I rarely have an opportunity to mention Philadelphia and Vienna in the same breath — I’ve had my say about Vienna at my other journal — but the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday noted that, at least in one sense, both cities are on the same wavelength.
The Inquirer‘s Jake Blumgart interviewed Philadelphia City Council Member Jamie Gauthier about her journey to Vienna on a little investigatory tour of Austria’s public housing efforts. While both Vienna and Philadelphia face challenges in the effort to provide affordable housing for their citizens, Vienna seems to provide a few useful lessons on its implementation. The key to its success is Vienna’s use of city-owned vacant land and its partnerships with private developers and non-profit actors. Says Blumgart:
Vienna’s historic commitment to housing compounds on itself. The city government’s huge and long-standing ownership and subsidy of affordable units means it is known as a reliable and transparent actor. That makes private-sector actors comfortable helping to fund the projects. …
No American city is in a position like Vienna where the local government controls, or at least has a stake in, the ownership and construction of homes where a majority of the population lives. But … Philadelphia’s large amount of vacant land, combined with innovative funding policies, could begin to make a difference.
I live in New York currently; here the phrase “affordable housing” is an oxymoron, and New York is not lacking for morons. But there appears to be more than one reason that both Vienna and Philadelphia are considered highly livable cities, not least when it comes to housing for the less fortunate in Vienna.
You can read Blumgart’s article here, assuming you haven’t run out of free articles, as the saying goes.