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Comment by anal_reactor | Hacker News Reader

> Many cities already have government owned homes that are rented out at 1/3rd the market price to people in need, like single parents and co. I see no reason why this couldn't work at scale.

Kekd.

It doesn't work for the simple reason that if you don't have enough homes, no matter how you shuffle people around and divide costs, someone is going to get the short end of the stick in some way. There are many places with elaborate systems of rent control and social housing, usually the effect is waiting lines and discrimination.

Yes, having to pay a lot for rent sucks, but you know what sucks even more? Applying for social housing and then being told that you should've started thinking of such things at the age of 4, now it's too late. That's how the Netherlands functions, despite having the highest ratio of government housing in Europe.

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it does work in vienna. almost 60% live in housing owned or subsidized by the city. there are waiting times, but not as bad as you think. for one you have to be already living in vienna for a few years to qualify (which is unavoidable, otherwise any EU citizen would qualify automatically). the option to pay a lot for rent still exists, but the average family can't afford that.

One test of how good it is to rent in Vienna, would be, what is the vacancy rate? In my area a 3% vacancy rate is regarded as balanced market between demand and supply. Gives tennants a good choice of dwellings and promotes a level of competition and negotiation amongst property owners. I predict that once people obtain subsidised dwellings , they would be move less and or be reluctant to move. I predict that the supply of "new dwellings " privately constructed , is less than other places with the system that is implemented in Vienna does not exist. It would be interesting to see the management costs and loss of taxes experienced by the cities ownership of dwellings.

the supply of "new dwellings" privately constructed , is less than other places with

from what i have seen, this is not the case because other places do not provide enough incentive to build new homes. vienna is growing faster than some other cities. it's not easy to find good numbers. maybe this helps: in 2021 in all of germany about 260000 new apartments were built. that's one apartment per 323 inhabitants. in vienna in 2015 11500 apartments received building approval. that is 1 apartment per 165 inhabitants. of these only one third were built with government support. while in the same year 100million euro of government support remain unused. but apparently, since 2020 it is not allowed to have more than 1/3rd of any new building project without government subsidies and rent control. unlike germany subsidies continue for the lifetime of the building and so they can't be used for speculation and thus ensure a steady supply of affordable housing.

because of viennas growth i suspected that vacancy rates should be low. what i found is that from 900000 apartments in 2015 35000 were empty. that's 3.8%. this is from a statistic made by the city. others claim estimates from 80000 or even 100000. in 2017 9000 out of 2009000 city owned apartments were empty (4.3%). most of those empty places are available on the market.

i could not find anything good on financing. apparently most of the money comes from rent-income, so it seems to be mostly self-financing, although critics claim that the city also does not spend enough on maintenance. the city can also save money because they already own the properties they build on.

so it looks to me like a successful non-profit operation.

there is a typo. 2009000 should be 209000 city owned apartments

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