What if our housing system was built around the idea that all people should have a safe, comfortable place to call home? That might sound radical or unrealistic to some, but it could be reality if we just look beyond our own borders. Housing as a right rather than a privilege would look a lot like what we saw in Vienna.
There's a difference between reading about Vienna's housing system and standing in the middle of a municipal housing complex — seeing the architecture, talking to residents, and observing how public space is integrated. In our country, public housing isn't seen as aspirational. For most Americans, public housing is the projects, a result of the long history of systemic racism embedded throughout our real estate markets and housing policy that created "vertical slums" for Black and brown people.
In Vienna, public-owned and managed housing isn't stigmatized or hidden away in the poorest neighborhoods. They treat housing as public infrastructure. Leaders have made deliberate choices for over 100 years to keep housing public, affordable, and high-quality — and they maintain it like a park, not something to offload to the private market.
Vienna has a 9-hour time difference from Portland. It would have been impossible to schedule meaningful discussions with their housing experts over Zoom. Being in Vienna allowed us to build direct relationships with policymakers, housing agency staff, tenant organizers, and nonprofit leaders. These are connections we can call on in the future for technical advice, peer-to-peer exchanges, and policy collaboration. And as we know all too well from the pandemic, Zoom can't replace the trust and nuance that comes from face-to-face conversations.
In person, we got to dig deeper into the work behind Vienna's housing system. We asked hard questions, got candid answers, and heard about the challenges and failures — not just the shiny success stories included in policy write-ups. We were also able to compare our challenges with theirs in real time and see how different governance choices shape outcomes. Knowing the full picture of how Vienna built their world-class housing system helps us design policies that are realistic and grounded in what's possible in Portland.
For example, Portland could start with land banking to help create permanent housing affordability. Vienna strategically bought land decades ago, giving it the power to keep rents low today. Land costs are one of the biggest affordability challenges, and when national economic headwinds are slowing development, we can purchase land now to build public control. Portland could also pull from Vienna's tenancy system that guarantees three protections together: price controls, eviction protection, and landlord maintenance obligations. These keep people in their homes and out of homelessness.
We have to be clear-eyed about our local context and understand we're working at a disadvantage because federal policy ratified private real estate discrimination into law. Public housing was concentrated in Black neighborhoods and other neighborhoods where marginalized communities lived, while single-family homes were subsidized in white neighborhoods. A chronic lack of investment and years of deferred maintenance led to the deterioration of public housing, making it easier for federal policymakers to justify moving away from public housing programs altogether.
Our country has effectively turned over the entire construction and management of affordable housing to the private market. Today, we're seeing the limits of that system as more people are losing their homes than are finding housing stability in Portland. The Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), the main tool for cities to encourage affordable housing construction, is designed as a tax write-off to make the construction of affordable housing more attractive for investors. It also has built-in expiration dates for affordability, unlike in Vienna where housing is permanently affordable.
Residents at Tigard's Woodspring Apartments, an affordable housing complex for seniors, had to fight rent increases after their landlord raised rates once LIHTC requirements expired. Washington County ended up purchasing the property, but there are 4,189 more affordable housing units our state is at risk of losing by 2030. That's on top of an already daunting shortage of affordable housing in Oregon.
Too often in Portland and around the metro region, renting is precarious and predatory. One of my takeaways I shared at the Homelessness and Housing Committee is that in Vienna, renting is stable, dignified, and designed to build long-term security. One way Vienna creates stability is by removing lease term limits and allowing families to pass down their apartments to children, enabling intergenerational wealth building.
The scale of this is huge — 75% of all tenants qualify for social housing, and 76% of Vienna residents are renters. And yet, Vienna is consistently ranked one of the most livable cities in the world. It's proof that housing stability, not necessarily homeownership, is the real foundation of thriving communities
I was thinking a lot about what that policy would mean for my constituents in East Portland, many of whom were priced out of other parts of our town. For generations, housing policy here displaced Black Portlanders and other marginalized groups — through exclusionary zoning, racially restrictive covenants, and redlining. Those were political choices that transferred wealth to white property owners and stripped it away from everyone else.
