LH 돈 없다고 할 게 아니라. 비엔나 '포트학스키가세 Podhagskygasse' 프로젝트, 100세대 공급, 1세대당 1.6억원 건설 비용. 공정 기간 9개월. 목조 경량 모듈러

오스트리아 비엔나 '포트학스키가세 Podhagskygasse' 프로젝트, 100세대 공급, 1세대당 1.6억원 건설 비용. 공정 기간 9개월. 목조 경량 모듈러 시스템 도입.

 

현행 '매입임대주택' 제도 폐지해야 하는 이유들.   비엔나 시처럼 서울시가 직접 주택건설 공급자(9개월도 가능),서울시민 80%가 임대주택 신청가능도록 양질로 바꿔야 한다.

 

 

현재 , 서울시공공임대주택 SH,LH 합산 보유량은 30만호.  서울시 전체 주택 수 대비 8~10% , 위치는 주로 서울 외곽 구들, 불편 사항 10채 중 9채는 너무 좁음(36제곱미터, 11평으로 주로 1인 가구용,  아이 있으면 살기 힘들어 이사가야함) 서울시 최근 4년간 매입비용 9.8조원.

 

경기도 공공임대주택 보유 물량 ( 55~60만 호) 전체 주택의 9%  
40㎡ 이하(12평 이하 약 75% 이상), 경기도 최근 4년간 매입비용 6.9조원 

1. 경실련 (조정흔, 정택수) 연구자들이 이재명 정부의 '신축매입 미대 14만호' 계획을 폐지하라고 주장했다.

 

[매임임대주택이란, LH,SH (주택공사)가 민간건설업자들이 지은 주택을 직접 사서, 서민이나 청년들에게 임대해주는 주택이다. 이것은 LH가 직접 주택을 건설해서 공급하는 ‘건설임대’와 다르다.

 

그 이유는 무엇인가? 

 

(1)  재정 낭비.  SH 가 (25평형) 아파트 신축한 분양원가는 3.4억원, LH 매입 오피스텔 6.6억원 SH 매입 오피스텔 7억원.

LH 한국 토지주택공사, SH 서울주택공사, GH 경기주택공사 등 '공공기관'이 돈은 2배 쓰고, 효과는 없는 상황.

 

윤석열 정부, 비-아파트 (빌라, 오피스텔) 안 팔려, LH가 직접 사주기 시작 (LH,SH가 비싼 구매자 역할)

 

'민간업자가 토지가격을 올리고, 건축비 거품을 얹은 시장가격으로 LH 등이 주택을 구매하고 있음.

 

정부가 집을 직접 짓는 대신 민간 업자의 물량을 사주는 방식을 택한 이유는 건설 자본의 이윤 증식에 기여하기 위해서임. 살 집이 필요한 시민들의 주거 안정이 목적이 아니라 부동산 경기 부양과 민간건설사 구제가 본질적 목적이 되어버림.

 

서울시(경기도)가 주택 공급자가 아니라, 주택 소비자로 전락하면서, 주택 가격만 더 상승시켰다고 지적함. 

 

(비교) 오스트리아 비엔나 주택공사 '비너보넨'은 지난 100년 넘게 민간주택을 구매하지 않는다.  LH, SH 등이 직접 건설해서 양질의 공공임대주택을 공급하고 있다. 

 

(2) 실적 위주 때문에 2배 손해. 왜 2배 손해보고, '정부가 매입 임대주택'을 사들이고 있는가? 답은 간단하다.  현행 관행상, LH 이 신규아파트를 완공하는데까지 걸리는 시간이 6~7년이기 때문에, 1~2년 안에 '임대주택 물량 확보' 실적을 올릴 수 있는 '매입임대주택' 제도를 채택함.

