The solution, IMHO, building more, could be theoretically be championed by the State, but with ever-increasing construction costs, regulation, taxes on everything, scarcity of land in big cities, and pensions entitlements, where will the money come from? It's not cheap to build with the quality standards that we all desire everyone to have.
Building co-ops like those that exist in Vienna do exist in Spain, but they are not a panacea, the same problems that a State-run initiative has will apply.
It also creates a system where the only new buildings are luxury condos because on paper it’s usually the only thing that would turn a profit after investing a decade of hoop jumping and political wrangling. No affordable development would ever pass that sort of system.
So the gov is tasked with building affordable housing. Creating a bad situation themselves, pointing the finger at developers and only offering very expensive bandaids as the solution that happens to give them more power, money, and control over the city.
Kingmakers in an high end market while feigning solutions for the low end, and pushing the middle to the suburbs and small towns.
numerous negative effects supported by a variety of studies both in Spain and abroad
No, it doesn't. Everywhere in Spain it works well. It was always there. Those 'studies' come out of mainly the bloated neoliberal Anglloamerican investment circles like the Brookings institute - which was cited just in this discussion.
> The solution, IMHO, building more, could be theoretically be championed by the State, but with ever-increasing construction costs, regulation, taxes on everything, scarcity of land in big cities, and pensions entitlements, where will the money come from?
China is able to build housing like that for ~1.5 billion people and they don't run out of money. Maybe the problem is the bloated, destructive real estate investment sector in the West?
I used to live in Vienna for 8 years (2005-2013). Looking at https://www.immobilienscout24.at/regional/wien/wien/wohnung-... the prices per square meter are a lot higher than I paid at the time: the cheapest rentals I saw was just above €10/m^2 (rare) and more commonly were around €15-20/m^2. When we left in 2013 we were paying €480 per month for a 65m^2 apartment (that was already cheap at the time but is even more out of the ordinary today).
Anecdotally everyone I know in Vienna started complaining about housing unaffordability around the time we left (it was never a topic when I got there) & that seems to still be the case.
Is it possible to get that affordable rent within, say, a year? My understanding is the wait list for this affordable housing can stretch multiple years.
Maybe Vienna is affordable to people living there, but at the cost of extreme difficulty for outsiders (even Austrian outsiders) to move there.
So, if you grew up in a poor village with little economic opportunity, you will have a lot of difficulty moving to Vienna to open up your job prospects. The affordable housing there comes at the cost of denying outsiders an opportunity to better their position in life.
Is that better than riding rents displacing longer term residents? Maybe, I don't know, but there are invisible victims to many affordable housing schemes.
The free-market housing (and regulated market housing) still exist by the way, but the prices are way lower than they are in similar-sized European cities (because they compete with non-market housing), so yes to your question.
However I claim it didn’t really solve the problem, it just alleviated it - when I moved to Vienna in early 2005 finding an apartment was easy and the prices low enough that even as a (working) student I didn’t have any trouble paying for rent. You could have a good life in Vienna even earning minimum wage (I know because my part-time student job earned me less than a full-time minimum wage would have).
Today this is no longer possible - it’s not easy to get a cheap apartment and prices are higher to a degree that you need a considerably higher-paying job to lead a comfortable life and the biggest chunk of that change is due to increased housing costs.
Amsterdam, Paris, London etc have it even worse but the problem is life in Vienna used to be very affordable (not that long ago, even 15 years ago) and it’s a lot less so today.
The same can be said about Berlin, prices here are lower than Amsterdam et al but it’s still a lot higher (relative to wages) than it was 15+ years ago and the gap keeps increasing.
You seem to be confused, and a tad ignorant too. Public housing investments are nothing new, and Barcelona has already benefitred from a massive urban development program at the turn of the century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eixample
Barcelona has already one if the highest population densities in the world. The examples you listed in Austria are already eclipsed by the massive appartment blocks in Barcelona and neighboring municipalities. Your average city block in Barcelona is already 6 stories high or greater. It's a dense urban area covered by massive residential blocks.
Even if you start demolishing blocks to replace them with hongkong-style skyscrapers, you would need a few decades to increase supply in a meaningful way, and even then the impact would be negligible.
Barcelona's problem is not supply.
