A city’s quality of life, its built form and the affordability of urban housing are inextricably linked to public welfare-oriented land policy. Especially in growing cities like Vienna, it is essential to secure the valuable resource of urban land, which is not reproducible, permanently for democratic urban development. It is a matter of defining soil as a common good and not as a commodity or an object of profit.

In the Austria-wide context, soil protection measures are needed to stop the continuously growing urban sprawl and uncoordinated building up of the cultural landscape. However, this paper focuses on urban areas, especially Vienna, and the connection between rising land prices and rising housing costs, which are mutually dependent. The remainder of the paper therefore focuses on land policy instruments with the perspective of ending the current speculation with urban land. As a result, many urban policy issues that are equally important for a justice-oriented livable city are only implicitly addressed. This also applies to important federal policy issues relevant to housing, such as tenancy law, but also wage and labor market policy.

When we speak of the affordability of urban housing or housing construction and not of urbanity in general, it is because we start from the right to housing as an articulated human right ratified in Austria: In this paper, housing in the city always means more than housing, or rather we understand urbanity from the point of view of housing – thus also the living environment with high-quality open space and good infrastructure. It is about equal opportunities and access in terms of work, leisure, transport, culture and much more. And “affordability for all” stands and falls with freedom of choice for all, i.e. with affordable housing also being available in central locations.

Land policy is redistribution policy. The collection of land policy arguments and instruments to be published in 2019 is based on two premises that run counter to the unhindered commodification of housing and urban land: affordable housing as a public interest and the social obligation of property, in this case specifically land ownership.