Lessons from Vienna: Rethinking Vancouver’s Housing Affordability

IN-SIGHTS presents another contribution from UBC Professor Condon , published here with his permission. I have spent thirty years telling anyone who will listen that Vienna solved the housing question a hundred years ago and we still refuse to copy the homework. This week’s collapse of Vancouver’s half-baked 20-storey social-housing amendments is only the latest proof that we are determined to keep failing in the most expensive way rather than succeed in the proven way. The tale of the tape shown below. Vienna did three things that Vancouver refuses to do: They took land speculation off the table. Between 1919 and 1934 the city taxed the daylights out of large landowners, bought huge tracts at pre-boom prices, and has never sold them back. Today, the City of Vienna owns enough land to house another 400,000 people without touching a single private parcel. They invented the limited-profit housing association (Gemeinnützige Bauvereinigungen). These entities can borrow at municipal bond rates, pay no dividend above a capped 3-4 %, and are required to recycle every euro of profit into new units. Most developers build non market housing, not market housing. They kept the heights humane. Walk through Leopoldstadt or Favoriten today: the famous Gemeindebauten (municipal blocks) from the 1920s are five to seven storeys, built around generous courtyards with kindergartens, libraries, and laundries. Even brand-new social projects along the Gürtel rarely exceed ten storeys. Nobody is slamming 20-storey towers into 1910 heritage streets and pretending it is “progressive.” Vancouver’s defeated amendments this week were the photographic negative of the Vienna model: their broader proposals to upzone most of the city without taxing the land lift proposed to hand speculative windfalls to private owners while hoping non-profits could somehow outbid them for the same city inflated sites, and they did it by threatening 20-storey buildings in quiet, leafy streets. No wonder residents revolted. If Councillor Boyle’s original 2021 motion (the one I praised) had been paired with Vienna-style tools - a city land bank, exclusive density rights for non-profits, and a hard cap on private profit - we could have built thousands of non-market homes by now without a single 20-storey tower. Instead we keep proving that the definition of insanity is doing the same market-led, speculation-fueled experiment and expecting a different result. Vienna has shown for a century that you can densify gently, capture uplift for the commons, and still have a city of courtyards, streetcars, and rents that haven’t gone up in real terms since the 1970s. We could copy that model tomorrow. All that’s missing is the political will to tell the landowners and luxury developers that their century-long jackpot is over. Until we do, every new upzoning plan - no matter how boldly it is marketed - will end up exactly like this week’s: defeated, deservedly, by furious residents who know they are being asked to surrender their neighbourhoods so that someone else can get rich. ISSUE VIENNA (RED VIENNA → TODAY VANCOUVER 2025 Share of housing that is non-market....

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