High quality social housing

In Austria one of the highest rated social housing complexes is Alterlaa. It was built between 1973 and 1985 and houses around 9K people on 240.000 m². This results in a population density of around 37.5K per square kilometer. For comparison, Manhattan has between 22K and 40K people per square kilometer.

With this high density around half of the area can be green space and high frequency public transport is viable because enough people live in walking distance of the station.

Additionally, infrastructure costs decrease, because less water, waste, electricity, public transport and street kilometers need to be built to connect the same amount of people.

Standardizing building can dramatically reduce the cost of housing and therefore rent. Reduced rent would increase the spending power of every person living there, leading to additional positive effects on the economy.

These factors lead to this type of housing being more economically, ecologically and socially viable and sustainable.

One aspect that still could be improved is the design of the buildings exterior. While the staircase balconies on the lower 12 floors break up the design and reduce the likeness to russian style prefabricated homes, there is still room for improvement. The facade of a build should appeal to the people living there, as well as market the housing type to visitors. This should foster support in the broader population to grow support to build more of this type of housing.

In its current form it also has incredible third places in the middle section of the lower floors. Because of the step architecture of the lower floors a "dark triangle" is formed that provides space for clubrooms, indoor playgrounds, indoor pools, and saunas. To develop this idea further, the space could be used and integrated with some of the flats of a floor to provide public spaces that have still access to natural light and provide a mix between public and private areas for retirement flats. This would provide communal spaces for people that might need additional support for socializing in an advanced age and would reduce the amount of private space occupied, which would in turn free up underutilized space in other flats.

With the current height they would definitely be dense enough to be viable for public transport. An open question for me is, if building not as tall would be over proportionally cheaper per square meter and if building lower would enable more ecological building materials like wood. Both price and material choice have to be made in a multi century context as this kind of building should provide generational wealth and not require a rebuild for many lifetimes. If we get energy efficiency and sound isolation between the flats right, I don't think there will be much that is missed by people living there that would not be easy to retrofit even in decades of technological improvements.

With all this written, I strongly advocate for looking at what makes people already content, has been proven that it can be built and with incremental improvements could provide us with long term prosperity for centuries.