Posted Dec 4, 2023, 11:34 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Vancouver
Posts: 22,516
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin
'Cause building large quantities of public housing within a constrained space has worked out so well in the past, right? ..
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Oh my God, you're right! What if we were end up like Vienna, the world's most livable city? 
Imagine a Renters’ Utopia.
It Might Look Like Vienna.
Soaring real estate markets have created a worldwide housing crisis. What can we learn from a city that has largely avoided it?
By Francesca Mari Photographs by Luca Locatelli
Published May 23, 2023
When Eva Schachinger married at 22, she applied for public housing. Luckily, she lived in Vienna, which has some of the best public housing in the world. It was 1968. Eva was a teacher, and her husband, Klaus-Peter, was an accountant for the city’s public-transportation system. She grew up in a public-housing complex in the center of the city, where her grandmother, who cared for her from 6 in the morning until 6 at night, lived in one of five buildings arranged around a courtyard. Eva played all day with friends from the complex...
... When I met Eva late last year, she looked smart in a jean jacket with a neatly tied silk scarf around her neck, small dangly earrings and cropped curly hair. Over the course of the last 44 years, as she continued to teach English to fifth through eighth grades, Eva’s rent increased almost fivefold, to 270 euros from 55, but her wages increased more than 20-fold, to 3,375 euros a month from 150. Viennese law dictates that rents in public housing can increase only with inflation, and only when the year’s inflation exceeds 5 percent. By the time she retired in 2007, Eva’s rent was only 8 percent of her income. Because her husband was earning 4,000 euros a month, their rent amounted to 3.6 percent of their incomes combined....
...To American eyes, the whole Viennese setup can appear fancifully socialistic. But set that aside, and what’s mind-boggling is how social housing gives the economic lives of Viennese an entirely different shape. Imagine if your housing expenses were more like the Schachingers’. Imagine having to think about them to the same degree that you think about your restaurant choices or streaming-service subscriptions. Imagine, too, where the rest of your income might go, if you spent much less of it on housing. Vienna invites us to envision a world in which homeownership isn’t the only way to secure a certain future — and what our lives might look like as a result....
....Writing about housing in the United States, I’ve become depressed. I’m the scold at the dinner party, revolted by big investors speculating in the housing market, yes, but also by the thousands of small-time investors — including some of my own friends — who are pooling money to buy homes in states they’ve never seen or buying rental properties in gentrifying neighborhoods. But the math is hard to argue with. Buying a home near work is more lucrative than working. The growth of asset values has outstripped returns on labor for four decades, and a McKinsey report found that a majority of those assets — 68 percent — is real estate. Last year, one in four home sales was to someone who had no intention of living in it. These investors are particularly incentivized to buy the sorts of homes most needed by first-time buyers: Inexpensive properties generate the highest rental-income cash flows...
... Real estate is a place where money literally grows on tree beams. In the last decade, the typical owner of a single-family home acquired nearly $200,000 in appreciation. “Another word for asset appreciation is inflation,” the academics Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings write in “The Asset Economy,” “an increase in monetary value without any corresponding change in the nature of the good itself or the conditions of its production that would make it scarcer or justify an increased demand for it.” That inflation is creating a treacherous gulch between the housing haves and have-nots. ...(bold mine)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/m...l-housing.html
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