 

이에 대한 대안은 무엇인가? 주택 신규 건설 공사 기간 획기적으로 단축할 수 있다. 오스트리아 비엔나 '포트학스키가세 Podhagskygasse' 프로젝트, 100세대 공급, 1세대당 1.6억원 건설 비용. 공정 기간 9개월. 목조 경량 모듈러 시스템 도입. (모듈을 공장에서 90% 제작후,현장에서 바로 건설) 

 

서울시가 2026년에 계획하더라도, 2027년 ~ 2028년 에 공공임대주택 신청자들이 입주가 가능하다. 

그리고 9개월 공정 방식이 아니더라도, 2~3년으로 공사를 단축시킬 수도 있다. 

어디에 짓는가? 서울 시내 자투리 땅, 재개발 대기지역, 국공유 공휴지에 고품질 모듈러 주택 건설 가능.  

 

(3) 공실율 발생. 경실련 보고서에 의하면,. 2021년~2024년까지 . 매입임대주택을 구매한 비용, 총 16.7조원. 2024년은 역대 최고, 5.6조원. 이 돈으로 주로 구매한 것은 아파트가 아닌 주택 형태들 (빌라, 오피스텔, 다세대주택) 

부실관리와 주민의 기피로 인해, 공실률 발생. SH 매입한 주택의 공실율은 11% (1841채) 

10%에 해당하는 1695 호(채)는 명의 등기조차 없는 미입주 상태. 

LH 공사는 이에 대한 국회의 자료 요청 거부. 불투명 행정의 대명사. 

 

공실율 증가 원인으로는, 사람들은 공공임대주택으로 아파트를 선호하는데, 빌라,다세대,오피스텔 같은 주택형태가 많다는 점.

그래서 인기가 상대적으로 없음. 

 

한국일보 보도에 따르면, 서울시 외곽에 소재 ( 입지 ) 대도시 외곽, 비수도권 , 소도시 배치.

서울시 보유 임대주택 30만호 중에서, 60제곱미터 (실 18평, 보통 25평 ) 미만은 전체 물량의 92%. 60제곱미터 넘는 집은 2만 4천호에 불과.

 

서울시 매입임대주택은 주로 소형 오피스텔, 빌라 위주, 17~40 제곱미터 (5~12평)

서울시 공공임대의 49%는 원룸 형태, 2개 이상 방은 전체 30%도 안됨.

 

(4) 보충, 공실율 원인 및 품질 현실. 

현재 서울시 매입임대주택, 소형 오피스텔이나 빌라 위주, 17~40 제곱미터 (5~12평짜리) 

인근주민 반대(집값 하락, 역세권 청년주택 건립시, 일조권 침해, 슬럼화 우려 (사다리꼴, 채광 불량))

서울 공실율 (3.6% 1만 5천호 공실, 이유, 시설낙후, 행복주택 초소형 평형 기피.

 

대안 - 임대주택의 크기를 최소 59제곱미터로 늘려야,

신규 공급 위치 - 도심 유휴 부지, 용산 정비창, 노후 관공서, 외곽 NO

 

(비교_ 비엔나 모델과 차이, 공공임대주택이나, 비영리 사회주택의 임대주택 방 크기,  평균 70제곱미터 약 21평. 최대 110제곱미터. 부대시설이 호텔급)  공공주택 내부에 공동시설을 고려하면,  비엔나 시소유와 사회주택 두 가지 임대주택의 크기는 서울보다 2.5배 정도 더 크고 질적으로도 우수하다. 

(5) 세입자들 강제 퇴거 발생. 신축매입약정의 문제점. (2021-2024)  서울 지역 신축(주택) 매입 8.8조, 구축(주택)  매입 1조원 지출.

신축약정 양식이란 (민간업자가 토지를 매입하고 건물을 지어, 공공에 넘기는 방식) –이게 오히려 공공의 재정 부담 증가시킴. 

조정흔 감정평가사가 정의당 주택정책 토론회에서도 중요한 사실을 알려줌. 민간건설업자들이 '신축매입약정'을 맺고, 기존 주택을 해체하고, 신축하는 과정에서, 거기 세입자들이 강제로 쫓겨나고 있음. 실제로 동네를 가보면,아직도 살만한 집들을 부수고 새 집을 짓는 경우도 많다는 리포트.

