VIENNA : The city of Vienna is launching a special allocation of municipal housing on July 1st a thousand apartments will be available for people whose tenancies are expiring in the next few months. This is intended to combat high housing costs, it is said, as fixed-term rents are a major price driver.
Between July 1 and November 30, a thousand municipal apartments with one to three rooms are to be made available. In principle, anyone whose fixed-term rental contracts expire in the next few months can get one of these apartments.
Further requirements are: a minimum age of 18 years, at least two years of continuous primary residence in Vienna, Austrian or equivalent citizenship and clear family circumstances. In addition, the maximum income limits for municipal housing must not be exceeded.
No Vienna Resident Ticket required
You do not need an existing Vienna housing ticket. This means that you do not have to meet all the requirements for a “justified housing need”, as is normally required for a municipal apartment in Vienna. After their details have been checked, interested parties will then receive access to the Vienna Housing Advice Center’s online municipal apartment search for three months.
Housing councillor Kathrin Gaál (SPÖ) criticised the fact that more and more Viennese people are coming under massive pressure due to fixed-term rental contracts in an ORF interview: “We simply see that the federal government has failed to take into account that the private housing market is exploiting this issue to a great extent. If I have a fixed-term rental contract, I am virtually at the mercy of my landlord. And we as a city now want to take responsibility for this.”
The proportion of fixed-term tenancies is increasing at an alarming rate and is further exacerbating the situation on the housing market, according to a press release from the city. Reference is made to a report by the Chamber of Labor, according to which around half of the tenancy agreements are now fixed-term. According to a current study by the portal miet-bremse.at, around two-thirds of the rents for old buildings in Vienna are also excessive, especially for fixed-term tenancy agreements.
Around 220,000 municipal apartments in Vienna
There are currently around 220,000 municipal apartments in 1,800 municipal buildings in Vienna. A total of around 500,000 people live in these apartments, or about a quarter of Vienna’s population. The tenancies are all permanent.
Link for Applying Appartement:
www.wienerwohnen.at