**1. Introduction**

The current housing economy and policy in market-based countries such as Austria are characterized by interrelated structural, functional and processual facts. One of these facts is a prevailing territorial planning paradigm, which rests primarily upon an internal dominance of local residential development and largely ignores the regional scale of a joint housing development. Furthermore, municipalities with their containerized spatial thinking of land use policies produce a situation of competition among each other to gain (high-income) residents and take less care on low(er)-income households.

A second fact is given with a predominant focus on the capital value of a housing unit and consequently de-valuing the use value of a home as a place of shelter and

social interaction. That is, building housing units obeys primarily market rules, with problematic side-effects, among others are housing vacancy, touristic use of dwellings or temporarily used second homes. In other words, commodification outperforms societal needs.

Closely interrelated with commodification and territorialization is, thirdly, the centralization of housing and neighborhood policy situated in the municipal government. Even though policy decisions are legitimated by representative-democratic principles, the local government largely ignores the participation and involvement of neighborhoods affected by housing planning decisions.

A socially more sustainable future for housing has to deal with these politically challenging facts, which jeopardize local social cohesion and affect poverty and inequality negatively. Approaches discussed in this chapter focus on these three domains and consider transformations in, firstly, the legal framework, and secondly, in a changing understanding of the geographical framing of planning by introducing a relational spatial model of local and trans-local housing development. Thirdly, a strong plea for commoning practices is outlined, allowing for a local-democratic allocation of housing and neighborhood relations based on societal needs instead of market-driven mechanisms. All these approaches are supposed to contribute to housing poverty and inequality mitigation. They will be discussed in an Austrian urban context, excluding Vienna due to its exceptional social housing policy. Vienna's housing policy is characterized by a significantly higher proportion of social housing than any other Austrian city. This policy dates back to the post-First-World-War period when the city started to build dwellings in public municipal ownership (Gemeindebau). In addition, social housing companies have contributed to this housing segment for decades, which means that today 45% of Vienna's housing market is government-sponsored [1]. **Figure 1** illustrates the legal status of housing at the level of federal states.

**Figure 1.** *Legal status of housing per federal state (in percent). Source: ([2], p. 29).*

*Contemporary Challenges and Future Strategies to Mitigate Social Inequality in Urban Housing… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.107999*
