regard because it has been a stronghold of leftist government. The 2nd and 3rd biggest cities in Austria are Graz and Linz which don't have that kind of left-leaning policy. You can rent flats there for rates similar to Vienna public housing. But those are much smaller cities. Vienna is more comparable to Munich for instance where rents are much higher and which is a city t…

Thanks for sharing! Question: > has less to offer along many dimensions of quality-of-life. Which one are saying has less to offer, Munich or Vienna?

Munich.

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

#52

Post by statstutor »

kcorbitt wrote: post #8

The article states that Vienna's population in 1914 (at the beginning of WW1) was 2 million, vs 1.9 million today. I'm no housing policy expert, but isn't it possible that Vienna's rents are stable and low in part because they haven't had to increase their housing stock in over 100 years? It seems to me that a new-world city like Vancouver that has grown tremendously over that period wouldn't be directly comparable.

Not really.

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

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

#53

Post by I_am_tiberius »

tom_mellior wrote: post #28
kcorbitt wrote: post #8

The article states that Vienna's population in 1914 (at the beginning of WW1) was 2 million, vs 1.9 million today. I'm no housing policy expert, but isn't it possible that Vienna's rents are stable and low in part because they haven't had to increase their housing stock in over 100 years? It seems to me that a new-world city like Vancouver that has grown tremendously over that period wouldn't be directly comparable.

> 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 accel…

I assume that concerns many cities worldwide but it seems that currently everyone is trying to get rid of cash and take cheap loans to buy real estate. I check the real estate websites in Austria on a daily basis and can say that real estate supply has definitely decreased during the past year.

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

#54

Post by ajsnigrutin »

aerosmile wrote: post #37

Here's the gist: the government taxed the shit out of the landlords and forced them to sell their land cheaply. Europeans generally see nothing wrong with this strategy, whereas most Americans will feel shivers down their spines. This difference comes from different attitudes around ownership. In places like China and Russia, owning a house means you get to keep the house unless enough people would benefit from you n…

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.

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

#55

Post by ajsnigrutin »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #30
jeffbee wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SF is an economics lesson on what not to do. Complete and catastrophic failure across the board. Low prices don’t mean much if there is no market availability. Many cities that are heavily rent controlled have horror stories of year long waits to get a unit. Or, far worse, black markets where controlled units exchange hands privately. The other responder to my comment suggests this is not the case in Vienna, nice! Th…

San francisco is also a building project that noone understands... Instead of building large apartment buildings, they build single family houses.

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

#56

Post by ghaff »

throwawayboise wrote: post #46
aerosmile wrote: post #37

Here's the gist: the government taxed the shit out of the landlords and forced them to sell their land cheaply. Europeans generally see nothing wrong with this strategy, whereas most Americans will feel shivers down their spines. This difference comes from different attitudes around ownership. In places like China and Russia, owning a house means you get to keep the house unless enough people would benefit from you n…

> 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.

It is but it's increasingly difficult. Constructing the Interstate Highway System would have be far more challenging today. (Some of our property growing up was taken for this purpose. Don't really know if my parents considered it an OK deal at the time.)

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

#57

Post by Barrin92 »

arcticbull wrote: post #48

Singapore does something similar, with 80% of the population living in HDB accommodations [1]. The other 20% is a free-for-all near as I can figure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

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.

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

#58

Post by tom_mellior »

jschveibinz wrote: post #7

A city government manipulating the price of urban property so that it can purchase it? This doesn’t seem like a workable model. Doesn’t that reduce property tax revenue? Doesn’t that affect the value of other land in general? Why wouldn’t urban land holders sue the city for damages?

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.

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

#59

Post by selimthegrim »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #54
aerosmile wrote: post #37

Here's the gist: the government taxed the shit out of the landlords and forced them to sell their land cheaply. Europeans generally see nothing wrong with this strategy, whereas most Americans will feel shivers down their spines. This difference comes from different attitudes around ownership. In places like China and Russia, owning a house means you get to keep the house unless enough people would benefit from you n…

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 chea…

Do people still have apartment rights left over from ex-YU?

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

#60

Post by larsiusprime »

giantg2 wrote: post #47
larsiusprime wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you referring to taxes on ground rent (what is typically meant by "land tax" -- a tax on the value of the land if it was an empty lot), or taxes on improvements (what's built on the land)? Conventional property tax is a mixture of pure land tax and a tax on improvements. And are you talking in general, or do you have some specific insight into Vienna's particular policies?

In general and total real estate property tax. I will pay at least as much property tax over the next 50 years as what I paid for my house.

Thanks! I'm curious -- if it's not weird to ask, does your property tax bill happen to separate out how much is due to improvements and how much to ground rent?
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