ABSTRACT
In 2004, Vienna city council stopped building new housing projects directly through municipal companies and relied more on organisations of the private sector to construct affordable rental housing. The Wohnbauinitiative (WBI) was initiated in 2011 to quickly expand housing construction by adding housing units that receive some, but compared to existent regional schemes, less public subsidies. In 2011, Vienna, in its capacity as a municipality, took out a loan of €300 million via the Austrian Treasury which was earmarked for the WBI and passed on to the participating consortia. The consortia were formed of one or more Limited-Profit Housing Associations or commercial developers together with at least one bank or housing construction bank. These consortia qualified for participating in the WBI scheme, i.e. partly receiving cheap municipal building land and additionally qualifying for the subsidised municipal loans. The completed dwellings will belong to different layers of housing supply on "Context and governance framework".
