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Does Vienna have the answer to Canada’s housing crisis?

7 1
25.03.2024

(Version française disponible ici)

Vienna is consistently ranked as the world’s most livable city. Its housing policy is regularly hailed as a renter’s utopia. It’s also a city that I – the son of Viennese parents forced to flee their beloved city after the 1938 Anschluss (the takeover by Nazi Germany) – love and that is indeed unparalleled for the quality of its urban life and environment.

Montreal’s mayor, Valérie Plante, made a pilgrimage to Vienna last year in search of solutions to her city’s growing housing crisis. But how useful is the Viennese model of public production and subsidization of housing for Canadian cities?

The evidence suggests Vienna has not been more successful in coming to terms with the underlying drivers of the current worldwide housing crisis. Its previous admirable success in keeping rents low for decades was the result of distinct historical conditions.

At the start of the First World War, Vienna had a metropolitan population of more than two million and was growing at breakneck speed (figure 1). Vienna was then the capital and centre of the rapidly urbanizing Austro-Hungarian empire of 50 million. Locals foresaw a population of six million in the not-too-distant future.

With admirable foresight, planners under a municipal government with the powers and territory worthy of an imperial capital laid the foundations for a growing metropolis: tramway routes, land for development and accompanying infrastructure.

However, the breakup of the empire after it was on the losing side of the First World War put an abrupt end to the growth of Vienna, suddenly the oversized capital of a mini republic whose total population was six million.

The city then began a long period of population decline that would last 70 years. Only after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 did Vienna’s population start to grow again as it became a favoured destination for immigrants from Eastern Europe.

After the war, Vienna thus found itself (with hindsight) in the enviable position of having a government with the taxing and regulatory powers of a Land (the equivalent of a Canadian province) as well as the land and infrastructure to accommodate development for the next two generations.

As the former imperial capital, it was also blessed with a legacy of parks, monuments and........

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