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VIENNA — At the edge of a wide, grassy park in Vienna, there's a modern building with lots of windows and a sleek wood facade. For the past six years, Sebastian Schublach has lived here with his family in a light-filled four-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor.
Up on the roof, where Schublach can relax in the communal library with a view of the city and park, there are solar panels to reduce climate pollution. There's a rooftop garden full of rosemary — the greenery helps keep the building cool in summer. Thick, insulated walls reduce the need for heating and cooling — Schublach's apartment doesn't even need an air conditioner. "It's not cold in winter times. It's not hot in summer times," Schublach says. "It's very comfortable."
In the United States, high-quality, climate-friendly apartments like this are mostly rare and unaffordable, says Daniel Aldana Cohen, professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and co-director of the think tank the Climate and Community Institute. But in Vienna, sustainable buildings like Schublach's aren't just affordable, they're widespread. Schublach's apartment is what the Viennese call "social housing" — housing that's built or supported by the government. Now this social housing is a key driver of Vienna's ambitious climate action.
About half of Vienna's 2 million residents live in social housing. Average social housing rents are about $700 for a large one-bedroom apartment, says Gerald Kössl, researcher at the Austrian Federation of Limited-Profit Housing Associations. Schublach pays more for his four-bedroom — with utilities, it's around $1,700 per month. "Which is not 'cheap, cheap,' but it's definitely affordable," he says.
In the U.S., the number of households officially "burdened by rent" has hit another record high. As of 2023, more than 22 million renting households are spending more than 30% of their incomes on rent and utilities, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Meanwhile, climate change-fueled wildfires, floods, heat waves and sea-level rise are making it harder to find safe, affordable dwellings. And the energy used to heat and cool the nation's housing stock contributes to climate pollution.
The lack of affordable housing and the growing threat of global warming used to be thought of as two distinct problems. Now that's changing, and politicians in U.S. cities like Chicago and Denver are looking to tackle the housing crisis while simultaneously combating climate change. They see Vienna's green social housing as a roadmap.
Vienna council member Nina Abrahamczik, who heads the climate and environment committee, says as the city transitions all of its buildings off planet-heating fossil fuels, they're starting with the roughly 420,000 housing units they already own or subsidize. "If you have these buildings, you can make choices regarding those buildings, " Abrahamczik says. " One of the biggest advantages is that we have a bigger lever."
Using social housing as a lever for climate goals
Just like the United States, the federal government of Austria has recently been backtracking on climate action. But Vienna is forging ahead. This spring the Austrian capital passed a historic climate law, outlining a plan to get its climate pollution down to zero by 2040. Vienna's leaders see the city's vast social housing program as a critical tool.
Vienna has two main types of social housing: city-owned and city-subsidized. Vienna owns and operates about 220,000 apartment units. Some date back to the period from 1919 to 1934 when, amid a postwar housing crisis, the newly elected left-wing Social Democratic Party built more than 60,000 brand-new, high-quality apartments for its citizens, says Eve Blau, architecture and urban history professor at Harvard. Today the city also subsidizes about 200,000 apartment units.
As Vienna makes an aggressive push to completely move away from climate-polluting natural gas by 2040, it's starting with much of this social housing, says Jürgen Czernohorszky, executive city councilor responsible for climate and environment. City-owned buildings are now switching from gas to massive electric heat pumps, and to geothermal, which involves probing into the ground to heat homes. Another massive geothermal project that drills even deeper into the earth to heat homes is also underway.
The city is also powering housing with solar energy. As of a year and a half ago, Vienna mandates all new buildings and building extensions to have rooftop solar. And Vienna's older apartment buildings are getting climate retrofits, says Veronika Iwanowski, spokesperson for Vienna's municipal housing company, Wiener Wohnen. That includes new insulation, doors and windows to prevent the city's wind from getting in the cracks.
The increase in energy efficiency and switching from gas to renewables doesn't just have climate benefits from cutting fossil fuel use. It also means housing residents are paying less on electric bills, Czernohorszky says. "The sun," he says, "doesn't send an energy bill."
To spur climate-friendly designs, Vienna makes competitions
Schublach's light-filled building, Gleis 21, is a type of housing subsidized by the city. And it's an example, researchers say, of how Vienna uses subsidized housing to drive innovative climate design.
With city-subsidized housing, housing developers can compete to get land and low-interest loans from the city. Officials say those competitions are a critical lever for climate action. "As we can control the contents of the competitions, we try to make them fit to the main goals of the city," says Kurt Hofstetter, city planner for Vienna, "which is of course also ecological."