 

(6) 비엔나 시 주택공사 '비너보넨'의 토지 확보와 주택기금 조달 방식.

 

1. 토지와 주택을 민간에다 내다 팔지 않는다. 역대 정부의 오류를 반복해서는 안된다. 

비엔나 시는  한국의 LH, SH와 달리, 토지와 공공임대주택을 민간에 절대 팔지 않음.

반면에 LH 는 공공토지를 민간건설업자들에게 매각해서 이윤을 챙김 (적자 메우느라) 

 

2. 토지 은행이 필요하다. 평소에 땅을 저축하자.

 

비엔나 시당국은 토지 은행인,본폰즈 빈 (Wohnfonds Wien)을 운영.

토지은행인 '본폰즈'가 뭐하냐?  비엔나 시내의 유휴지나 노후 공공시설 부지가 매물로 나오면, 바로 매입해서 땅을 저축해놓음.

이렇게 비축된 토지를 민간 건설사에 파는 것이 아니라, 비영리 사회주택 협동조합에 장기 임대하거나 저렴하게 공급.

3. 사회주택 전용 법률 필요

 

 예를들어 서울시 용산정비창 부지의 경우, 비엔나 시 같으면, '법률로' 서울시가 '공공임대주택' 건설 전용토지로 될 수 있음. 

비엔나 시는 2019년, 사회주택 전용 용도(Geförderter Wohnbau)' 등급 신설해서, 특정 부지를 개발할 때, 전체 면적의 3분의 2(66%) 이상은 반드시 사회주택용으로만 건설. 도시계획법

예를들어, 서울시 용산 정비창 부지는 상위 1%를 위한 초고층 타워가 아니라, 서울 시민 66%를 위한 공공주택 부지다, 이런 도시공간계획법이 필요함.   

 

4. 주택기여금 제도 (  Wohnbauförderungsbeitrag) 소득의 일정 비율을 노사가 절반씩 부담, 1960년대는 1%에서 지금은 1.5%로 (고용주 0.75%, 노동자 0.75%) 인상. 비엔나 시는 이 돈으로 사회주택과 시소유 공공임대주택에 투자 (건설, 보수, 유지)

한국도 질좋은 공공주택 건립을 위한 법률과 조세제도를 마련해야 한다.  (재원 마련, 서울의 종부세와 양도세를 , 시소유 주택이나, 사회주택 건설 자금으로 법제화 해야 한다.)

 

5. 서울시가 공공임대주택을 공급할 때, 소셜 믹스, 즉 층별 호별로 임대주택과 분양주택을 섞어야 한다. 

 

 

(7) 비엔나 시 전체 주거  4가지 형태

 

a. 토지는 시가 소유. 시소유 공공임대 주택 . 22만호. 21~22% 비엔나 시민이 거주.

b. 비엔나 시에서 토지를 장기 저금리로 빌려줌. 비영리 사회주택 (협동조합). 20만호. 20 % 

c. 비엔나 시의 월세 정책의 통제를 강하게 받음. 민간 임대주택 : 33~35% 

d. 자가 소유. 18~20% 

 

 

 

 

1. 자료.

https://www.iba-wien.at/en/projekte/projekt-detail/project/podhagskygasse

Overview

 

 

 

Vienna’s Model Shows the Government Really Can Guarantee Housing for All

 

A new report documents the wild and likely replicable success of Vienna’s public housing plan.

 

By Tyler Walicek , Truthout

 

 

PublishedSeptember 2, 2025

A statue is displayed in front of Karl-Marx-Hof, a red, several-story tall community owned apartment building in Vienna.

Karl-Marx-Hof, a community owned apartment building, is seen in Vienna, Austria on November 28, 2018.

