Imagine living in a city
where you can afford beautiful homes.
A city that combines quality with affordability.
Around the world, this idea of a livable city
increasingly seems like a pipe dream.
Housing unaffordability is not just a crisis
for the United States.
You see it in cities as diverse as Caracas,
Moscow, Rio de Janeiro.
The UN estimates that despite the pandemic,
over 60% of the world's population
will live in cities by 2030.
Urbanization is going to keep growing
at a tremendous rate.
And so we're really going to need to look at how do we build
in a manner that's livable, it's affordable.
There is somewhere though
that seems to be keeping the housing crisis at bay.
The Austrian capital, Vienna,
is one of the most affordable major cities in the world.
It also tops the charts for quality of life.
And how they got there, may offer up some tips
for cities globally.
This is Aspern Seestadt, in the suburbs of Vienna.
One of the largest new urban developments currently
under construction in Europe.
Seestadt is being built on a former airfield
and has a man-made swimming lake at its center.
60 to 70% of the apartments built here
will be allocated to affordable housing.
Some of which are designed by their occupants.
We all know how tough it is
to bring new urban quarters to life,
to make them feel like the old parts of the city
that have this patina that we all love.
So we introduce a new model of collaborative housing.
Self developed multi-family housing originated
in Berlin and Freiburg,
sort of emanating from the squatters movements.
These are groups of people and oftentimes families
or people who are organized around a certain ideology
like the environment or living in solidarity.
They will work to design
and build their own multi-family housing.
Collaborative housing is one of the innovative ways
subsidized apartments are being built in Vienna.
Now, apart from being something really special
of having the opportunity to design your own apartment
within a subsidized housing project,
what is very important about this project
is that they think about so many things.
They will introduce regularly coworking spaces,
rooms for seminars, or a big kitchen
that can be used by everybody.
But the most important part is that these people
that have worked together on designing their own apartments
and their own building form a community, a lively community.
So we have found out that they work as a community magnet
and they are the ones that will bring life
to a new urban quarter.
When it comes to affordability,
Seestadt is not an exception.
Vienna is growing rapidly
and to meet the demand, every year,
it builds at least 7,000 affordable housing units.
About half of all the apartments built in the city.
62% of the Viennese population already live
in this type of accommodation.
Public housing blocks, which are apartments
that belong entirely to the city of Vienna
are just one part of the affordable housing portfolio.
The city has been building them at a steady pace
since the 1920s.
Many other countries also tried to make this model work,
but few have succeeded.
Public housing summons this vision
of cold monstrous towers.
Many were, at the time of their construction
following World War II, very utopian projects.
Their planners imagined
a kind of modernist egalitarian society
which might have succeeded if they were funded
and maintained and supported, but they were not.
In the United States, the result
is that you have public housing units that lack heating
and public housing units that are just not safe
for the occupants.
Compounded by the racial composition
of public housing residents,
this has these deeply troubling implications.
You have both quality of life issues and then general bias
and discriminatory attitudes toward their residents.
That mean that people perceive public housing
as a threat, unfortunately.
The stigma of public housing
has translated into U.S. policy.
And a rule called the Faircloth Amendment
currently caps the number of public housing units
at the level it was in 1999.
Municipalities need to either sell
or demolish existing buildings to build new ones.
And this is all compounded by restrictive zoning laws.
When you have neighborhoods or parts of entire cities
that are zoned for single family homes,
those neighborhoods are effectively segregated.
By controlling the nature of construction
through zoning codes,
you limit how much housing can be made anywhere.
That has had the result of not a single U.S. county
having enough affordable housing
for its current population right now.
In the '90s, Vienna also took a radical decision
about its public housing,
but the city went in the opposite direction.
Public housing was always well-maintained and high quality,
but to maximize its investment,
Vienna decided to instead focus
on a model offering subsidies to private nonprofit companies
to build what they called social housing.
The entire model of subsidized housing in Vienna
is very robust and it is very profitable
for the corporations that engage in it.
It works on the basis of a threefold subsidy.
Affordable housing stands and falls with land prices.
So the city of Vienna has a very active land policy,
buying land or mobilizing
historical land reserves,
and then either selling it or leasing it
to not-for-profit corporations
at a very, very low affordable price.
