In the place that last year retained its crown as the world’s most livable city in the Economist’s annual index, Vienna’s renters on average pay roughly a third of their counterparts in London, Paris or Dublin, according to a recent study by the accounting firm Deloitte.

Funded primarily through a hypothecated tax on luxuries such as champagne or horse-riding, the inaugural phase of socialist-governed “Red Vienna” saw 65,000 socially rented apartments shoot up within the city by the time of the Nazi coup attempt in 1934.

The most famous examples of Red Vienna social housing, such as the Karl Marx-Hof in the 19th district or the estates dotted along the “Ring Road of the Proletariat” on Margaretengürtel, look more like castles or monasteries, with art deco flourishes on their facades.

Talk to Gemeindebau residents such as 76-year-old Heinz Barnerth, a retired mechanical engineer who has lived for the past seven decades in the Reumannhof estate in Margareten, and he will be unswerving in his praise of the idea that brought his block into existence in the 1920s.

One of the downsides of having a single large company, Wiener Wohnen, in charge of managing and maintaining so much housing stock in the city is that logging and commissioning caretakers’ tasks can lead to bottlenecks.

He criticises Wiener Wohnen for its opaque accounting, suggesting its finances are in direr straits than the Vienna’s senate admits, and that the city’s underspending on maintenance is driving the middle-income earners so desired for the social mix into private rentals.

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