Promoting Rental Housing Affordability in European Cities by Marco Peverini

Author:Marco Peverini
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031436925
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland

4.2.3 Spatial Planning and Land Policies

The relationship between ULR and housing affordability in Vienna is significantly influenced by spatial planning and active land policies. Land costs for subsidized housing cannot legally exceed €188/m2 for realized living space, which is three to ten times less expensive than market prices for urban land, limiting land prices is essential to enabling the production of affordable housing as well as allowing the social orientation and hybridization of LPH associations [18]. One main component for this system to work and produce affordable, de-commodified, and rent-controlled housing is public control on land. The policy system that enables affordable housing production “lands” materially on the city depending on planning and active land policies. The main tool for providing land for affordable housing in Vienna has historically been strategic PLB. Government agencies assemble land property through the process of PLB for a variety of uses, primarily to enable infrastructure and housing development for current and future needs, but also to prevent land speculation, and get rid of oligopolistic prices. It mainly involved purchasing greenfield suburban plots in advance. PLB enables the public institution to give up part of its capitalization to build public or affordable housing at below-market rates, even though it does not entirely abolish ULR. It can be viewed as a strategic tool because acquisitions will mostly benefit businesses in the long run. PLB has been performed almost continuously since the Red Vienna period [22], exploiting some economic advantages the city had over the market and, until the 1980s, essentially controlling the purchase of greenfield property in new development areas ([12]: 14). It was dependent on certain factors, such as the ability to use planning and zoning laws to make rational acquisition decisions, the results of circumstances like rent control, and particular events (like the collapse of the real estate market following WWI), which led to a period of time when private competition was low and land was less expensive [22]. Rent control introduced during WWI had caused land prices to drop to around 10% compared to pre-war prices, allowing the municipality to cheaply bank land [2]. In the words by Lawson, “[t]aking advantage of a collapse in the land market in the early twentieth century, Vienna eventually rose to become a key player in the provision of development sites and has since been able to dominate the land market to fulfill its social democratic housing ambitions” ([22]: 215). During the Red Vienna period, housing development in banked land mainly took the form of direct intervention and MH construction, that in 1926 reached the highest level ever. During the turbulent period of Fascism and Nazism, social and affordable housing policies were radically curtailed and MH production stagnated, but after WWII, “[w]ith the City of Vienna reinstated and the social democrats at the helm, public land banking expanded the accumulated assets of the past and once again promoted the development of affordable rental housing, this time via both MH companies and limited profit housing cooperatives” ([22]: 212).

Vienna

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