VIENNA VOTES TO BUILD 25,000 MUNICIPAL DWELLINGS

VIENNA, 1923-09-21. — Vienna’s Municipal Council to-day adopted a programme for the construction of 25,000 dwellings within five years, committing the city to an extensive intervention in the provision of working-class homes. The Social Democratic administration proposes that the municipality itself shall supply accommodation which private enterprise, under present conditions, is failing to furnish in sufficient quantity. For a capital burdened by overcrowding, restricted incomes and the financial consequences of the war, the decision is no ordinary addition to the public works estimates. It makes housing a principal object of municipal expenditure and sets a numerical undertaking against a shortage long discussed but inadequately relieved.

The programme comes under Mayor Jakob Reumann, whose administration has governed since the Social Democratic victory in the municipal election of 1919. The party’s commanding position in the council gives the undertaking a political foundation considerably firmer than that enjoyed by many projects dependent upon shifting parliamentary combinations. Yet a vote is not a house. Sites must be prepared, plans settled, materials purchased and building labour employed before the decision can relieve a single overcrowded household. The immediate importance of to-day’s proceedings lies in the adoption of a sustained programme, rather than reliance upon scattered buildings and emergency expedients.

Vienna’s housing distress did not begin with the armistice. The imperial capital had already accumulated great districts of small tenements, where families took lodgers and workers rented sleeping accommodation rather than rooms of their own. The war then checked ordinary building, while its conclusion left the city as the disproportionately large capital of a much-reduced republic. The depreciation of the crown has further disturbed every calculation connecting wages, rents, building costs and savings. A household may retain the protection of an old tenancy and nevertheless have no practical prospect of finding a larger or healthier dwelling when its circumstances require one.

The financial instrument most closely associated with the new undertaking is the housing construction tax, the Wohnbausteuer, introduced this year under the direction of Hugo Breitner, the city’s finance councillor. Its graduated assessment places a much heavier charge upon accommodation of high rental value than upon the humbler dwelling. Receipts are devoted to the housing task. The arrangement is intended to turn a recurring municipal revenue into buildings, rather than leave construction wholly dependent upon the willingness of lenders or the prospects of private landlords. Other municipal taxation, including imposts upon luxuries and entertainments, forms part of the administration’s broader effort to finance its social services.

Breitner’s financial policy thus makes the distribution of the burden inseparable from the building programme itself. The administration’s case is that a city cannot remedy mass overcrowding by charging its poorest inhabitants rents sufficient to meet the full cost of new construction. A substantial part of that cost must instead be borne collectively, with heavier contributions exacted where the means to pay are greater. The contrary objection is equally plain: taxation levied upon property and expenditure may restrict private resources which might otherwise sustain business and employment. To-day’s decision carries this dispute from general municipal doctrine into an undertaking measured in thousands of homes.

The position is complicated by the protection afforded to existing tenants. Wartime rent restrictions have prevented landlords from simply adjusting older rents to the enormous alteration in money values. For working families, that protection is an important defence against displacement. For private building enterprise, the relation between restricted rental returns and the cost of new work presents a formidable difficulty. The municipality proposes to break through this impasse by separating much of the capital expense from the rent eventually demanded of the occupant. It is therefore not merely promising additional buildings; it is advancing a different account of how inexpensive dwellings can be financed.

Vienna possesses unusual powers for carrying out this policy. Its constitutional position as a province as well as a municipality, and its separation from Lower Austria, have given the city an independent fiscal standing of considerable consequence. The federal Constitution declares, in translation, ‘Austria is a democratic republic. Its law emanates from the people.’ The Social Democratic council’s practical contention is that municipal democracy must reach beyond the administration of streets and offices into the conditions under which citizens live. That contention meets a sharply different political temper in the federal government under Chancellor Ignaz Seipel, whose Christian Social administration must answer for the Republic’s financial reconstruction.

The contrast with the national economy is striking. Austria’s reconstruction under the League of Nations arrangements requires financial discipline and the restoration of confidence after severe monetary disorder. Vienna, meanwhile, is preparing a large expansion of publicly directed building. These policies are not necessarily contradictory: a programme supported by identified taxation differs from expenditure met by fresh inflation. Nevertheless, the city will have to demonstrate that its revenues can support its promises without exposing the undertaking to interruption. The crown’s greater steadiness offers a more serviceable basis for estimates than the recent collapse in its purchasing power, but estimates must still survive the placing of contracts.

For the building trades, the council’s decision offers the prospect of substantial and continuing municipal demand. Brickmakers, timber merchants, transport concerns and building contractors have an interest in the manner and speed of its execution. No immediate movement in commercial quotations can establish whether the scheme will succeed; the decisive evidence will be the cost and progress of actual work. Land already obtainable by the municipality, the organisation of construction and the terms upon which materials are bought will all affect the number of dwellings delivered for the money available. A five-year undertaking may permit more orderly preparation than a succession of disconnected emergency appropriations.

The larger question is what sort of accommodation these public resources will purchase. The municipal housing policy places health, light and adequate household provision alongside the mere supply of shelter, challenging the economy of the densely occupied private tenement. Such ambitions will be tested against the need to build quickly and to spread the benefit among many applicants. Vienna has to-day adopted a definite measure by which its administration may be judged: 25,000 dwellings within five years. The council has supplied the authority and established the fiscal machinery. The next reports must concern sites, contracts and completed homes, for it is there that the promise will acquire its value.