INITIAL SITUATION Austria has joined the European goal of ending homelessness by 2030 and has a competent partner to pursue this goal in the form of the Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft Wohnungslosenhilfe (BAWO). Housing First is internationally recognised as an effective method of sustainably combating homelessness and enabling those affected to participate in society. The first Housing First programmes in Austria were opened in 2012 in Vienna, the Neunerhaus, and Salzburg, VinziDach- Housing First Salzburg. In 2021, the Ministry of Social Affairs launched the nationwide Housing First initiative zuhause ankommen, which was expanded to include Housing First Austria in 2023. The Ministry of Social Affairs' nationwide campaigns have provided many resources to establish Housing First structures in other parts of Austria and provide homeless people with affordable housing. An effectiveness analysis has not yet been conducted and is difficult to carry out due to the many partner organisations involved and the comparatively short duration of the project. STUDY CONTENT VinziDach- Housing First Salzburg has more than twelve years of experience in Housing First and has now provided housing for over 140 clients, with a success rate of 92%. The aim of the study is to document the impact of Housing First on homeless people with mental illness and addiction using the following three impact dimensions: Empowerment of people in care (micro level), regional services for homeless people in Salzburg (meso level), clinical care of the target group in Salzburg (macro level). The study will be carried out in the period 01.11.2024 - 31.07.2025 and financed by the Ministry of Social Affairs, the City and the Province of Salzburg. METHOD / APPROACH The study is based on various empirical methods. At the centre is the quantitative evaluation of data sets that have been collected quarterly since 2016 and contain eight outcome-related indicators. The indicators are: 1. physical health; 2. mental health; 3. risk behaviour; 4. daily living skills; 5. housing; 6. legal problems; 7. employment and income; 8. resocialisation. The assessment shows the extent of stabilisation and development during the four-year care period. As a further quantitative method, a data comparison is carried out in cooperation with the Christian Doppler Clinic (CDK) of the province of Salzburg with regard to hospital contacts and their quality (outpatient and inpatient) and duration. By analysing the periods before, during and after VinziDach care, the impact and sustainability of the programme can be verified. Qualitative expert interviews are conducted with (former) care recipients and professionals. The results will be presented to Housing First experts from other federal states in an expert workshop in the run-up to the BAWO symposium in May 2025. The aim is to discuss the study results in the context of the specific target group of VinziDach (long-term homelessness, mental illness and addiction) nationwide and on the basis of broader Housing First target groups. The focus here is on the generalisability of the results.

Let´s look at different phases of a social innovation process. Current policies often focus and promote the early phases of incubation, development and formation rather than later phases of stabilization and adjustment. This uneven distribution of attention becomes problematic for long established but still useful social innovations – from two sides. On one hand supporters of a socio-ecological transformation overlook potentials for re-evaluations and refreshments. On the other hand, democratic and welfare state institutions are exposed to growing neoliberalism and right-wing populists, who are fighting them more and more openly. This contribution describes recent attempts to stabilize and adjust the old but gold social innovation of social housing in Vienna in a transforming world. Vienna has a highly elaborated system of policies and institutions that (re)produce social housing through collaborative practices that has been continuously built up since one century. This system is under constant political, economic and more and more social and ecological pressure and faces transformational challenges. The innovation format of an International Building Exhibition (IBA) has been implemented from 2016 to 2022 by the political-administrative system. The format itself is the experimentational attempt to tackle these challenges, but also spread the social innovation of social housing internationally. Within this format experiments with the established cooperative practices have been conducted (among other things). This research is based on the reflection with the involved actors. Thereby key ingredients for the implementation of new and adjustment of old social practices become evident: building better relations, redefining shared purposes, understanding transformational challenges, re-evaluating existing policies and practices, political backup, right timing and endurance, and balancing public and safe spaces of controversial negotiations. Specific experiments regarding collaborative practices within long-term quartier developments therefore appear as highly intertwined processes of stabilizing and adjusting. This contributes to a deeper understanding of innovation and transformation processes and productive ways to foster them in a socially responsible manner.

