In 2023, Vienna once again topped the Economist Intelligence Unit’s list of the world’s most livable cities. It scored a perfect 100 for stability, healthcare, education and infrastructure — that last metric encompassing the high quality of its housing and public transport.
It wasn’t always thus. At the end of the First World War, after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the metropolis transformed from the centre of the world into an impoverished and overcrowded city so rife with tuberculosis that the illness became known as “the Viennese disease.” Then, in 1923, the Social Democrat government approved a plan to build 25,000 housing units; they were paid for by taxes on luxury goods, traffic, land and even brothels. They could do this because of the Austrian capital’s unprecedented independence thanks to “a constitutional law,” according to the City of Vienna, that “separated Vienna from Lower Austria, turning Vienna into a separate Bundesland (state) with financial sovereignty and her own taxing authority.” Only a decade later, at the end of the “Red Vienna” period, more than 60,000 apartments housing 220,000 people had been
