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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)

#81

Post by mschuetz »

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.

Standards of living were vastly different back then. It used to be the norm that 6-7 people were living in the same room, and apartments were about 22m² [1]. Toilets were outside the apartment. etc. Since then, old houses were upgraded and massive amounts of new houses were built to accommodate a rising standard of living. Just in the past 30 years, formerly cheap regions at outer parts of Vienna, with houses that were only habitable during summer, developed into enormously expensive upper-middle class areas with single-family houses.

[1] https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000067989262/wohnhistorike...

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

#82

Post by masswerk »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #6

So a hundred years ago the city imposed crazy taxes on land owners and then bought the land for themselves. Then the city built a lot of housing on the now city-owned land via non-profit construction. The article doesn’t make a strong attempt to explain how their housing affordability is “solved” though. How easy it to find a new apartment to rent? How much does it cost? What do you get for that price? How does this…

Small correction:

More like, city imposes a variety of luxury taxes dedicated to fill the gap left by private businesses in providing homes. While the public building program never made up a major share of the total, it still provided housing to the poor and working class and also provided a base line for the market.

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

#83

Post by ch4s3 »

giantg2 wrote: post #41
ch4s3 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that what they did? If by that you mean that they used the tax system to discourage the development of investment properties and undeveloped land as well, then yes I guess. However land value taxes aren't a marxist idea, in fact LVT has been advocated for by Smith, Ricardo, Friedman, Stiglitz, and so on. Even a lot of libertarians like LVT.

It said they had a highly progressive land tax and additional tax on vacant land. This incentivizes utilization of land, but also makes it economically unfeasible to create apartments if you must pay the tax and compete with the government housing. I'd love to see the data for Libertarians promoting land tax.

> I'd love to see the data for Libertarians promoting land tax.

You can Google this. There’s a lot of disagreement but some of them are for it.

I would imagine that the LVT would make it hard to compete with government housing at some price points, but I don’t know too much about Vienna in particular.

My understanding was they they were trying to write tax policy to maximize the private market production of housing affordable at some percentage of AMI (or rather however the measure median income). But I don’t have a sophisticated understanding.

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

#84

Post by masswerk »

dantheman wrote: post #13

Vienna is the most dull and calcified city I've ever lived in, and it's not a growing city. It's not super useful to compare to cities that are thriving.

Fun fact: It has been growing by 30% over the last 30 years. (from just below 1.5M in 1990 to just below 2M today.)

The article is about the situation the city was left in after a quite rapid growth from 0.5M in 1851 to 2M in 1910, just before WWI.

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

#85

Post by masswerk »

gyulai wrote: post #11

Knowing Vienna quite well and knowing Vancouver at least a little bit, I'd say this is not apples-to-apples. In Vancouver it was the real estate boom that has fueled high-quality residential development: Given the circumstance where such development would fetch high prices, residential development was conducted that would deliver on a level of quality commensurate with high prices (namely: high quality!). A "Gemeinde…

This isn't necessarily true, especially for the original building program. Pre-war apartment buildings for the masses (Zinshaus) were raised quickly and weren't maintained well. E.g., before regulations outlawed the cheaper variety in the 1990s, cheap apartments often lacked a bathroom of their own and relied on shared facilities. The public building program, on the other hand, was up to modern standards (and taking pride in doing so), while it was still aimed at efficiency and never intended to rival the residential buildings raised by private ownership for the middle class. So, if you expect high rooms, stucco, etc, you're probably in the wrong market. (Also, you may not be part of the intended audience, anyway.)

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

#86

Post by cheriot »

dragonwriter wrote: post #63
arcticbull wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact, if you want to reduce the price of houses, increase the supply instead of instituting rent control and hoping for spooky action at a distance.

> Fun fact, if you want to reduce the price of houses, increase the supply instead of instituting rent control and hoping for spooky action at a distance. That doesn't work either, though it may slow the rate of price growth. If you want to reduce the price of housing, tank the local economy. It's the only thing that works. Supply side policy is neutralized by its own effect on accelerating/decelerating economic grow…

Building new housing doesn’t bring more people to the area. Nobody will stay long without a job and increasing the total number of jobs requires more office and commercial space.

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

#87

Post by tablespoon »

arcticbull wrote: post #49
cheriot wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet employment increased 40% from 1990 to 2019[1]. Increasing employment while maintaining a cap on the number homes drives up the value of the homes closest to all those jobs. [1] 2523.4/1798.7 = 1.4 from https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SANF806NAN

Fun fact, if you want to reduce the price of houses, increase the supply instead of instituting rent control and hoping for spooky action at a distance.

> Fun fact, if you want to reduce the price of houses, increase the supply instead of instituting rent control and hoping for spooky action at a distance.

Though if you want to reduce the prices of housing quickly, I don't think anything could beat rent control plus an aggressive use of eminent domain to build lots of public housing quickly. Even though public housing was done extremely poorly in the US and earned a very bad reputation, other countries have done it much more successfully.

A market solution would naturally take far more time (at a minimum, there'd be no reduction in prices until new development project finish and their supply hits the market), and the equilibrium price may still end up being lower but still unaffordable to too many people.

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

#88

Post by peter_d_sherman »

>"Vienna provides an interesting counterpoint. Because rent control disincentivized the private development of rental buildings, landlords were, for a time, removed from the market for urban land. Consequently prices finally went down, allowing the city to buy land at a much reduced price; often it was the only buyer in the market."

PDS: An interesting cycle (or set of cycles) of cause and effect...

Disclaimer: I am neither for nor against rent control...

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

#89

Post by arcticbull »

giantg2 wrote: post #68
arcticbull wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a great way to reduce inequality, sure. It's one way to reduce housing prices, but generally just increasing supply is simpler and more palatable.

I guess it addresses it on the effect side more than the cause side (inequality). This is the way they are increasing supply.

This is an unpopular opinion to be sure, but I believe in wealth inequality and income inequality, so long as the standard of living at the bottom is reasonable - and there exists meaningful social mobility. I'd rather tax it on the backend than impede the front end. This is just a matter of opinion of course.

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

#90

Post by arcticbull »

tw_hn_3_14_2021 wrote: post #64
arcticbull wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact, if you want to reduce the price of houses, increase the supply instead of instituting rent control and hoping for spooky action at a distance.

Somehow, no one in SF has realized this: that they can institute rent control... and increase housing supply... at the same time.

It's certainly possible to do both, but I do not believe that rent control is necessary when organic market-based solutions should sort the problem out. I'm an interventionist when the market fails, but not when the market isn't even allowed to try due to different failed intervention.
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