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Among housing observers, Vienna is typically treated as a posterchild of decommodification, showcasing the power of politics to tame the profit motive in housing. We argue that this view requires nuance. In the regulated private rental market, which accounts for one-fifth of all housing units in the city, commodification has become a trait of Vienna’s housing system over the last three decades. Based on policy analysis and transaction data we trace the state promoted intensification of commodification and the rise of corporate owners. We show how, together, they substantially transformed regulated private renting by opening and exploiting regulatory loopholes to maximize returns. We then demonstrate, based on survey data, how this was accompanied by improved housing quality in the sector, yet also by rising rents, affordability burdens, and housing insecurity. The paper balances existing accounts of Vienna’s housing system, while also speaking to debates around the revival of private renting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The supply of social housing has been marked by erosion and decline in most Western Europe countries since the 1990s, albeit with considerable variation in timing, speed and degree. Recently, it has been suggested that the sector has kept a more prominent position at the local level, at least in some cities. This paper scrutinizes this claim by comparing the development of social housing in two cities in two distinct national housing systems that have traditionally had a strong commitment to social housing: Vienna and Helsinki. To do so, we build a multi-dimensional framework that encompasses sector size, stock privatization, new housing production, and residualization. We empirically demonstrate a remarkable stability along these dimensions in both cases, albeit with some differences in degree. A number of factors need to be considered to explain this stability. They relate to aspects of institutional design of the social housing systems, as well as to continuity in policies at national and local levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Airbnb prominently argues to promote more inclusive forms of tourism through enabling ordinary households to occasionally share their home with tourists. This conventional understanding of 'home-sharing' has been challenged, however, with critics arguing that property owners and landlords use the platform for the commercial provision of permanent holiday homes. This article uses Airbnb provision practices and the dichotomy of 'home-sharing' and commercial provision as an empirical entry point into the debate to what extent Airbnb promotes more inclusive tourism development. While existing studies on Airbnb provision practices in the European context have predominantly focused on the major tourism centres with the biggest tourism numbers, we consider a second-rank European tourist city with a rapidly growing Airbnb supply, Vienna, Austria. Methodologically, we critically review and extend common approaches to identify commercial practices. Based on a new dataset of Airbnb listings, quantitative statistics and GIS, we find that, in Vienna, the notion of 'home-sharing' is insufficient to fully explain the characteristics of the Airbnb supply, with commercial practices playing a considerable part, yet in geographically uneven ways. Our extended methodological framework provides further, more differentiated insights into provision practices than previous studies. We conclude by relating our findings back to debates on inclusive tourism development and discuss questions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A substantial area of permanently habitable land in Austria is already sealed to be used for residential, commercial, and infrastructural purposes. Although the annual land consumption used for these purposes has slightly decreased over the last 20 years, it is still at an alarmingly high rate. In 1996, the daily land consumption corresponded to over 30 hectares, while it dropped to about 10 hectares in 2016. In this paper the determinants of land consumption were confirmed within the econometric framework of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). In the EKC it is assumed that there is an inverted-U shaped connection between the GDP and land consumption. In this conceptual framework, the effectiveness of spatial planning frameworks, such as the Austrian Spatial Development Concept (ÖREK), was tested. The results show that, in Austria, there is a general trend towards a decrease in land consumption. The effectiveness of spatial planning frameworks is, however, not discernible from the general influence of an increase in the GDP. Both the increasing scarcity of land (reflected in the increasing land prices) and the increased efficiency of the use of land (as a result of population density and urbanization), contribute to the reduction of land consumption. This indicates that additional and more effective policy instruments, such as brownfield and inward development, land mobilization strategies, higher land taxes and urban contractual agreements are all urgently needed to reduce land consumption to much lower sustainable levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homeownership has been declining in favour of private renting in most developed English speaking countries since the early-2000s. Public debates in countries like Britain, Australia and the US have subsequently focused on the ostensible coming of age of ‘generation rent’, constituted of younger individuals excluded from home buying and traditional routes to housing asset accumulation. While the focus of this paper is the significance of access to housing assets as a means to offset potential economic and welfare precarity, our concern is landlords rather than tenants. Drawing on British survey data, we show that the rental boom has been accompanied by increasing multiple property ownership among classes of largely middle-aged and relatively affluent households. Over one-million small-time landlords have emerged in the last decade alone, who, we argue, are part product of historic developments in housing markets and welfare states. Generations of British have not only been orientated towards their homes as commodity assets, they have also begun to mobilise around multi-property accumulation in a context of shifting welfare and pension expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a comparably high degree of de-commodification in the urban housing market, Amsterdam has been long considered a prime example of a ' European city' and a 'just city'. This paper looks at how the city's housing tenure sectors have changed since the 1990s due to neo-liberalisation processes and specifies effects for housing conditions of the poor. It highlights how restructuring has been driven by policy changes at different scales, and analyses the effects of reform on issues of accessibility and affordability. We identify a gap between insiders and outsiders, with affordability for the poor inside the system not yet deteriorating, but accessibility for poor outsiders emerging as a key problem. In the conclusion we speculate on future developments of the Amsterdam housing market and relate our findings to debates about the ' European city' and the 'just city'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]