Wow this is amazing. I especially love the swimming pools. Luxury on a budget.

I am always fascinated planned residential areas. One of the most interesting is Halle Neustadt which was built to house 100 000 chemical factory workers and their families in the GDR. There is some information here:

http://www.shrinkingcities.com/halle_leipzig.0.html?&L=
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halle-Neustadt

really nice

That’s awesome!..@.@..would it be great if there are lots of this kind of housing complex in Third World countries?

it looks very similarly in many cities here, in Slovakia/Czech rep.

America should be taking notes.

“Luxury on a budget.”

No, it is luxury on someone else’s budget.

There are housing projects like this in third world countries, but they’re for the rich, not the poor.

At the risk of knee-jerk condemnations of racism, I’ll say the truth: it ain’t the facilities that keep the place nice, it’s the people inside them.

that’s amazing. i love the forest growing on the balconies. could somebody please post a google earth/maps link to this place? thanks!

wow — the highlife for free. why work at all?

Where the black people at?

it looks a lot like the ’socialist paradise’ built in now huta, outside of krakow poland. i like it!

Deputy Dog, you’ve done it again. I wish I had a swimming pool.

I don’t know, from the sky it looks like a large square nuclear powerplant. What’re they hiding under that tranquil exterior?

America can “take notes” until her hands cramp up, but something like this will never be built here. For one thing, the conservatives and libertarians would be bombing every government building in sight due to the tax increases needed to pay for it, and let’s face it, the American underclass (regardless of ethnicity) to be housed in such facilities would have them trashed and looking like bombed-out shells in a week.

Do we really know how well residents engage with each other? Towers in a park is a well known modernist-era residence plan that historically has produced stunning monuments to construction and symmetry but end up not being human scale enough (buildings too far apart, people don’t run into each other, green space is vast and for looking more than playing). For more tower in the park: http://alpie.net/blog/bin/post.cgi?id=367

nice buildings, where could i check it out on google earth?

funny, being from Vienna I thought this would be about “Hundertwasser Haus” which is also a social housing project:

http://www.hundertwasserhaus.info/

Admittedly, that’s now more of a tourist attraction. Alt Erlaa can be found here:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&ttype=&q=alt+erlaa&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=33.160552,59.765625&ie=UTF8&ll=48.15223,16.313818&spn=0.006814,0.014591&t=h&z=16&om=1

lat long is 48.15228, 16.31321

Wish England would come up with something like that…there might just be a little less crime!

I hope they make something like alt-erlaa in Indian cities also!

Looks nice on the outside , but where are the pictures of the apartment??? What do the rooms looks like etc??

This just encourages people to want to remain poor. I bet Vienna’s welfare-to-work program rates are abysmal, unlike America, where it’s very successful.

“‘Luxury on a budget.’

No, it is luxury on someone else’s budget.”

No, it’s called frugality. You can build crap holes that beg crime to take root and then spend a lot of money catching and holding those criminals, or you can spend more money up front and end up with less crime and therefore less money spent on crime.

It amazes me how many people can’t see that spending a little extra money is a good tradeoff for not getting shot at

“This just encourages people to want to remain poor. I bet Vienna’s welfare-to-work program rates are abysmal, unlike America, where it’s very successful.”

Willful ignorance. No one wants to be poor. The vast majority of poor people work longer and harder hours than wealthier people.

I’m no expert on Austrian social systems, but judging from their neighbors, the concept of a “welfare-to-work” program is meaningless because commonly needed support is given to everyone, regardless. People with jobs aren’t left totally on their own to fend off the wolves themselves.

Also, browsing over the US CIA’s statistics on both Austria and the US shows that they’re doing pretty well.

They have half the HIV infection rates we do, their economy is growing faster than ours, they have less than half the number of people below the poverty line (man, facts hurt sometimes), inflation is lower, investment is higher, and they have less debt measured as a percentage of GDP. So, yeah, it’s really abysmal over there.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/au.html

My apologies for the minor snarks, but I can’t countenance smug, willful ignorance.

brilliant, from a bird’s eye view at least!