As mentioned in the article, it is most attractive to rent out your apartment temporary from 1 to 11 months. Longer renting contracts are quite risky from a landlord's perspective. E.g. in Spain if your tenant goes bankrupt and does not pay the rent anymore, you cannot kick them out until they have found something else. Good luck on that. The law sounds nice because no one wants people to end up on the street, but it effectively makes small landlords exit the rental market. Protection from squatters is also nonexistent. Local newspapers are full of stories of places being occupied by squatters while empty for renovations.
Also there are these stupid local regulations around having to create social housing in every building / renovation project. That also significantly reduces new supply.
Singapore is also hard to achieve but the HDB mandate made it that the government own monopoly on land so they're incentivized to provide maximum land utility to its population.
Japan has the best land use zoning in a way it makes it so easy to build and develop. They also have a very practical view on housing and do not see it as an appreciating asset critical to accumulating wealth.
I want to note that this is in big part due to earthquakes and nature in general. In Spain 100-year old houses (like in the article) are renovated and relatively easy to maintain. However in Japan, between the earthquakes, typhoons, and the weather in general, not only you need to be actively maintaining it (typhoons), but they become worse over time (earthquake damage accumulates).
Source: Spaniard who lives in Tokyo.
IMO geographical constraints should not be the all-in justification for a certain land-use/housing policy. I hear a lot chalk up the fact Barcelona stopped building since the 1980s because they're surrounded by mountains and the sea. Or recently with the LA fires people look at these wrong answers. There's no reason for things being like that other than NIMBYism and lack of long-term political will from local councils.
Barcelona's problems come from a very complicated regulatory regime that hasn't just lowered construction, but ultimately led to fewer people living in the same space. Regulations that favor the renter enough to make putting housing up for rent pretty risky in many ways. Minimal property taxes that let having an apartment unused be pretty attractive. Big tax advantages for owning an expensive apartment vs living in a smaller one and putting your savings into stocks. Prices that don't come down. A location so interesting, and yet at prices that are globally affordable, so it is more profitable to have an apartment dedicated to low-occupancy rate foreign tourism than to have it occupied all year long by a long term tenant. Cheap enough for an American in tech to buy an apartment downtown, and use it 3 weeks a year.
The market-centric changes that wouldn't just allow more building, but make the existing buildings be used more efficiently are just not in any local regulator's radar, because lowering prices might be nice for renters, but it'd be awful for owners, and there's a lot of those, and they vote.
There's many other differences (and surprisingly, similarities) between Spain and Japan regarding buildings, e.g. the mixed areas are both very similar in both countries. But another surprising thing in (specifically) Tokyo is how strongly public transportation shapes Tokyo, go out in any train station and you have tall buildings, but walk 10-15 mins away and you have houses. In Spain, you have a very homogeneous height all across the city (fun fact: this was traditionally shaped by the cathedrals/churches).
This obviously a lot to pay for such miserable housing, but it’s also significantly less than private renters currently pay in the UK[1]:
> Excluding housing support, the average proportion of income spent on rent was 37% for social renters and 45% for private renters.
I’m not trying to suggest the current situation is as bad as early C20 Vienna. Thankfully, such poor conditions are not, to my knowledge, widespread. I imagine other needs like food and clothing are more affordable than they were then.
However, it does point to how expensive things have become. If we removed some regulation, would housing be pushed further towards cheaper but substandard dwellings?
I don’t think housing at 25% of low-income exists in the UK. If we extrapolated from the current, more expensive housing options, how different would 25% housing be from those in Vienna?
[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/chapters-for-englis...
Does it mean that anyone, at any income level, and any family situation, in Austria can elect to move to Vienna and get a reasonable sized apartment within a short period of time, perhaps 1 month?
There's nothing wrong with believing that non-market housing is the way to go, but we can't judge success on rents alone.
But even looking at Vienna, it's obvious that the answer to affordable housing is to build more housing. It doesn't matter who builds or who owns it. It could be a corporation building Levittown. It could be the SPÖ building the 1.1km long Karl-Marx Hof. It could be Khrushchev building Khrushchevkas. And it doesn't even have to be ugly (on the subject of Vienna, see the George-Washington-Hof.) But you do have to build, more or less continuously, and if you don't you better have a large building boom to make up for it.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-11-08/the-desig...