Lessons from a utopia of tenants

One afternoon last In autumn I walked through the center of Vienna, past ornate buildings with lace balconies, balustrades and porches – private apartments from the 19th century. They were interspersed with social housing blocks from the 1920s and 1930s – the Gemeindebauten, notable not only for their modernist architecture, but also for the triumphant red block letters on their facades, announcing: Erbaut von der Gemeinde Wien in den Jahren 1925-1926 aus den Mitteln der Wohnbausteuer. (“Built by the city of Vienna in the years 1925-1926 with money from the housing tax.”) A piece of political genius, I thought as I waited for the tram: explanation and advertising. Half an hour later I was in the 21st district, the ‘Russian area’ where Eva Schachinger used to live. Wohnpartner, the city office that promotes community within the Gemeindebauten and helps resolve tenant disputes, held an open house in its old building, a flat, minimalist complex with orange elevator shafts.

I followed the Wohnpartner signs and found the glass-walled community center and entered. Most of those present were mothers with small children or pensioners. There was a painting station, table tennis and a plant exchange. People had brought their second-hand things to give away, and a millennial Wohnpartner employee offered technical help, which, surprisingly, no one seemed to need. Among the permanent fixtures was a library filled with free books and a play area with an array of wooden toys.

I took a seat with Eva in the communal kitchen, where someone had made a large pot of butternut squash soup. (Some Red Vienna planners had hoped to centralize cooking in communal facilities with industrial machinery, but the fascists came first, and then, under capitalism, Austrian families quickly got used to building their own KitchenAids, Vitamixes and Nespresso machines.) Since her retirement, Eva has been working with Malyuun Badeed, the building caretaker, on a bi-annual magazine for the complex that includes a recipe and a crossword, along with the latest community news. Badeed, who was in the kitchen with us, wore a black hijab with pearls and waved her hands as she said she had left Somalia as a single mother in the 1990s. When she first arrived in Vienna, she was selling newspapers on the street; now she helped produce one.

Eva told me she often returned to the Gemeindebau to tutor students from the complex with a woman named Edith, an elderly neighbor who lived in a nearby Gemeindebau. Edith’s neighbors help buy and deliver her groceries, which she has a hard time carrying. In return, she watches over their three children. When Eva called to wish her a Merry Christmas, Edith was wrapping 40 presents for the three children; she hid them in her apartment so they wouldn’t be found until Santa came to visit. “The Gemeindebau is where socialization takes place,” Eva liked to tell me, and this is what socialization looks like through the generations.

I learned that the average waiting time to get a Gemeindebau is about two years (there are about 12,000 people on the waiting list at any given time, and about 10,000 or more people join each year) . Vienna residents — anyone who has had a permanent address for two years, whether a citizen or not — can apply, and applications are assessed on a need-by-need basis. Florian Kogler, a 21-year-old university student, was considered an emergency because he lived with his mother, stepfather and two siblings in a crowded two-bedroom apartment. He shared a room with his brother, while his parents slept in the living room. He was also given priority because he moved into his own apartment for the first time. Kogler was offered an apartment within about a month. “That’s unusually fast,” he told me.