Vienna's policymakers made a different choice, and we can too, because our current way of doing affordable housing isn't working. For Portland leaders, coming back from Vienna with a shared set of observations builds alignment on where we need to go. It's easier to advocate for bold ideas like land banking, rent caps, or tenant protections when we've collectively seen them working at scale.
Importantly, international trips remind us that we are not alone. Other cities across the globe are wrestling with the same affordability, climate, and justice issues. It's humbling and empowering to see that transformative housing policy is possible, and to connect Portland's work to a global movement for housing as a human right.
As far as next steps, we'll be working more with Portland Housing Bureau staff to capture all that we learned in the report that's due next spring, collaborating with community partners and housing providers to identify policy priorities and potential pilot projects, and joining future community engagement events hosted by Neighborhood Partnerships. I've asked my colleagues Councilor Mitch Green and Councilor Jamie Dunphy to reflect on their takeaways from Vienna, and what City Council can do next to help create quality housing and affordability for all Portlanders.
Councilor Mitch Green
My biggest takeaway was the staggering cost-effectiveness of the Vienna model. We saw a city that is able to deliver high-quality, permanently affordable homes for the majority of its population at a fraction of the cost per-capita we spend in Portland. Vienna used to have many of the same problems Portland has today- unaffordable housing, rampant homelessness, and a withering economy. Their solution was to design a system around the idea that housing should be a right, not a commodity. They saw that the city could and should play a decisive role in ensuring that right. The result is one of the safest, cleanest, and most livable cities in the world. It's a model that is dramatically more humane, and more fiscally responsible. You can't experience that system and not want to come back and fight for something similar here.
We're often told in Portland that things like tenant protections, rent control, and taxes on the wealthy will tank our economy. Yet in Vienna, a city with the world's strongest tenant protections, near-universal rent control, and steeply progressive taxation, the economy is booming. Shops and cafes are bustling. There are construction cranes in the sky everywhere you look. Vienna's success puts the lie to the scare tactics used to maintain a status quo that is clearly failing us.
I think one of the main lessons we can take from Vienna is how they allocate affordable housing. In Portland, we treat public housing as a program for the poor, and as a result it is stigmatized, neglected, and chronically underfunded. In their model, anyone making 150% of the median income or less (the equivalent of $120,000 per year in Portland) qualifies for Social Housing. That's about three-fourths of the entire population. By guaranteeing housing stability to the broad majority of middle class residents, it becomes less of a political football, and something more akin to a core service like parks or schools. That's the recipe for a successful, sustainable system.
Councilor Jamie Dunphy
The experience our delegation had in Vienna left a deep impression on me. My biggest takeaway from the study trip was how profoundly housing shapes a community when it is treated as a public good. Walking through Vienna's neighborhoods, I saw people of all incomes living together intentionally. Kids played in shared courtyards, families gathered in parks that were seamlessly built into each block, and every few minutes a train pulled up, full of people taking part in one of the best public transit systems I've ever seen. What struck me most was the absence of housing insecurity: people had stability, community, and dignity, and that sense of security permeated the entire city.
What surprised me most was how invisible income differences were. You couldn't tell how much someone earned by looking at where they lived. That wasn't by accident. It was by design: policies and investments that prevent segregation and ensure everyone has access to quality housing and neighborhood amenities. Seeing that in practice was far more powerful than reading about it.
For Portland, the lesson is clear. If Vienna can treat housing like schools, parks, or roads, something built, maintained, and protected as essential infrastructure, then we can too. With new Tax Increment Financing Districts on the horizon, we have the chance to invest in housing models that create lasting affordability, like co-ops, limited-profit housing, and publicly-owned developments that stay affordable for generations. We may not catch up to Vienna's century of progress, but we can take bold steps now to ensure that in the future, Portland neighborhoods are places where affordability is permanent, incomes are mixed, and every family has the security to plan their future. The Vienna model proves it is possible, and the question before us is whether we are ready to take the leap here in Portland. I believe we can.