JOE KLAMAR/AFP via Getty Images

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In the United States, calls for better social services, public programs, and other state-led interventions are reliably met with cries of impracticality. Ideas from the left are regularly derided in hyperbolic terms; some classics include the charge that the left wishes to give away the equivalent of “free ponies” (that one comes via Hillary Clinton), or are otherwise pie-in-the-sky utopians living in a “magical fantasy land,” promising “unicorns” and the like. But those who shout down even the barest suggestion of mobilizing public assistance to confront the U.S.’s many sprawling social crises betray their ignorance of, or their dogmatic ideological opposition to, the wealth of flourishing social programs that are in place worldwide.

 

Vienna has long been among the many international examples that provide valuable lessons for systematic social betterment — particularly for the housing crisis, which has become catastrophic in the U.S. Conversely, in the Austrian capital, a thriving, popular state-led social housing model leads the globe in providing high-quality affordable developments (known locally as the Gemeindebau) to a large segment of the population. With a pragmatic yet forward-thinking design, particularly in green energy future-proofing, the Vienna model offers a knowledge base, born of decades of experience, that in a just world would be tapped to help enact comparable proposals in the United States — like the currently stagnant hopes of a Green New Deal for Housing.

 

Good First Impressions

The Climate and Community Institute (CCI), a progressive think tank with a focus on economics and climate, released a comprehensive report this summer that documents the history, sociopolitical context, and notable achievements of the Vienna model. Hundreds of thousands of people in Vienna are comfortably housed by state-owned buildings, to which 5,000 new affordable units are added per year.

 

Daniel Aldana Cohen is a researcher, writer, sociology professor and the CCI’s co-founder and director of housing. “Vienna is the social housing capital of the world,” said Cohen in an interview withTruthout. “It’s the big major Western city with the most social housing … It’s very frequently ranked the world’s most livable city. So, it’s not just the social housing — they’re clearly doing something right.”

 

Cohen witnessed the model’s accomplishments firsthand on a delegation trip to Vienna; this experience provided the initial impetus for the CCI report. The city’s leadership on housing is the legacy of Red Vienna, a period of leftist governance lasting from 1919 to 1934, which laid the groundwork by building 64,000 units of municipally owned housing, funded by progressive taxes on property and on luxury goods. These efforts helped resolve a disastrous turn-of-the-century tenement and slum crisis and produced, among other legacies, the iconic Karl-Marx-Hof.

 

 

 

Members of PAHC sit outside of the reclaimed building where Pablo and Nadia live in Manresa, Catalonia, on May 5, 2024, to celebrate the squat’s one-year anniversary.

News | Human Rights

 

Housing Activists in Spain Occupy Vacant Bank-Owned Buildings and Halt Evictions

In addition to reclaiming vacant buildings, a collective in Manresa, Spain, halts roughly three evictions per week.

By Ella Fassler , TruthoutOctober 27, 2024

The statistics certainly bear out claims of the model’s longstanding success: as the CCI report notes, Vienna has the lowest rent of any major city in Western Europe; per square meter, it is roughly three times cheaper than London, and its income distribution is far more equitable than New York City’s. Social housing has benefits that redound to many further realms of society. It is a state and community platform on which a civil service, public goods, sustainability and better lives have been built for a century.

 

Working Households

Vienna’s social housing is divided into two primary types: a large supply of both municipally owned housing units and what the CCI researchers call “limited-profit” housing. The former is entirely state-owned and run; the latter, as the report describes it, is “publicly subsidized, privately developed, and heavily regulated.”

 

Each type accounts for 21 percent of Vienna’s total housing stock, which consists of roughly 40 percent social housing, with the remainder being privately owned rentals and owner occupied units. Both varieties of social housing are affordable and sought-after. Unlike the developments pejoratively referred to as “projects” in the U.S., Vienna’s limited-profit housing is attractive to people across the financial spectrum. The report notes that, though limited-profit rents are higher than that of the municipal-owned units, “on average, new limited-profit social housing rents are 27 percent lower than private rentals.”

