Comment on Has any country actually _solved_ the housing crisis?
SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 1 week agothe increased housing supply has kept private rents very affordable too.
This is very good. Do you know if Austria had an Ireland-style house price problem before they did this (ie. would it halt the crisis in Ireland now), or is it more that it just prevented the crisis we see in surrounding countries from happening in Austria in the first place?
“before they did this” for Vienna is around WW1, which was a very different time :/
I am not very familiar with housing crises in other countries. I have lived in Vienna my whole life and now live in an apartment I own. This was possible to afford for me (a single man then in his mid-20s working as a software engineer) with a bank loan and some financial support from my family; I am not sure if it would still be possible nowadays.
I see. Yeah, I live across the border in Czechia and the way you did it used to be standard too until 5-10 years ago. Then the prices started rising (especially here in Prague) and it started to be a problem. It used to all be state owned obvs (not sure about einfamillienhauses though) but it was sold to the residents after 1990, and our levels of municipal housing haven’t risen much since then either. I don’t think we had the housing cooperative movement that you guys had in the interwar period.
ECB@feddit.org 1 week ago
They’ve been building big public housing since the 1920s. I live next to a lot of it and it’s quite high quality and really pleasant.
Lots of cities/countries has massive public housing (the UK being a great example post WW2) but Vienna is more of an exception in that they didn’t follow the trend in the 70s-90s of privatization and stopping investment (although it did slow down at one point).
They were the same way about their tram system, where they kept it rather than ripping it out like most places. Now everyone else wishes they so had a tram network or is trying to rebuild one.
That being said, rents are rising here too, but they are much more reasonable to begin with. I was living in London previously, and now we spend about 30-40% less for a place over twice the size and in a nicer location. Plus finding a place was muuuuuch easier, since it’s noticeably less competitive.
sparky@lemmy.federate.cc 1 week ago
Just adding to this, some history if anyone is curious: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Vienna
SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
This is genuinely cool. I love that they managed to do it within the framework of democracy too.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
We still reduced our tram system quite a bit from what it once was; not to zero like e.g. West Berlin did, but lots of places where trams used to run now have bus or metro lines running instead.