The companies get subsidized loans for construction.
And if the apartments are still too expensive,
there are subsidies for renters.
What is special about Vienna is that social housing
is a middle-class subsidy.
It is not thought to be only for people
that have a weak socio-economic background.
It is thought to be actually for almost everybody.
And as your income increases, as you get older,
you aren't pushed out of your social housing.
And what this does is it keeps people in these communities.
That's a very different way
of looking at keeping communities intact.
In the '90s, the construction process also changed.
Each company that wants to build social housing
needs to submit their design in a developer competition.
One of the most important mechanisms
of ensuring sustainability and quality are competitions.
The designs are judged based on the architectural quality
of the development,
the economic function of the building,
so that's how affordably they can build it,
the environmental performance of the building,
as well as the social mix.
And so this is just ensuring
that there's a diversity of unit types,
so it's not just singles or couples.
You get families, you have elderly residents.
The competitive aspect of the developer competitions
definitely pushes people to be more innovative
on a number of fronts.
They're really well designed, high quality buildings,
low energy buildings, just wondrous amenities, saunas,
kindergartens, clinics, libraries, community spaces.
We almost always have balconies.
And in many cases there are even swimming pools
on the rooftops.
Developer competitions are also one of the main factors
driving down the costs of construction.
The construction costs in Vienna are about half
of what they are in Seattle.
And so you're getting these incredible
high quality buildings for really a fraction
of what we would pay here in the U.S.
for what I would say are buildings
that are not as well done.
Another key element to making this model work
is using space wisely.
It would be a waste of money
to embark into subsidized housing and then do low density.
Of course, you have to do high density
because this results in many, many more apartments
to the benefit of many, many more young families.
But density will work well
only if you combine it with high quality.
And I'm talking about high architectural quality,
I'm talking about high level public transport access,
and I'm talking about vast green spaces.
So the way we go about density
is to create really vast accessible parks
and to concentrate construction at the edges of these parks.
They don't have a significant number of high rises,
but there is this broad density.
The core is five to eight stories
for kilometers and kilometers in every direction.
Today, Vienna invests in a mix of public
and subsidized housing,
but just building new apartments isn't enough.
The city is also committed to actively maintaining
and retrofitting its stock of over 500,000 affordable flats.
There's this process in Vienna called
the gentle urban renewal.
And what this is is the city will go into neighborhoods
where gentrification is becoming more mainstream
and the effects of it are becoming more visible.
They will upgrade the social housing
to ensure that it maintains a similar quality
to the new market rate housing.
They will develop amenities
to ensure that schools don't become overcrowded.
They'll add a floor or two to the roof of a building.
This could become either market rate or social housing.
What this does is it allows more people
to live in the neighborhood.
It subsidizes the cost of the energetic retrofit,
because there's also the energetic component as well.
And so they'll rehabilitate the facade of a building.
They'll add ventilation to ensure
that these buildings are comfortable,
there aren't mold issues, they're healthy.
So the city is really taking an active approach
in ensuring that these buildings are comfortable, habitable
and also climate-proof.
In the wake of the pandemic,
the affordability crisis in cities worldwide
has become even more visible.
Rent always eats first,
that means that medical care, clothing, even food
are costs that renters sacrifice
in order to keep a home over their family's head.
During the pandemic, the kind of plight
of low-income tenants really expanded
because the number of people who are out of work,
just ballooned and suddenly households
were confronting precarity in their housing
for the first time.
Vienna's model isn't a solution
that can easily be copy and pasted,
but all the cities are paying attention.
It will take more than just changes in policy though.
Attitudes about how and where we live
will need to shift too.
In the U.S., there's a lot of desire
to live in a detached house, own a single car.
For families like mine where we don't own a car,
we have two children, we get around by bike,
it's density and ample social housing
that really allows for that kind of lifestyle.
There is this generational flip where families like ours
and especially those that are younger than us
have no shot at affordable housing or market rate housing
in a lot of cities.
And I think that we're going to see places
really start to look at adding a density
and hopefully in a smart way
that doesn't bring more cars, more congestion
so it's more sustainable in the future.
Vienna is doing things that everyone should be aiming for.