The question of where to live is fundamental to everyday life: it determines access to public transportation, green spaces, social infrastructure, and overall daily routines. Moreover, one’s place of residence directly impacts personal health by shaping levels of exposure to air and noise pollution, as well as extreme temperatures. Meanwhile, the choice of where to live – or, more precisely, the very possibility of choosing - is clearly restricted by access to financial capital. Greater economic resources not only allow for more livable space, but also for a more advantageous spatial organization. While Vienna’s tradition of integrating social housing throughout nearly all parts of the city promotes social mix and justice, the private rental sector follows a different legal and economic logic.

This research examines the relationship between residential location, housing, and spatial justice, with a particular emphasis on understanding a location’s value in terms of society, politics, and economics. In Vienna, I focus on the system of location surcharges (Lagezuschläge), introduced in 1994, which is set to be 'evaluated to improve transparency,' according to the current government program. The relation between the rent and the surcharge has changed notably over time, both starting with approximately 4€/m² in 1994, allowing a surcharge (16.02€/m²) almost two-and-a-half times as high as the regulated base rent (6.67€/m²) in 2024. This also means that the surcharge has increased fourfold, while the rent has not even doubled in 30 years. Knowing that the monetary location value increased massively leads to the question whether that is based on real improvements of the location, or if the location surcharge (over)compensates the regulated rent in the private rental sector. Drawing on GIS-data and policy analysis as well as expert interviews, I examine regulations and practices that shape access to residential locations. In so doing, I explore the intended goals of regulatory practices by assessing their alignment with stated objectives, and by identifying possible contradictions. Through this research, I aim to address the question of how location can be re-conceptualized as a common good, rather than a commodity, and what policy instruments might support a socially and spatially just transformation.

This study takes populism more than a distrubution mechanism, different from the classical usage of the term. Apart from the allocation of rents in economic terms, populism at the same time comes to mean ideological reproduction which indicates the libidinal dimension. In this context, populism becomes a special type of political mobilization. It is directly related to its being as a political strategy. Therefore populist politics becomes not only an economic rent seeking process, but also a political rent seeking process that makes the Turkish case so unique. Turkey has been going through extensive neoliberalization in the 2000s. This deepening neoliberalization has affected urban politics as well. Related to these attempts for urban neoliberalism, housing policy has also been transformed. Especially after the 2008 Finance Crisis, this has become more evident. In line with the change in housing policy, as a state agent, TOKI (Housing Development Administration) has become a significant actor. In this sense, TOKI has undertaken an important role not only in restructuring of the housing sector in particular, but also in designating the ongoing political goals of the Justice and Development Party (JDP) government. Considering all these, this study aims to analyze the neoliberal populist politics of the JDP government along with the housing policy, with a special emphasis on TOKI.

Although homemaking processes are well studied within the context of housing, it is significantly more complicated when it comes to people with unrooted homes. Most of the literature that covered housing experiences in relation to homemaking processes focused on owner occupied housing. Little was researched on social housing, even though it represents an important dwelling for vulnerable groups. Social housing tenants in European welfare states come from diverse backgrounds which often makes them subject to socio-spatial segregation on the (social) housing market. Various scholars argue that welfare regimes and housing systems play an important role in this but their focus has been on quantitative methodologies to determine housing discrimination, whereas design research, ethnography and interviewing as data collection methods were rarely considered. In order to broaden the perspective of housing research, this thesis proposes home research as an instrument to assess segregation practices in social housing against people from migrant backgrounds, queer people, single mothers, and disabled tenants. Two case studies of newly built social housing units in Vienna, Austria and Brussels, Belgium were selected. To reach a holistic understanding of the meaning of home and homing, a number of mixed methods are part of this research. Architectural design research, semi structured interviews and observations were utilised to address the crucial role architecture plays in home research and therefore in comparative housing research. Even though the results do not allow a concluding evaluation of the selected housing, they show the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in housing research. Additionally, they show how imperative qualitative methodologies that consider individual homemaking experiences are to grasp how architectural design contributes to shaping the social in social housing and how it impacts the homemaking processes of vulnerable groups.