This article in HuffPo describes how wonderful the housing in Vienna is, and how cheap: “Vienna’s Affordable Housing Paradise:
Public housing is the accommodation of last resort in the U.S. Not so in Austria’s capital city.”

Paragraph after paragraph describes the situation in the Austrian capital, a city of nearly 2 million, in which there is a century-old dedication to building affordable subsidized housing that is apparently quite pleasant and desirable. Anyone with an income under $53,225 a year after taxes is eligible, and 62% of Vienna’s residents live in these units* [see NOTE below] in what is called “social housing.”

Obviously this is a very different concept than our public housing, which only serves the very lowest of incomes and is riddled with problems. In Vienna, more than half the people live in these places, which makes the vibe very different:

Kathrin Gaál, Vienna’s councillor for housing, says social housing is aimed at both people with low incomes and “a broad middle class” in the city. “What makes Vienna unique is that you cannot tell how much someone earns simply by looking at their home address,” Gaál explains.

The article goes on and on about how wonderful the system is, and there is a particular effort to contrast it with the system in the US which is decidedly unwonderful. Hooray for those Europeans, right?

I kept wondering if and when the article would get around to explaining how this miracle of affordable housing is accomplished. You could read most of it and get the idea it’s done through a combination of will, benevolent kindness, and magic. But about 2/3 into the text of the more than 1000-word article you get one little laconic paragraph about it. If you blink, you might even miss it:

Social housing is a valued priority across Austria, funded by income tax, corporate tax and a housing-specific contribution made by all employed citizens. According to Councillor Gaál, Vienna’s annual housing budget—which is spent refurbishing older apartments in the city as well as building new social housing projects—amounts to $700 million with $530 million coming from the national government.

I said it was a paragraph, but it’s really only that first sentence that deals with the nitty-gritty. And the facts in that first sentence are really not all that nitty or all that gritty, because although elsewhere the article is rather specific about monetary figures, there’s nothing specific there about income tax or corporate tax rates in Austria, or about what the amount of that “housing-specific contribution” paid by all of the country’s employed citizens might be or how it is determined.

I just spent about twenty minutes Googling to find further information on the latter tax, and I gave up for now. But here’s a chart that describes Austria’s income tax levels. There are plenty of other taxes, too, including of course the VAT of 20% which certainly adds to the cost of living.

Different countries make different choices about how much shared responsibility to have for the welfare of others and how much individual responsibility, at what point to start helping, and whether help should be government-mandated or through voluntary charities or some combination of the two. The countries of Europe are generally much less individualistic than the US, and the welfare system is structured very differently with more reliance on taxes and mandated group responsibility. European countries have also benefited from US military protection, so they don’t have to spend anywhere near as much of their federal money as we do on defense. In addition, European countries have until very recently been far more homogeneous ethnically and culturally than the US, which helps them foster a sense of being all in it together.

The HuffPo article does mention a bit of a change in that regard in Vienna:

Austria has not been immune to fears about an influx of refugees benefiting from government assistance in recent years. The country elected a right-wing coalition government in December, and rhetoric about immigrants putting pressure on public resources has grown even in its cosmopolitan capital city.

“There is a still a strong idea here that public housing is something for everybody,” says Andreas Rumpfhuber, a Viennese architect. “But we have similar problems to other countries. We have right-wing populists talking about whether refugees deserve public housing. So there are still dangers ahead for the [Vienna] model.”

Surprise, surprise! That “we’re all in this together” feeling may not extend to the entire world and everyone in it.

The article also indicates that Vienna is very affordable:

In fact, the extent of Vienna’s subsidized housing makes it one of the most affordable major cities in the world.

Follow that link, though, and you’ll see that the page is only saying that Vienna is one of the most affordable cities in terms of rent. That’s not at all the same as “affordable, period.” Vienna is not currently one of the most expensive 10 cities in the world (see page 4 at that link), but other cities in Europe are on that list and none in the US. Vienna certainly isn’t one of the cheapest 10 cities either (see page 7); let’s just say that no European city except Bucharest, and no US city at all, is on that particular list. Unfortunately, to get the full list—which would divulge where Vienna ranks—one must purchase it, and I’m not about to do that. And from what I could tell, the list doesn’t even factor in tax burdens, which would seem to me to be quite an important omission.

[* NOTE: It is interesting to compare Vienna with the closest thing the US has, which is rent control and rent stabilization in New York City. Granted, New York’s system is based on a very different principle and operates differently, but according to this chart about 61% of New York’s apartments fall under some sort of rent limits rules. Interesting that the percentage is so close to the percentage who live in subsidized housing in Austria.]

[NOTE: This post was originally on my older blog and had comments, but unfortunately the comments didn’t transfer over here.]