One afternoon last week In the fall, I walked through the center of Vienna, past ornate buildings with lace balconies, balustrades, and porticos: 19th-century private apartment buildings. They were interspersed with social housing blocks from the 1920s and his 1930s. Gemeindebauten was distinguished not only by its modernist architecture, but also by the red block letters of Victory that proclaimed on its façade: Erbaut von der Gemeinde Wien in den Jahren 1925-1926 aus den Mitteln der Wohnbausteuer. (“Constructed by the City of Vienna in 1925-1926 with funds from the housing tax.”) As I waited for the tram, I thought the explanation and promotion was a stroke of political genius. Half an hour later I was in the 21st district of the “Russian Territories”, where Eva Schachinger once lived. Wong Partners, the city authority that fosters community within Gemeindebauten and helps resolve tenant disputes, is holding an open house in the old building, a flat, minimalist complex with an orange elevator shaft. I did.
I followed the Wohnpartner sign and found a glass-walled community center. Most of the participants were mothers with young children or retired people. There was a painting station, a ping pong table, and a plant exchange. People were bringing in second-hand items to give away, and his Wohnpartner staff member, a millennial, provided technical support, but surprisingly, no one seemed to need it. Among the permanent facilities there was also a library with lots of free books and a play area with lots of wooden toys.
I sat with Eva in the communal kitchen, where someone was making a large pot of butternut squash soup. (Some Red Vienna planners had hoped to centralize cooking in communal facilities using commercial machines, but the Fascists took the lead, and then under capitalism (Austrian families quickly got used to spending big bucks on their own KitchenAid, Vitamix, and Nespresso machines.) Since retiring, Eva has worked with the building’s caretaker, Maroun Badido, to We publish a twice-yearly magazine for the complex with recipes, crosswords, and the latest community news. Badid joins us in the kitchen, wearing a black hijab with pearls and waving as she talks about leaving Somalia as a single mother in the 1990s. When she first arrived in Vienna, she peddled newspapers on the streets. Now, she helped create it.
Eva told me that she often returned to Gemeindebau and tutored the students in the housing complex with an older woman named Edith who lived in nearby Gemeindebau. Edith’s neighbors help her buy and deliver groceries that are difficult for her to transport. Instead, she watches over her three children. Edith was busy wrapping 40 presents for the three children when Eva called to wish them Merry Christmas. She hid them around her apartment so Santa wouldn’t find them before he came to visit. “The Gemeindebau is where socializing takes place,” Eva was fond of telling me, and this is how socializing happens across generations.
I learned that the average wait time to get a Gemeindebau is about 2 years (there are around 12,000 people on the waiting list at any given time, and about 10,000+ are accommodated each year). Vienna residents (anyone who has had a fixed address for two years, whether or not they are citizens) can apply, and applications will be evaluated based on their needs. Florian Kogler, a 21-year-old university student, was deemed an emergency because she lived in an overcrowded two-bedroom apartment with her mother, stepfather and two brothers. He was sharing a room with his younger brother and his parents were sleeping in the living room. He was planning to move into his own apartment for the first time, so he got priority. Kogler was offered an apartment within about a month. “That’s unusually fast,” he told me.