Proven Yet Abandoned: Lofty Public Housing Aspirations Can Be Regained

An extraordinary collection of colourful and different apartments, interspersed with plants and trees.
20 August 2007 photo by ccarlstead is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
In Vienna, public housing has achieved lofty aspirations. One of the strangest, Hundertwasserhaus was designed to be both attractive and attracting. It is!

In the final quarter of the 20th century, public housing on both sides of the Atlantic fell victim to “Thatcherite” small-government philosophy. Governments don’t belong in the housing business. Free Enterprise could do it better.

In the UK, where in the 1970’s one in three renters lived in public housing, matters weren’t helped by high rise tower construction, which quickly housed hundreds of thousands. Much of that housing proved, unlike earlier and sturdier construction on both sides of the Atlantic, to have a disappointing lifespan, its degeneration accelerated by neglect.

Decades of public housing neglect has filled modern minds with a hellscape of social and physical failure. With crumbling infrastructure, poor maintenance, and poor management, it’s been easy to forget that social housing was not always a bitter and much-begrudged chore of warehousing people with low incomes in tawdry conditions, which far too many believe they deserve.

There were once high aspirations for public housing, and some were realized in their time. That was before governments began deliberately, if haphazardly, to demolish their success. High aspirations, which have been pursued and refined over decades, have created today’s Vienna, Austria. There, an entire urban society finds home in a vision of public housing that is today much coveted and admired.

For one such public housing project founded on utopian hopes and dreams, which is undergoing a revitalization, read more in YorkshireLive: Archive Photos Show Yorkshire’s Most Famous Council Estate During Its 1960’s Heyday

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