This month, four Ford School student essays were recognized for outstanding, policy-focused analysis and personal reflection. They are the winners of a contest that invited students to explore central themes of Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
A selection committee chose four winners across two categories: Conversations Across Differences and International or Comparative Perspectives.
Conversations across Differences
- 1st Place: Arctic Abundance by Aaminah Tabassum, MPP
- 2nd Place: Investing in Abundance: Transforming Education Finance Through Trickle-Up Economics by Stephen K. Callaway, MPP
International or Comparative Perspectives
- 1st Place: Building Abundance: What Vienna's Century of Social Housing Can Teach American Policymakers by Schila Labitsch, MPP
- 2nd Place: L'Abondance: Lessons from Our French Allies by Julia Shamus, BA
In her first-place essay, Schila Labitsch (MPP '26) traces the history of housing policy in Vienna, Austria, and offers recommendations for policymakers navigating the United States' housing crisis. You can read it in full below.
Building Abundance: What Vienna's Century of Social Housing Can Teach American Policymakers
Schila A. Labitsch is a Fulbright Scholar completing her Master of Public Policy at the University of Michigan's Ford School, where her work focuses on AI, labor markets, and international tax policy.
Introduction
Growing up in Vienna, I never heard anyone talk about a "housing crisis." This wasn't because Viennese complain less than Americans; if anything, we complain more. It was because the crisis did not exist. In a city of nearly two million people, roughly 60 percent of residents live in publicly subsidized housing, rents average about 21 percent of income (half what residents pay in London or Paris), and Vienna consistently ranks among the world's most livable cities.1 The Karl-Marx Hof, a kilometer-long complex completed in 1930, still houses thousands of families in light-filled apartments organized around courtyards and communal spaces, affordable not as a temporary intervention, but as a permanent condition.
When I moved to the United States for graduate school, I encountered a starkly different reality. Housing costs dominate political debate, shortages shape where people can live and work, and "abundance" has emerged as a rallying cry among reformers searching for solutions. In Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that America's scarcity is largely self-inflicted: the product of zoning restrictions, permitting delays, and procedural veto points that prevent private developers from building enough housing to meet demand.2
This diagnosis is compelling, but incomplete. Vienna achieved housing abundance not by liberating private markets, but by building durable public capacity to develop, own, and govern housing at scale. This essay argues that Klein and Thompson are right that America must build more, but wrong about how. Vienna's century-long experiment demonstrates that true housing abundance depends on treating housing as infrastructure rather than investment, and on sustained public commitment rather than regulatory retreat.
The Case for Building More
Klein and Thompson argue that the United States has stopped building enough housing, and the evidence supports taking this diagnosis seriously. Housing construction has not kept pace with population growth, especially in high-demand metropolitan areas where jobs have concentrated faster than homes. In places like San Francisco, permitting even a single apartment building can take years and require costly rounds of review, fees, and consultants. Rules designed to protect the public, such as environmental review and discretionary approvals, are often repurposed into tools of delay by well-resourced homeowners who benefit from scarcity. The result, as the authors argue, is a country that has become better at stopping projects than completing them.3
From that diagnosis follows a clear prescription. If the core problem is that government process constrains supply, then the solution is to reduce those constraints: streamline permitting, reform zoning, and shrink the number of veto points that allow a small group to block projects that would benefit many. Klein and Thompson frame this as "supply-side progressivism": a liberal politics that measures itself not only by the generosity of benefits but by the capacity to deliver housing, clean energy, and infrastructure at speed and scale.4
There is real merit to this argument. But the central question is whether deregulation alone can deliver affordability, or whether the gains will be captured by markets shaped by profit, land prices, and inequality. Vienna suggests the latter.
Vienna's Alternative Path
Vienna offers a response to America's housing dilemma that complicates the abundance agenda without rejecting its central insight. Like Klein and Thompson, Vienna's policymakers understood housing scarcity as a structural failure rather than an individual one. But instead of attempting to unlock abundance by removing barriers to private development, the city pursued a different strategy: building and maintaining public capacity to produce housing directly, at scale.
That strategy emerged from crisis. In 1919, Vienna faced acute housing shortages following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When the Social Democratic Party gained control of the city council under universal suffrage, it confronted a fundamental choice: wait for private markets to recover and build, or treat housing as a collective responsibility requiring direct public intervention. The city chose the latter.5
Over the next fifteen years, Vienna constructed approximately 64,000 new apartments, housing more than 200,000 people, nearly a tenth of the city's population.6 These developments were conceived not as emergency shelters but as permanent, dignified homes, with light, ventilation, and shared amenities such as courtyards, kindergartens, and clinics. Projects like the Karl-Marx-Hof embodied a radical proposition: that affordable housing could be both high-quality and socially integrated, without relying on market rents to determine access.
