"The city of Vienna / Europe spends 632 Mio € alone on social housing."
You've never been to Vienna or Austria if you are comparing San Francisco to Austria.
Austria has a relatively homogenous culture, very conservative society (culturally, not politically).
Relatively low rates of labour mobility meaning that you 'know your neighbours' - generally a communitarian attitude, (as opposed to fairly libertarian attitude in SF and US in general) and they don't have industries that generate tons more $ than others, which means no housing bubbles. You can rent flats not too far outside of Vienna very inexpensively.
Just some things come to mind.
Money matters, but it matters less than social conventions and culture.
My hometown (in Canada) spends $0 on social housing (however, there is welfare and healthcare) and there is no homelessness. That said, housing is extremely inexpensive, and nobody really has a lot of money or opportunity either.
Vienna has no homogeneous culture. It is a cultural melting pot comparable to New York City. This roots back to the multicultural Habsburg state. At the moment Vienna grows by approx. 20000 people from all over the world by year. [1]
The last years flat rent raised by 16%.
If the city of Vienna would not build 13000 new cheap social flats every year, it would have problems like American cities.
Vienna is nothing comparable to NYC in terms of cosmopolitain, NYC is of a different variety entirely. Have you been to both? About 85% of NYC residents are from out of country or out of state. Nobody is from New York. Everybody living in Vienna since the 'Habsburg era' may as well just be 'Germanic', as far as their culture is relative to something like 'Jamaican' or 'Puerto Rican' or 'Chinese' or 'Indian' as you have in NYC.
Also - I'm afraid you might be missing something called 'market dynamics'.
People don't 'move to a place' and then 'wait for housing'. If X number of people are 'moving' to a city every year, then it's because there are already places there to buy or rent. Builders make the assessment of how much the city is growing (as you say, rents are going up - that's a sign of demand) and then build homes and flats based on the types of demand - which enables more people to come.
Given the vast differentiation in prices between city and 'out of city' homes - it's patently absurd for taxpayers to subsidize expensive city living for some people and not others. The 'expensive' part is not the 'flat' - it's the 'property'. The best thing is to let market dynamics have it's way, and have cheaper apartments in the periphery where there is less demand. Reasonable rent controls protects people from being kicked out.
Average rent in Toronto is about $2K for a one room flat. A simple subway ride to the suburbs, and it's less than half that. A little further and it's 66% cheaper. Trying to control home prices is like trying to control the tide of the sea. It's pointless.
For the small amount of those 'very marginalized' - yes, maybe they need their rent paid for, but that's another story.
And if all those newcomers to Vienna require 'subsidized housing' (which I doubt) then Vienna will not exist in 50 years.
"Trying to control home prices is like trying to control the tide of the sea. It's pointless."
Vienna has been controlling the home prices by building houses with great success for decades. [1]
Vienna is the largest apartment owner in Europe and 220,000 community dwellings also the largest property management company in Europe. Hardly any other European city is so valued for their social housing as Vienna.
"Vienna has been controlling the home prices by building houses with great success for decades. [1]"
Vienna is controlling nothing.
Vienna has failed to create global industries that attract value creators from around the world and other kinds of firms.
If they did, there would be people getting wealthy on a global scale, 'screwing up the housing market', and there's little that could be done about it.
Owning 200K homes is a terrible thing for the government to be doing - it's a relic of 20st century socialist thinking. It's incredibly inefficient. The remaining homes will be priced to 're-balance' the actual market dynamics in the region given the government intervention.
This inefficiency amounts to a) waste and b) and unfair subsidy by taxpayers, especially those in the countryside to people living in state-owned homes on land which is really expensive.
Again - it's better just to have basic regulations and smart developers, those people would be living in privately owned homes just a little further from city centre.
Again - you simply cannot control the tides - the money you spend fighting it is wasted, and most government operations are considerably more inefficient than private ones, which leads to another form of waste.
In Toronto (almost the size of Austria), nearly 1/3 of the 'special housing budget' goes to the staff working on the team. It would be more efficient (though unfair) just to directly subsidizes of lower income people and let the market decide how the spaces are allocated.
Vienna has failed to create global industries that attract value creators from around the world and other kinds of firms.
If they did, there would be people getting wealthy on a global scale, 'screwing up the housing market', and there's little that could be done about it.
- "If you follow development strategy X, housing prices cannot be controlled. Therefore housing prices can never be controlled!"
- Vienna chooses another development strategy that avoids the problem
- "No! They're not supposed to do that! Bad!"
Again - it's better just to have basic regulations and smart developers, those people would be living in privately owned homes just a little further from city centre.
You mean like in Germany where lots of former public housing has been sold to private conglomerates - which have increased rents and cut back maintenance to a minimum?
Not only housing afford ability is important but also quality of housing. Social housings in Vienna come sometimes with pools on the flat roof or saunas. They built Gemeindebauten [1] (social housings) in posh areas. They made exceptional architecture for the people. (for example Hundertwasserhaus) [2]
You don't try and control house prices directly. You use regulations to make unproductive real estate speculation unattractive relative to productive investment.
You control the supply of credit available for real estate speculation, via prudential regulations, and employ capital controls and residency requirements against inflows of unproductive capital from overseas.
Unearned rents in the form of land price increases can be recaptured via taxation, in the form of broad based land tax, capital gains tax and vacancy tax.
But also Austria spends a lot of efforts and. Oney to better distribute wealth. This has a positive impact overall because it reduces the extreme cases that can cost a lot of money and impact society.
Social housing in Vienna is completely different than social housing in the US as an example. I just bought a flat in a building where the first three floors are social housing. That is not something you do in the us.
Vienna has no relevant homeless problem.
https://wien1x1.at/site/wp-content/blogs.dir/9/files/2014/06...