Differentiating “the working classes” for policy and action

Reades left of center are well-familiar with rising calls for more and more of the working class(es) in politics. More trade unions, more social movements, more alliances, more class analysis. These fall short, in my view as one such listener, when the calls are not granular enough for action even in the next steps ahead.

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One positive example identifying the levels of granularity for action is the recent report: Daniel Aldana Cohen, Aaryaman “Sunny” Singhal, Ruthy Gourevitch, & Gianpaolo Baiocchi, 2025. Green Social Housing: Lessons from Vienna, Climate and Community Institute, https://climateandcommunity.org/research/vienna-green-social-housing.

To wit:

Vienna is the global capital of social housing. As of this writing, over 40 percent of the city’s housing units are social housing, providing homes for the majority of the city’s renters. And, as the city’s population has grown over the past two decades, Vienna has continued to build affordable, beautiful housing: 5,000 units per year, representing nearly one third of all housing construction in the city. In Vienna’s social housing communities, doctors live next to janitors, and grandparents live down the street from their kids. Community gardens, playrooms, and quality architecture abound. Social housing is the foundation of the city’s good life. Vienna has been ranked repeatedly by the Economist Intelligence Unit as the world’s best city to live in. (internal citations deleted)

Yes, this is policy advocacy, and yes, more scholarly articles not referenced in the report are available (e.g., Sarah Kumnig & Katharina Litschauer. 2025. “Decommodified housing under pressure: contested policy instruments and provisioning practices in Vienna.” International Journal of Housing Policy, DOI: 10.1080/19491247.2025.2458389).

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I mention this not because I believe the report to be more credible than the others, but because unlike those with which I’m familiar, it states upfront and repeatedly the case for a working class point of departure for programmatic effectiveness:

Vienna’s success cannot be divorced from the city’s working-class political base, and strong membership-based working-class organizations. Since its inception, Vienna’s social housing system has depended on the progressive social-and-planning vision of one of the world’s most dynamic leftist political parties.

And to the report’s credit, the weaknesses of the Vienna’s social housing programs center around features of the city’s working classes:

First and most troubling, social housing is not inured to the problematic racial politics of Austria, Vienna, and Vienna’s Social Democratic Party. The city’s shift toward the limited-profit housing model has constituted a barrier to lower-income immigrants and people of color on two fronts: one, because limited-profit housing requires a down payment; and two, because development is spread among dozens of different associations, making this type of social housing harder to access, as prospective residents must apply to each limited-profit social housing project separately, one at a time.

It bears mentioning that municipal housing, too, features obstacles for immigrant communities. The two-year residency requirement for eligibility excludes scores of newly arrived immigrants from the economic and social stability that municipal housing provides. As a result of these barriers to access, Vienna’s immigrant communities are over-represented in the lower tiers of the city’s private housing market, which is more expensive, less regulated, and offers far lower housing quality.

The city’s Social Democratic Party is uniquely situated to address discriminatory rules and behavior in the provision of social housing. However, the party has had difficulty building a deeply anti-racist politics grounded in the city’s multiracial working class. Improving this situation would likely require that city’s progressives adopt a more sophisticated anti-racist politics—and to reassert the public sector’s role in building, operating, and regulating social housing.

As noted above, limited-profit housing—the overwhelmingly dominant type of social housing built in recent years—requires a down payment: anywhere from €5,000 to €40,000 for an 80 m2 apartment. When this upfront cost is coupled with often complex eligibility, many working-class families are left to fend for themselves in the private market. (internal citations deleted).

I have quoted the preceding at length because it exemplifies precisely the sought-after levels of granularity. Although not answered in the report, the question a policy analyst asks now and in the next steps ahead is: “Well, in this case, what other cities or municipalities–and not only in Europe–have really-existing anti-racist political parties, social housing and payment structures that actually reduce such weaknesses?“

If other urban centers have worked better, then how are such interventions to be modified for effective application in Vienna? If nothing works better elsewhere, then the actionable hooks of working class, anti-racist, or both need further differentiation, right? Either way, the potential for upscaling the Vienna success in social housing to other sites (as the report seeks to do with respect to the US) lies in the malleability of that approach to itself being modified in light of evolving affordances.