HOUSING MARKET
A city of tenants
Vienna boasts about one million housing units. Of these, 33 percent belong to the private housing sector, while 21 percent are co-operative dwellings, 22 percent are municipal flats, 19 percent are condominiums, and 5 percent are other types of housing.
In this context, it should be mentioned that social and affordable housing accounts for 43 percent of the housing market, which has a price-dampening effect on Vienna’s housing market as a whole.
The special feature of the Vienna housing market is that 76 percent of the population rent their apartment.
Rehabilitation and refurbishment
The first big rehabilitation campaign was kicked off in 1984 with the creation of what today is wohnfonds_wien. Since then, 7,463 residential buildings with approx. 322,700 housing units were renovated in the context of “gentle urban renewal”. At the moment, another 210 residential buildings with roughly 16,800 dwellings are undergoing refurbishment. In addition, 95 residential buildings with 6,400 flats are up for refurbishment in the near future. Vienna’s active housing policy addresses the housing market in its entirety and tries to also influence the private sector.
A large part of these rehabilitation projects was and still is implemented on the basis of “THEWOSAN”, a subsidised thermal-energy renovation programme. This programme specifically serves to support structural measures for the thermal rehabilitation of building shells as well as measures for the modernisation of heating systems with the prime objective of reducing the energy demand for space heating and, hence, CO2 emissions as well as fossil fuel consumption.