When developers compete, they submit proposals to a panel of expert judges who award them points for the features the buildings will have. When the competitions began in the 1990s, judges awarded points for things like beautiful architecture and keeping costs low. But in the late 2000s, the city also started to prioritize climate-friendly designs, says Wolfgang Förster, director of Vienna-based housing consultancy PUSH Consulting, and a former head of housing research for the city. Now the housing judges give out points for things like increased energy efficiency, green roofs and sustainable building materials.
The land that's now Schublach's apartment had been an old rail yard. Around a decade ago when Vienna was turning the land into housing, the competition was fierce. A group of about 20 friends and acquaintances wanted to make an apartment together, and they had their eyes on a plot at the edge of the park. The group chose an architect, Markus Zilker, who along with his team made a design full of climate-friendly features, including lots of insulation and sustainable building materials. The architects also completed an analysis of the full life cycle of the greenhouse gas emissions of the building materials. Zilker remains convinced that the climate elements of Gleis 21's proposal were what helped them beat the competition.
Climate-friendly designs are increasingly rewarded with points in competitions, leading to more and more green social housing, Zilker says. Now the climate innovations in subsidized housing are inspiring the private market as well, Hofstetter says. "The subsidized housing has such high quality," Hofstetter says, "because we always are pushing it to the limits."
Social housing fits into the city's broader climate adaptation plan
In 2003, about 180 people died of heat stress in Vienna as heat waves swept through Europe. As the world heats up, Europe is warming up twice as fast as the global average, according to Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service and the World Meteorological Organization.
Vienna isn't just working to reduce climate pollution, it's also building new infrastructure to help adapt to global warming. Hofstetter says social housing is intricately tied into these new plans.
On an old airfield with a large lake, Vienna is building a new social housing development with a special emphasis on decreasing risks from climate change, like heat and flooding. This development, called Seestadt, has a mix of city-built housing and city-subsidized housing.
Hofstetter, a landscaper by training who helped design Seestadt, says the development has elements of something called a "sponge city." On a street near some social housing, Hofstetter points to a sunken planter full of gravel, sand and the beginnings of daffodils. It's about the size of the bed of a flatbed truck. It turns out the sunken planter helps prevent floods.
"You can see here, this is where the water comes in when it's really a lot," he says.
In intense rainstorms, instead of massive amounts of rainwater all rushing into the sewer at once, the sunken planters can absorb excess stormwater so it doesn't overpower the sewer system. With permeable landscaping like this, he says, " the sewer system can be much smaller."
For Hofstetter, the climate resiliency of green social housing isn't just about the housing itself — it's also about everything that surrounds it. "Sponge city" landscaping helps protect residents from floods. The trees cool residents down in heat waves. The bike lanes and car-free streets reduce climate and noise pollution and keep children safe.
"The idea of creating spaces and areas for people to live in a dignified way — that's the main focus," Hofstetter says.
As the U.S. federal government pulls back, local governments take the lead
In the U.S. today, much of the public housing and subsidized affordable housing has a connection to the federal government. Some of it was funded or built by the federal government or with some combination of federal tax credits and money from other sources.
Under the Biden administration, the U.S. federal government tried to tackle climate pollution through federally assisted housing with a $1 billion program to make older housing more energy efficient and climate resilient. Now that President Trump has returned to office his administration has taken steps to eliminate the program, although it's still unclear what will happen to it. Many other federally funded housing assistance programs are also on the chopping block.
Last September Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. introduced the Homes Act, which would support the construction of climate-friendly affordable housing. Smith tells NPR she was inspired to learn more about social housing after visiting Vienna, and from her work on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. But the legislation remains stalled in Congress.
While federal efforts for green social housing have slowed, there's momentum on the local level, says Ruthy Gourevitch, housing and communities director at the Climate and Community Institute, which just released a new report on lessons from Viennese green social housing for the U.S.
Gourevitch says that, like Vienna, America's green social housing doesn't have to rely on federal funding. Some money to finance Vienna's social housing comes from a tax on people's salaries — the employee pays part and the employer pays part, Kössl says. Most of the city's funding is provided in the form of low-interest loans, he adds. And in city-subsidized housing, also called "limited profit" housing, developers must invest profits back into maintaining housing or building more housing.
U.S. cities are also finding local funds to build green housing. Chicago is using $135 million of a larger city bond as a "seed fund" for climate-friendly affordable housing. A new "Green Social Housing" ordinance passed this spring creates a nonprofit that will administer the funds and have an ownership stake in the development of new apartment buildings. The plan is for 30% of the apartments to be affordable and for the buildings to reduce energy use and climate pollution.
