The Chamber of Labor compared several European metropolises. Vienna is still in pretty good shape at the moment. But housing prices are under massive pressure.
Anyone who is not a millionaire or a top manager in London is already paying half their salary for a broom closet in the backyard. Vienna is in a much better position in this respect because the city has many social buildings.
But: On the free market, the wind is blowing increasingly rougher here, too. Land prices are exploding. Investors flee into “concrete gold”. That drives rents up. A study by the Chamber of Labor (AK) compared how expensive living is in each of several metropolises. Paris, Hamburg, Berlin, London and Vienna were used for this. This selection is a minor flaw: you could have chosen Warsaw and Bucharest.
The result is therefore not really surprising: in Vienna, an average household has to spend 27% of its budget on housing. In Berlin it is 41%, in London a good half (50%). The reason: Six out of ten Viennese live in subsidized housing. This is significantly less in the other large cities. In Berlin, after a wave of privatization, the share of social housing has fallen to 10%. Hamburg only has 8%.
So everything paletti? No, says AK expert Thomas Ritt: “Vienna is under massive pressure. The zero interest rate policy means that there is a lot of money in circulation. ”It is now a business model to buy apartments, leave them empty and speculate on rising prices. There’s no end of the bubble in sight, says Ritt. The Chamber of Labor therefore demands rapid action from federal policy and makes three demands:
Large apartment owners such as corporations, insurance companies, etc. should only be allowed to rent out indefinitely.
Public properties are only to be built on by “non-profit organizations” or by the City of Vienna itself.
More competencies for the federal states to create living space.