Housing as public interest, political duty and architectural task¹
– An opposition to free-market doctrine, as in Patrick Schumacher’s Urban Policy Manifesto

Gabu Heindl (author)
Drehli Robnik (translation)

From Brno to Vancouver, cities worldwide are in the midst of an enormous housing crisis, which, as we’re told, would be solved by an expansion of free-market housing.
As an alternative way, the “Vienna model” is today regarded beyond Europe as a model for social housing and thus for a welfare-state approach to crisis-like phenomena in metropolitan housing supply, which have been exacerbated by urban growth and the capitalization of urban space. Nevertheless, also in Vienna, rising social inequality is becoming increasingly apparent: 43 percent of people pay more than 40 percent of their income for housing costs in the private rental sector. This hits poor households particularly hard. The current Covid-19 pandemic is leading to a further worsening of the situation everywhere – not only in Vienna – especially when rent deferrals are still due to be paid off in the foreseeable future.

In the following, the Vienna model will be subjected to a two-part analysis with regard to its ambivalences and potentials. On the one hand, I want to criticize the model immanently, that is, to measure it against its claims and to question it in relation to its history: that is, to housing policy as part of the socialist-egalitarian project of Red Vienna in the 1920s. On the other hand, the historical and current Viennese housing policy, which is shaped by social democracy, is to be contrasted with the opposing market radical-oriented approach to solving the global “housing problem” by calling for the abolition of state-subsidized social housing per se: The eight theses presented by Patrik Schumacher at the World Architecture Festival in Berlin in November 2016 as the Urban Policy Manifesto for London, and elaborated in an expanded form for the liberal Adam Smith Institute in 2018,² are a prominent and heatedly discussed example of such a discourse in architecture. This text is also intended as a “radical democracy”-oriented sketch of analysis and response to the demands it raises and the political understanding of society that it expresses.
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