This new housing, as well as retrofits of old housing, could play an important role in Chicago's goal of reducing emissions 62% in the next 15 years, says Jung Yoon, chief of policy for the Chicago mayor's office. She notes that around 70% of Chicago's emissions come from buildings. "We can't reduce emissions without building much more sustainable housing," Yoon says. "These things are intricately tied together."
While climate investments can sometimes have high up-front costs, local governments are realizing that making housing more resilient to heat, flooding and storms could pay off as the world warms, says Sara McTarnaghan, principal research associate at the Urban Institute. "These things are not cheap, but inaction in our housing sector in terms of climate retrofits is gonna be really costly down the road," McTarnaghan says.
Last year alone, there were 27 confirmed billion-dollar disasters in the U.S., totaling at least $182 billion.
Yoon went to Vienna last spring and visited green social housing, including Schublach's building. On Yoon's Vienna trip there were city representatives from Nashville, Denver, Seattle and Philadelphia. "We've all been Vienna-pilled," says Emily Gallagher, New York state representative who went to Vienna in 2022.
Mixed-income housing is "integral to success"
At a construction site on the East River in Greenpoint in Brooklyn, a 37-story gleaming white building will soon offer apartments with views of Manhattan.
Gallagher, who represents this district, looks out over the river in black sunglasses. "You can see the Chrysler Building," she says, pointing. "You can see all of the East Village."
The building, now called The Riverie, will soon be the largest geothermal-powered building in the state. Thirty percent of the building's housing will be designated as affordable, according to a release on the developer's website.
In Vienna, much of the long-term popularity of social housing comes down to the fact that residents of different social classes have access to the same high quality amenities, Cohen at UC Berkeley says.
This is on full view in Biotope City, a development in Vienna's south where the majority of the apartments are city-subsidized. For resident Hasret Iscen, who pays about $1,015 a month for her three-bedroom flat, her rent includes access to her building's rooftop pool, a communal sauna and multiple communal gardens. Her apartment balcony is nestled in the trees of the nearby park. " It feels like living in a jungle because we hear all the voices from birds in our flat," Iscen says. "It's wonderful."
Most of Vienna's new social housing is city-subsidized, like Iscen's apartment building. While rents vary, city-subsidized rents tend to be higher than in city-built housing and sometimes require a down payment. It "tends to be more oriented toward people in the middle income kind of section of society, rather than those with lowest incomes," Cohen at UC Berkeley says.
Vienna's system works, Cohen says, because lower-income residents can still find homes in city-built housing, "which is a bit more of a safety net."
Ultimately, Cohen says a key lesson from Vienna for the U.S. is the need for balance. "You don't want to just pull one part of the model," he says. "You wanna make sure that you are providing really good quality housing from the very lowest incomes all the way up."
Making housing for all social classes is a goal of Chicago's new climate-friendly housing, according to Yoon at Chicago's mayor's office. "This mixed-income model of social housing is absolutely integral to the success," Yoon says.
"If people of all walks of life are benefiting from this it is gonna be much harder to unwind, and much easier to defend politically."
Yoon says in some communities there is some stigma against public housing, though she says that has shifted. She mostly hears from people who just want more housing options. "We have a major housing crisis in the city — as do most places," she says. "If anything, people just want more affordable housing."
A new American dream
For a long time, a big part of the American dream has been owning a single-family home in the suburbs. But those houses are increasingly threatened by wildfire, floods and heat. It's harder to get home insurance. For many Americans, the lack of safe, affordable housing is pushing the dream of home ownership out of reach.
Schublach has now lived in Vienna for 22 years, but he grew up in the Austrian countryside. He says in the countryside there's also a dream of a single-family home. "I think it's very similar to the American dream," he says. "And the downside is that this dream for most people has become unaffordable."
"So yes, this dream still exists. Some say it has become kind of a nightmare," Schublach says with a laugh. "It's really a dream which cannot be fulfilled by many."
But Schublach has found a new dream. In his climate-friendly social housing he's found a sense of community. The oldest inhabitant in his building is almost 80 and the youngest is less than 1 month old. He says they're all there for each other.
"If somebody needs a banana at 8 p.m. because the kid would not eat anything else, then you get a banana within one minute," Schublach says.
And the next time there's a storm or a heat wave in Vienna — because there will be a next time — Schublach says he'll be there for his neighbors, and they'll be there for him.
Schublach says people in the U.S. may look at Vienna's climate-friendly affordable housing and feel daunted, thinking the U.S. is too far behind. But he's optimistic.
"If it can be done in a city like Vienna with 2 million inhabitants, I see no reason why this cannot be done in any major or smaller U.S. city," Schublach says. "This is something we can shape. It's not given, it's something we shape."
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