Anyone wishing to rent privately in Vienna today has to dig much deeper into their pockets than ten years ago. The development of rents on the private market was not only faster than on the rest of the housing market. It has also significantly outpaced general inflation and income growth. Renting privately is thus becoming increasingly difficult to afford. Who can still afford a private rental apartment in the city under these circumstances? And where are there still affordable apartments at all?

These are the questions we wanted to answer at the Institute of Spatial Planning at the TU Wien. In cooperation with DerStandard, we evaluated more than 10,300 real estate offers for the period 2011-2019 on a small scale. We have prepared the results interactively on a website, opens an external URL in a new window. By means of maps, tables and diagrams, one can find out how (un)affordable private renting is in Vienna today.

The project closes an empirical gap in Viennese urban research: small-scale analyses of the affordability of housing have been virtually non-existent until now. At the same time, it makes university knowledge accessible to a broader public in a simple, interactive form, following the idea of the Open Science Principle.