 

The key to the success of the system is the interdependence of its two main components. For the social housing model to function — and function “as a pro-worker model, not just as subsidized units for the middle class,” Cohen stipulated — municipal housing must serve as a frontline solution to accommodate the tenants in the greatest need. “Most people from migrant backgrounds who live in social housing (and not enough of them do, but of those that do) live in municipal housing,” he added. Applications for municipally owned housing are simpler, and again, the rent is lower. It’s there that immigrants and the working class tend to secure shelter.

 

Cohen emphasized that to provide the best social outcome and house all segments of society, the dual systems are crucial. “We don’t actually want to just take the limited-profit model. We also need to have some version, in the U.S., like public housing, that assures a very substantial production for people who need that housing the most.”

 

But an entrenched pattern and legal structure has for decades sent the U.S. spiraling in the opposite direction, towards diminution and decay of the public housing stock. The Faircloth Amendment has capped the total number of public housing units since 1998 and has prevented the office of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and local Public Housing Authorities (PHA) from building any increase over the number of units that existed on October 1, 1999. Faircloth was effectively a giveaway to the real estate industry, which enjoys the benefits of severely constrained competition along with an open rental market share — a segment that disproportionately contains people of color, the poor, the elderly, disabled people, and the otherwise vulnerable — from which the industry can draw profit.

 

And the profits are enormous: Research published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2019 found that the owners that operate low-quality housing in impoverished areas — in a word, slumlords — often charge more, “relative to the market value of a property” than those operating units for people with higher incomes. Contrary to the prevailing vision of slums as a social byproduct of urban dysfunction, they persist, in effect, by design: the slum is a “prime moneymaker,” the researchers wrote, exploited by “those who saw in land scarcity, housing dilapidation, and racial segregation the opportunity to maximize their rate of return.”

 

Rent in poor neighborhoods has become endemically unaffordable across the country as a result. Meanwhile, the supply of public housing has fallen far behind the times. The intertwined crises of rent, homelessness and poverty are in many ways traceable back to the adoption of the Faircloth Amendment, alongside decades of federal disinvestment and the real estate industry’s profitable predation.

 

Historically, “federal public housing has not been mixed-income. But that could be introduced,” said Cohen. Indeed, building appealing units that house a wider income range of Americans would create constituent buy-in and help diminish the widespread stigmatizing impression of public housing as a place that wealthier (and whiter) people would want to avoid. The means-tested model — together with decades of market fundamentalist, neoliberal smears against public goods — has created this stereotype, bound up in all manner of confusion and myths about welfare, state programs, and race. Inevitably, income limitations hamper social programs and open them to attack. Universally open programs, conversely, remove the need for burdensome income-filtering bureaucracy and enjoy broader legitimacy: built into their very structure is the acknowledgment that the benefits are shared by all. And by eliminating the bureaucracy, universal programs often actually cost less.

 

Any application of Vienna-style solutions to the United States context — i.e., instituting mass social housing available to people of all incomes — will demand both the embrace of the limited-profit housing model and major investments in new and existing municipally owned housing. “What we would like to see [in the U.S.] is an expansion of that fully public stock,” said Cohen. “Because it’s publicly owned, you have much more control and [can fund] really well-regulated projects built, ideally, by non-profits or cooperatives. That’d be more flexible … what we’re looking for in the U.S. is a balanced-portfolio approach.”

 

Cohen himself was involved in the initial planning of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, which would revamp, repair, and extend the nation’s decaying public housing stock, construct new units and implement emissions reduction technologies, creating jobs in the process. As he added, “Even at the bare minimum, we need to repair, retrofit, upgrade, and basically save the almost two million units of public housing that are available in the U.S. right now.”

 

If the U.S. were to build more state-owned public housing as well as adopt the limited-profit model, this would meet the needs of a large segment of the working class, potentially from the lowest up to higher-middle incomes. With adequate regulatory policy like rent control in place, the devastating crises of housing and homelessness could finally be confronted. (It is worth reiterating here that an enormous number of the unhoused people in the U.S. are among the “invisible homeless,” crashing on couches or in vehicles, holding jobs but simply unable to meet their needs thanks to crushingly low wages and impossible housing expenses.)

