"It's not, 'We have a private (housing) system and in other societies the government is involved.' The truth is the governments are always involved. It's simply a question of how they are involved. How do they participate. If you go to Austria, and in particular to its famous capital city of Vienna, you will be in a city, one of the great cities of the world, where about half the housing is rental, either run by the government - that's a good part of it - or controlled, regulated, and subsidized by the government. It's one of the best housing situations in any modern city. There's virtually no homelessness in Vienna, and there hasn't been, because the government's intervention solved the problem. And by the way, when was that done? Over a century ago. Socialists in Austria set up that public housing program to make sure that nobody spends more for housing than twenty to thirty percent of their income. And that is a guarantee in the law. Right-wing governments have come and gone in Vienna. Left-wing governments have come and gone. They even had a period of time with a Nazi government. No one has dared to touch their public housing program, because there would have been an immediate reaction by an overwhelming majority of the people there. Because, of course, if the government maintains beautiful housing - I've been to Vienna repeatedly - I can tell you first-hand the housing is wonderful, to live in, to feel in (sic), the cleanliness, the landscaping, all of it. But because the mass of people, roughly half, live in government managed rent control, the private housing sector can't go much beyond it, because nobody would go there. So you have, in effect, a controlled guarantee, and it has worked impeccably."
-----Richard Wolff, A Radical Rethink of the Housing Crisis,
The Zero Hour Podcast, 9/17/23
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