Crucially, this expansion was financed not through deregulation but through deliberate redistribution and reinvestment. Vienna introduced progressive taxes on luxury goods, property, and wealth, redirecting resources from speculation toward construction.7
What distinguishes Vienna from other housing efforts is the durability of its institutions, which survived war and political rupture and resumed public construction after 1945. Unlike the United States, which largely abandoned public construction in favor of housing vouchers, Vienna continued to build. Today, the city owns or subsidizes more than 60 percent of its housing stock and adds thousands of new units each year through a mix of municipal and limited-profit developers.8
Land policy has been central to this continuity. Over decades, Vienna accumulated and retained land, limiting speculation and insulating housing costs from volatile real estate markets. By controlling land, the city reduced one of the primary drivers of housing scarcity: rising land values that reward delay and restrict supply. This allowed Vienna not only to build more housing, but to ensure that new construction served long-term affordability rather than short-term profit.9
Vienna's experience suggests that housing abundance is not a one-time achievement unlocked by reform, but a condition maintained through institutional commitment. The city did not eliminate regulation in order to build; it constructed public systems capable of producing housing regardless of market cycles. From this history emerge three lessons for American policymakers, concerning public capacity, political durability, and land, that complicate the prevailing abundance narrative while preserving its central imperative: to build.
Three Lessons for American Policymakers
Public Capacity, Not Just Deregulation
The first lesson Vienna offers challenges a core assumption of the abundance agenda: that government's primary role in housing is to remove obstacles to private development. In Abundance, the state appears mainly as a source of friction: slow permitting offices, costly compliance requirements, and discretionary review processes that empower local vetoes. Abundance is achieved by subtraction: fewer rules, faster approvals, and a larger role for private builders.
Vienna's experience suggests that this framing is incomplete. The city did not achieve low rents by relying on private developers newly freed from regulation; it achieved them by becoming a major housing producer itself. Municipal agencies and limited-profit housing associations built at such scale that they reshaped the market. This public and nonprofit housing stock did not merely serve those who lived in it; it disciplined prices across the city by providing a stable, nonspeculative alternative to market rentals.10
The American abundance debate rarely grapples with this dynamic. Deregulation may increase supply, but it does not determine who captures the gains from new construction. In high demand U.S. cities, new housing often enters at the luxury end, where profits are highest. While this may relieve pressure at the top, it does little to ensure affordability for middle- and lower income households. Vienna's model addresses this distributional question directly by embedding public purpose into the production of housing itself.
The implication is not that regulation should remain unnecessarily burdensome, nor that private developers have no role to play. Rather, Vienna shows that abundance requires addition as well as subtraction: public institutions with the capacity to plan, finance, and build housing continuously, insulated from market cycles and political churn. Without such capacity, efforts to deregulate risk producing more housing without producing affordability, and abundance that is real for some but illusory for others.
Universalism as Political Strategy
The second lesson from Vienna concerns political durability. Housing abundance depends not only on how much gets built, but on whether the institutions that build it can survive political and fiscal change. Vienna's housing system has endured for more than a century (including periods of fascism, war, and neoliberal retrenchment) because it was designed as a universal program rather than a residual safety net for the poor.
In Vienna, social housing is not stigmatized or spatially segregated. Eligibility thresholds are broad enough that roughly 75 percent of the population qualifies at any given time, and developments are deliberately mixed-income.9 Professionals live alongside service workers, families alongside pensioners. Because social housing is experienced as normal, it commands broad political support. Middle-class households benefit directly from the system and therefore have strong incentives to defend it against cuts or privatization.
This design choice stands in sharp contrast to the American experience. In the United States, public housing was largely framed as a last-resort program for the poorest households and was often isolated in marginalized neighborhoods. Over time, this made it politically vulnerable. Underfunding led to deterioration which reinforced stigma, and stigma justified further disinvestment. Housing vouchers, while valuable for recipients, operate at the individual level and do little to create a durable political coalition for expanding supply.
Land Policy as Foundation
The third lesson from Vienna addresses the material foundation on which both public capacity and political durability rest: land. Klein and Thompson rightly emphasize zoning reform, but Vienna's experience suggests that it is only part of the story. Even where dense construction is permitted, rising land values can absorb the gains of new development, channeling public benefits into private windfalls rather than lower rents. Without addressing land, abundance risks becoming an accounting exercise rather than a lived reality.
Vienna confronted this problem directly by treating land not as a passive backdrop to development but as an active policy instrument. During the Red Vienna period and again after World War II, the city acquired land at scale through purchase, taxation, and planning mechanisms that discouraged speculation.10 This accumulation of land allowed Vienna to separate the cost of housing from the volatility of real estate markets, ensuring that increases in demand did not automatically translate into higher rents.
Today, land control remains central to Vienna's housing system. The city actively banks land and releases it for development under strict conditions: projects must meet affordability requirements, and developers are typically nonprofit or limited-profit associations that reinvest surpluses rather than distributing them to shareholders. By controlling both land and development terms, Vienna ensures that new construction contributes to long-term affordability rather than short-term profit maximization.