What people like super mike don’t “get” is our (American) welfare to work rates don’t mean OFF welfare to work, we just spend the money a different way, we’ve increased eligibility for food stamps, increased spending on transitional and supportive programs, welfare costs MORE now than it has in years.. people are off “cash” assistance but we’re still paying the bill… it’s not like people working at $6 an hour jobs can support their families.

Why should people helping OTHERS make huge profits (such as those in service and retail jobs) have to live in hellholes just because they need low cost housing? Low income doesn’t mean lazy, doesn’t mean unwilling to work, doesn’t mean unwilling to contribute.

We proved years ago that the very design of many public housing complexes in the US contributed to crime rates… that doesn’t mean public housing is a bad idea, it might me the architects of social policy have had bad ideas about how to handle the needs of their community.

Americans need to get over the idea that one’s bank account proves ones value

I wonder if that housing project has an Austrian version of Candyman lurking about?

Amazing and inspiring…

Lilly’s is the only comment that really looks past the “attractive” surface of the pictures. (Casdon asks about the apartment interiors.) To wit… these people in the playgrounds down on the earth (or on the rooftops, I suppose)… what proportion of them are residents of the nearest floors, and how many are actually making the long trek from deep inside the building? For the residents of, say, the 23rd floor, after coming home from work, are they really going to go all the way back down to the ground with the kids? How often? Rather than massive towers set into massive parks, the people would be better served by human-scale structures (no more than, say, four stories tall) interspersed with hundreds of small-to-tiny parks.

prisons are NOT cheap social housing.

Hi!

Very nice description of the place where I live, but there is a little mistake in the article. Alterlaa is not a appartement area for low-income residents but rather for the middle class. In Austria we have the so called “Wohnbaufoerderung” (housing fund), which supports projects like this (and unfortunately also these terrible, space-consuming suburbs), so that they can be built cheaper than possible on the free market. This project was built with tah support, so we for example pay “only” 860 Euros (currently 1265 Dollars) per month for 108 square meters (1161 square feet), including heating and hot water, which is a very nice price for an appartement of that size, but still much more than somebody working in a supermarket could afford.
The building belongs to the “Alt Erlaa Inc.”, a company which partially (33.3%) to the residents and to the GESIBA, a cooperative that somehow belongs to the city of Vienna, its task is to build affordable appartements in Vienna.
To get an appartement in a building that belongs to this cooperative (or to any other cooperative, there are a lot of them in Austria) you have to pay a membership fee (in our case 16,000 Euros / 23,500 Dollars) and in the case of Alt Erlaa you have to by a share of the “Alt Erlaa Inc.” (1000 Euros / 1500 Dollars).

Greetings from Vienna,
Chris

There’s a huge difference between this complex and the ones in eastern europe (e.g. slovakia, czech rep.)…
the social niveau is much higher here and real low income houses may be recognized by its bad condition or the type of residents (for example immigrants mostly from eastern europe, africa and turkey.

These are the most beautiful bildings,blocks because the nature is on them and all around them,off course the facilities are great and the space bettwen them .Great place to live in.I love it

What a lovely place, certainly not a ghetto, must social housing is, but looks like they did a good job here.

I don’t think it’s all that impressive. Sure the roof top swimming pools are a nice touch, but the architecture is very dated now and a bit weird. If you all think it’s so amazing you should try in this complex, i’m sure your thoughts would change.

uh I think Chris (7th post above me) brings up a VERY GOOD POINT- that these simply aren’t the slums of Vienna, these buildings seem to be more like subsidized housing…

This means that the posts that compare this form of social housing to American “ghettos” are not topical

here is a youtube video about the wohnpark alterlaa. you can find it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35YdhKWjaEg

hanging gardens look stunning

Chris is right: Title & description of this thread are simply wrong. This is not a housing complex for “low-income residents”. I’ve visited a couple there last summer: double income (at least one income definitely not “low”), no kids and a small flat. I’ve got the impression that they’re among the typical residents; and they’re glad to live there because it seems to be a rather cool place to stay in Vienna (”cool”=relatively low temperature in the summer in contrast to the inner city; “cool”=of good reputation). This is, as Chris said, middle-class!

definitely MIDDLE class…these flats are not cheap!

but worth it really cool place to live…i grew up in these buildings it’s like a own village at the edge of the city and with the subway you need less than 30 minutes to get anywhere in the center of vienna…

cool place!