Dreaming of Social Housing Again: Karl Marx Hof

We were waiting for our connecting bus when just outside the terminal there it stood: the Karl Marx Hof. Stumbling across one of Vienna’s most ambitious social housing developments was a revelation. A reminder that social housing still existed and was something to believe in.

Rewind to life in the first lockdown. Driving through the Oxfordshire countryside, I accepted that we would never come to own anything remotely resembling the houses we passed. One for jannah I thought. Insha’Allah.

After months of searching, small flats, extortionate rates, the backend of hipster queues, I was no longer as keen to embrace the aesthetic life of a hermit struggling to pay someone else’s second mortgage.

I’m back agreeing with the philosopher and activist Simone Weil, it’s not asking too much. It’s not a big demand. Everyone deserves a little home of their own accompanied by a small garden.

When done right, council housing is -

“…aspirational housing: the mark of an upwardly mobile working class and the visible manifestation of a state which took its duty to house its people decently.” (John Boughton)

A duty tossed to the curb as politicians capitulated to the free market and unregulated private sector. In the Tory and New Labour drive for home owning voters, there was no intention to replace the council homes that tenants were encouraged to buy. We know the story by now, public assets were snapped up cheaply by private hands and capitalism trickled to the bottom through criminal shared ownership schemes and unattainable inflated mortgages. This isn’t just a London thing, this is an anywhere in the country with jobs and decent living thing. Renters are hostage to an unregulated, uncapped private rental sector which in turn is paid for by the public purse to house desperate council tenants. The poor are poor because they are subsidising the rich.

“Do you build high palaces on every high place, while you do not live in them and get for yourselves fine palaces as if you will live there forever?” (Qur’an 26:128-129)

The tafseer of these verses warns of the arrogance of acquiring material wealth (Maududi), an admonishment to the people of ‘Ad whose wealth led to acts of disobedience.

Yet, in the midst of a housing crisis the accumulation of land and houses can be viewed as acts of tyranny - “And when you seize, seize you as tyrants?” (Qur’an 26:130)

I didn’t look into the Karl Marx Hof before we visited because I wanted to hold on to an ideal for a little longer. Later searches revealed what I had wondered (residents complaining about a lack of space, racism towards immigrants). But the premise of a deliberately designed housing block with communal spaces to promote a sense of belonging and dignity must have held some sway for fascists to mark the Karl Marx Hof as a battle front during Austria’s 1934 civil war. Here we’ve resorted to another kind of warfare to break the back of social housing with a civil war that attacks the bottom (disproportionately Black, Asian and female) with low wages, loss of services and the end of the inter-war political consensus of the right to decent social housing for all.

When we stumbled upon the Karl Marx Hof, I needed a reminder that another way was possible. That the right to want more and dream better can be a starting point again for those of us who had given up on dunya dreams.

To strive for earthly justice is to seek God’s eternal pleasure.

N Abida Ali