This stands in contrast to the American approach, where land is largely treated as a private commodity and rising values are often celebrated as indicators of economic success. In U.S. cities, even ambitious upzoning efforts can fail to deliver affordability if higher land prices capture the benefits of increased density. Developers pay more for land, rents rise to cover costs, and the promise of abundance dissipates. Zoning reform without land policy risks producing development without affordability, and displacement instead of relief.
Vienna's experience suggests that a serious abundance agenda must grapple with land explicitly. This does not require wholesale municipal ownership, but it does demand tools that limit speculation and anchor affordability over time. Land value taxation, public land banks, and community land trusts offer partial analogues within the American policy context.
Limitations and Transferability
Any effort to draw lessons from Vienna must begin with an honest assessment of what cannot be replicated. Vienna's housing system emerged from specific historical conditions that do not exist in the United States today. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a rare political window in which the city could acquire large amounts of land at low cost all shaped the trajectory of Red Vienna.11 American cities cannot recreate these conditions, nor can they rapidly assemble a century's worth of public housing stock through incremental reform.
Acknowledging these limits does not weaken the case for learning from Vienna; it clarifies what kind of learning is possible. The relevant question is not whether American cities can become Vienna, but whether Vienna's institutional principles can be adapted to the U.S. context. On this front, the evidence is more encouraging. Montgomery County, Maryland, has required that new developments include affordable units since 1974, creating mixed-income communities through what is believed to be the nation's first mandatory inclusionary zoning program. New York's Mitchell-Lama program demonstrates that limited-equity housing can remain affordable for decades when protected from speculation. Recent proposals for state-level social housing authorities in New York, California, and Maryland explicitly draw on European precedents, including Vienna's, even as they adapt to American legal and political realities.
These efforts remain small relative to the scale of the U.S. housing crisis, but they illustrate an important point: the tools required for a more expansive abundance agenda already exist within American policy debates. What is missing is not feasibility, but ambition, specifically, the willingness to treat housing as a permanent public responsibility rather than a temporary market failure to be corrected at the margins.
Conclusion
Vienna does not disprove the case for abundance—it clarifies what abundance actually requires. Klein and Thompson are right that the United States must build more, and that procedural dysfunction has made scarcity a political choice rather than an economic inevitability. But Vienna's century-long housing experiment suggests that removing barriers to private development, while necessary, is not sufficient. Abundance is not simply the absence of constraint; it is the presence of institutions capable of producing what people need at scale and over time.
The lesson for American policymakers is not to replicate Vienna wholesale, but to rethink the underlying theory of abundance guiding current reform efforts. A housing system dominated by private developers responding to price signals will tend to produce abundance for those who can pay and scarcity for those who cannot. A system in which the public sector plays a leading role in shaping supply, through land, finance, and direct construction, can ensure that abundance is broadly shared rather than narrowly captured.
This reframing has implications beyond housing. If abundance is understood as institutional capacity rather than market liberation, then building what we need, whether homes, clean energy, or infrastructure, requires a more expansive vision of government than the abundance agenda currently offers. Vienna reminds us that the central question is not simply how to build faster, but how to build in ways that endure. Abundance, in this sense, is not a moment of reform; it is a political decision to keep building, even when urgency fades.
Notes
1. "Municipal Housing in Vienna," Wiener Wohnen, City of Vienna, accessed January 17, 2026, https://www.wienerwohnen.at/wiener-gemeindebau/municipal-housing-in-vie… ; Jonny Ball, "Inside the Vienna Model of Social Housing," New Statesman, September 3, 2019, https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/economic-growth/regional
development/housing/2023/02/vienna-model-social-housing
2. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2025).
3. Gyourko, Joseph, and Raven Molloy. "Regulation and Housing Supply." Journal of Urban Economics 76 (2015): 1–18.
4. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2025).
5. City of Vienna (Wiener Wohnen), "History of Social Housing in Vienna," Vienna City Administration, https://www.wienerwohnen.at
OECD, Housing Policies for Inclusive and Affordable Cities, OECD Publishing, 2020.
6. Blau, Eve. The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919–1934. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999; City of Vienna (Wiener Wohnen), "History of Social Housing in Vienna."
7. Patrick Condon, "How Vienna Cracked the Case of Affordability," The Tyee, June 6, 2018, https://thetyee.ca/Solutions/2018/06/06/Vienna-Housing-Affordability-Ca… .
8. "Municipal Housing in Vienna," Wiener Wohnen.
9. Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton University Press, 1990.
10. O'Sullivan, Arthur. Urban Economics, 9th ed. McGraw-Hill, 2012.
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Land Value Taxation and Housing Affordability, 2019.
11. "MPDU Program," Montgomery County Department of Housing and Community Affairs, accessed January 17, 2026, https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/DHCA/MPDU/mpdu program.html.
Comment: I used LLMs to grammar check the whole paper and format citations. All ideas are my own.