 

Some rough analogues of the limited-profit model do already exist in the U.S. — but Cohen says they remain inferior to Vienna’s approach for a number of reasons. Tax credits and grants for affordable development are patchwork, “[while] Section 8 gives tenants vouchers, which they bring to landlords, so the government is subsidizing the rent.” A better approach could be to “tie the voucher to the building, instead of the tenant, and then you can finance really good buildings.” Doing so would require regulatory overhaul — but, as Cohen put it, “we’re not talking about bringing an alien language to planet Earth.”

 

In the Vienna model, developers of limited-profit units are paid for their work, but those developers are not accumulating any excess profits, Cohen explained. “The quote-unquote ‘profit,’ which is the revenue in excess of expenditure, has to be recycled back into housing upgrades.” (The “limited-profit” concept is fairly comparable to the U.S. “non-profit” model; the report authors gave it a distinct name to reflect its distinct context.)

 

In Vienna, many developers maintain dual wings of operation: one for profit in private housing, with another dedicated to limited-profit projects. Though such work might lack exorbitant returns on speculative investment, it’s not as if developers are working for free — the company is still paid by the state, and its workers draw paychecks. Limited-profit work still provides opportunities for income and can be used as paid employee training. In other words, there are still meaningful incentives to build units under this model. It’s just not driven by the incentive of massively enriching investors, like many developments in the U.S.

 

The Innovation Confusion

Vienna’s housing triumph is a testament to the power of state planning to produce meaningful, positive social outcomes that catalyze positive feedback cycles of quality-of-life improvement and generate better living environments for everyone in the city. It’s also a potent counterexample to the deeply inculcated U.S. narrative that insists innovation can only happen in conditions of deregulation and state retreat.

 

As Cohen summarized: “The way that I think about it, as an outsider to Vienna, is that in the U.S., almost all housing is a high-risk, high-reward business. In Vienna’s social housing system, you have a lot of companies, and their workers get paid, and it is very often just a stable, low-risk, low-financial reward business.”

 

In fact, Vienna disproves other received wisdom about market forces. “You would think,” he said, “that if so much of the Viennese housing sector [is] lower-income, and no one’s making a killing in social housing, that it’d be staid and ‘boring.’”

 

“But you can see from the photos — it’s spectacular! I think one of the interesting lessons from Vienna is that it deconstructs this myth in the U.S. that innovation and deregulation go hand in hand. The idea that creativity and technological ingenuity rely on an unregulated Wild West market is just not true.”

 

“What you have [in Vienna] is highly regulated developer competitions,” Cohen continued, “with public agencies doing everything from the heat pumps to the sewer system … You are basically getting technological marvels out of a state-supervised, heavily planned system.” Indeed, one of the latest green innovations is the creative repurposing of Viennese buildings’ gas heat lines for air conditioning by filling the lines with cold water in the summer. The report approvingly cites these and myriad other green solutions.

 

Such victories put the lie to the ostensibly common-sense notion that innovation is predicated on deregulation and anarcho-capitalism. “You don’t need to have that Silicon-Valley level of ‘everything goes’ in order to get ingenuity,” Cohen said. “In fact, it’s more the opposite. The public sector setting the boundaries, setting the framework, saying: I’m going to give you the cost you can bid me at, but now you’re going to compete with each other on quality — that’s when you’re going to get innovation and quality.”

 

Commentators in the U.S. are always keen to tout the motivating benefits of competition. Vienna’s example provides a more nuanced approach. Of course, it is true that competition can spur progress. But to whom the benefits of that progress return is determined by existing relations of power. It’s in the interest of free-market ideologues to conflate those two questions. The Vienna housing market, though, makes the difference clear. Enlisting the incentives of competition on metrics of quality, rather than pathological cost-cutting, is producing stunning results.

