It's also likely far less than what developers-liberated from restrictive zoning rules and affordable housing mandates-would be likely be willing to build. That's because its overall rate of building is far lower than Vienna's. New York nevertheless remains one of the least affordable cities in the country. In relative terms, the government appears to be playing a larger role in new housing construction in allegedly ultra-capitalist New York City than in 'Red Vienna.' So nearly half of the city's housing production last year was government-subsidized, affordable housing. Data provided by the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development shows that 12,000 new subsidized, affordable housing units were completed at the same time. In 2022, New York City completed nearly 26,000 new housing units, according to a new report by the city's Rent Guidelines Board. It isn't serving an unfilled niche.įor more evidence that it's the rate of new supply that counts, not government subsidization of new supply, we need only look at New York City. In this light, Vienna's social housing is at best duplicating what the private market is doing.

In other words, private providers are willing to build and rent out housing units at affordable rates to the same class of people that are served by social housing. I've reported in the past too that in Austria as a whole, social housing residents on average have slightly higher incomes than private housing residents. Given these facts, Yglesias reasonably asks what problem social housing is solving that reduced regulations on private, market-rate housing wouldn't.Īs the Times article notes, residents of private housing in Vienna spend only a little bit more of their income on housing than social housing tenants. Yglesias also notes that the city's social housing units are also pretty small by American standards, reducing costs further. In recent years, two-thirds of Vienna's new housing is also private, market-rate housing. The city boasts per capita construction rates that make it look more like a Sunbelt boomtown than 'closed access' underbuilding cities like New York City or Los Angeles. Vienna isn't cheap because it builds social housing, he argues, but because it builds a lot of housing, period. Liberal blogger Matt Yglesias offers some pointed pushback to all this in his Slow Boring newsletter today. 'These public and social housing projects can ensure permanent affordability, support mixed-income neighborhoods, and bring new assets onto public balance sheets.' 'State and local governments can take on this task by building millions of homes themselves, particularly for poor and working class people, that private developers won't construct,' they write. For that to happen, the government should 'just build the homes.' Meanwhile, over at Slate, tenant organizer Daniel Denvir and researcher Yonah Freemark argue that no amount of new, private, for-profit housing development will make housing truly affordable. We could have those lower housing costs too, Mari says, if only Americans would abandon their obsession with mass home ownership and the subsidized mortgages that make it possible. That's contrasted with America as a whole where the average renter pays 30 percent of their income on rent (and much more in some higher-cost cities). Mari also interviews a number of higher-income social housing residents who spend less than 10 percent of their earnings on housing. In Vienna, author Francesca Mari writes, 80 percent of city residents qualify for public housing, and social housing tenants spend only about a fifth of their post-tax income on housing.

Last week, The New York Times published a long profile of Vienna, Austria's extensive, century-old social housing program that's turned the city into a 'renter's utopia.' The idea is to have the government build or subsidize housing developments in which units would be provided at generally below-market rates for people of all incomes. The high cost and limited availability of housing in many American cities have some writers and wonks dreaming of a seemingly novel solution: social housing.

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