 

Vienna, of course, is not a utopia, and Cohen and his fellow report authors are clear-eyed about its failings. As the report text notes, “We must also confront the model’s weaknesses. Discrimination against immigrants, and people descended from immigrants, is widespread in Vienna, and even more so in Austria generally. The city’s efforts to tackle this racism, overall and in its social housing system, have had mixed results. People living in Vienna can now move into social housing after residing in the city for two years, but the social housing system has not, on the whole, welcomed residents with migrant backgrounds at rates comparable to their population share.”

 

To better meet the needs of immigrants, Vienna still needs to increase the supply of the very low-cost apartments. The bureaucratic barriers to obtaining a unit remain too high for the decentralized, limited-profit model. “It’s got to be easier to access the service, and the service has to be more affordable,” said Cohen. “From a U.S. point of view, [to adopt such a model here,] you [would] have to build that in.” (And concerningly, in keeping with the worldwide lurch towards reactionary revanchism, some of Austria’s left-liberals are devolving towards a populist anti-migrant stance in coalition with the right — an inhumane and reactionary position that seeks to undermine social welfare by limiting it to what the right labels “real” Austrians.)

 

Better Visions of Home

In the U.S., adopting some version of the Vienna model would certainly come with vast challenges. However, the most severe obstacles are not physical. Building structures and housing more people is well within our capabilities. Reforms and regulations that can help mitigate inequality and discrimination are just as conceivable. The primary challenge is the extreme opposition that programs of this sort would face in the U.S., especially in the current climate. The failure of President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” program foreclosed the possibility of billions in housing relief. And Ocasio-Cortez’s and Bernie Sanders’s Green New Deal for Housing Act, while it was reintroduced last year, shows no signs of advancing at our current disastrous political juncture.

 

Nevertheless, seeking real resolution of the housing crisis could be a winning political platform, says Cohen. Indeed, public opinion, as Data for Progress research has found, is firmly in favor of policy intervention. It’s perhaps most viable to pursue a state level approach, though again, malicious opposition from the federal administration represents a severe obstacle.

 

Still, “If we could build housing, that would create a political constituency that would be a winner,” said Cohen. “There are all these little reforms [possible] here and there, but the main thing is that [Vienna] just kept the policy commitment: housing is a human right, we’re going to keep building it.”

 

Cohen’s words present a compelling vision of a world in which our human rights crises are confronted, rather than exacerbated in the interests of profit. Robust public housing programs (including appealing and innovative new developments based on promising ideas like shared land trusts) can and do exist in the U.S. But it takes a great deal of community and institutional backing and expertise to realize and sustain them. Vienna possesses a century of momentum to readily facilitate beautiful developments by the dozens. The U.S. failure to strengthen and expand public housing is owed not to some innate flaw in the concept, but rather to decades of racist stigma, state abdication, and sabotage by private real estate interests.

 

Social housing can be a vehicle for justice on numerous fronts, helping to mitigate racism and discrimination, homelessness, mental health crises and inequality writ large. Such meta-issues can form powerful coalitions across divides. Moreover, it is an urgent moral necessity as the crisis of homelessness enters catastrophic proportions with hundreds of thousands of Americans abandoned on the streets on any given night — an unfathomable toll of suffering. In this demoralized and fearful time, the public is in need of ways to join collectively to combat our most grievous social problems. We can do so only by fighting not just for ourselves, but for all those around us. Cohen memorably frames it this way: “Social housing is solidarity you can touch.”

 

Yet active, New-Deal-style programs to address poverty and suffering — together with increased unity among the working class — are things the reactionary right will fight tooth and nail to undermine. This is as true in Austria as it is anywhere else; Vienna’s social housing, for all its success, is “constantly pilloried in the right-wing press… It gets accused of being housing for poor people and migrants,” Cohen said.

 

“And I say, great — let’s build more.”

 

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Tyler Walicek

Tyler Walicek is a freelance writer and journalist in Portland, Oregon.