Graz

Cooperative housing in Graz mostly means limited-profit housing. Its builders are Gemeinnützige Bauvereinigungen (limited-profit housing associations), which may be cooperatives, limited companies or joint-stock companies under the WGG (the federal Limited-Profit Housing Act). All of them must charge cost rent. By law an association may ask no more, and no less, than a project actually costs. A tenant usually pays a Finanzierungsbeitrag (a one-off contribution to building costs) on moving in. It is refunded on moving out, minus 1% a year. Many Styrian flats also carry a Kaufoption, the right to buy the flat after renting it. For contracts signed since August 2019 it opens from the sixth year.

The tradition is old, but today’s large associations were born of post-war shortage. ÖWG Wohnbau was founded in Graz in April 1950 as the Österreichische Wohnbaugenossenschaft. GWS traces its roots to a settlement company founded in 1951. In the 1970s Styria added something of its own. The Modell Steiermark, launched in 1972 by a think-tank of the Styrian ÖVP (the conservative People’s Party), tied housing subsidy to architectural quality and resident participation. Eilfried Huth’s Gerlitzgründe in Puntigam, built from 1975, let future residents help design their homes. The experiment ended in 1991, when a new provincial housing councillor declared that “the Graz School is now on holiday”.

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ÖWG Wohnbau

Styria’s largest limited-profit association, founded in Graz in 1950.

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GWS Gemeinnützige Alpenländische Gesellschaft für Wohnungsbau und Siedlungswesen

Graz-based limited-profit builder with about 21,200 units.

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GBV Landesgruppe Steiermark, the provincial federation, counts 26 member associations managing over 134,000 homes for about 370,000 people across Styria. ÖWG is the largest, with more than 33,000 homes. GWS manages about 21,200 units and ENW around 10,000. GGW, a registered cooperative, keeps the older member-owned form alive. The big post-war associations share one problem: ageing estates whose renovation, the federation warns, reserves can barely cover, so the cost lands in rents. New building is harder still. Every point of interest, the federation said in 2023, feeds straight into rents. A third, self-organised strand barely exists inside the city. The WoGen cooperative’s KooWo co-housing sits in Volkersdorf, outside Graz, and a local report noted that Graz offers no subsidy for shared housing projects.

Styria channels most of its housing subsidy through these associations. The federation reports just under 2,000 new subsidised homes and about 8,000 subsidised renovations a year, at rents averaging about 20% below the market. A study by WIFO (the Austrian Institute of Economic Research) and the GBV argues that such stock also dampens prices in the wider market. In Graz the open question is whether city and province lean on that vehicle, or build around it.

Graz is the only large Austrian city run by the KPÖ, the Communist Party of Austria. Elke Kahr became mayor in November 2021, and in June 2026 her party won again with 35.8% of the vote. Since August 2026 it has governed with the Greens alone. Housing is the brand the party built here. Ernest Kaltenegger took the housing portfolio in 1998, and the Mietzinszuzahlung (a city rent top-up for municipal tenants) dates from a 1997 citizens’ initiative. It applies when rent, including service and heating costs, exceeds 33% of net household income. The city also pays a Kautionsbeitrag (deposit grant) of up to €1,000 for private lets.

Kahr set herself a target of 500 new municipal flats for her first term, and 301 had been handed over by June 2023. The record is disputed. A 2026 control report found that Wohnen Graz, the city’s housing company, lost €10.7 million in 2024 and had built 100 of 200 budgeted flats, as Wirtschafts-Nachrichten reported. The losses continued. Wohnen Graz lost €5.5 million in 2025 despite a city subsidy, and its main account was overdrawn by €49.8 million at the end of 2024. The KPÖ–Green programme signed on 22 August 2026 still promises more municipal flats, land purchases and plots reserved for municipal housing. It also keeps the rent top-up. Yet the coalition must find €65 million in savings in 2027 and 2028, and it caps investment at €300 million over those two years.

The bigger levers sit above the city. The Land (province) of Styria controls the Wohnbauförderung. In May 2024 it launched a €295 million Wohnraumoffensive (housing offensive) aiming at more than 5,500 subsidised rental, ownership and rent-to-buy homes, with renovation grants covering 75% of eligible costs for low-income owners. The federal government sets tenancy law and the limited-profit statute, a split that a review of Austria’s affordable-housing instruments sets out. Its 2024 Wohnbaupaket (housing construction package) put €1 billion into limited-profit building, sent €134.1 million to Styria and caps interest on subsidy loans at 1.5% until 2028. Since January 2026 the Mieten-Wertsicherungsgesetz (rent indexation act) has limited rises in regulated rents to 1% in 2026 and 2% in 2027. It also lengthened the minimum lease a professional landlord can offer from three to five years.

The empty flats counted in 2025 were meant to feed a tax. Styria’s Leerstandsabgabe (vacancy levy) has let municipalities charge up to €10 per m² a year since October 2022. Graz never levied it, pointing to its unfinished survey. The province’s government of the far-right FPÖ (Freedom Party) and the ÖVP, in office since December 2024, has pledged to abolish the levy. Such levies remain rare in Europe, as a survey of vacant property across the continent shows. The city’s own answer is to build on land it controls, above all former army barracks.

Climate targets pull the same way. Graz has set itself a net-zero target for 2040. Nationally, the provinces rejected a binding cap of 2.5 hectares a day on land take in February 2024. That leaves renovation of the limited-profit and municipal stock as the most direct tool, and the federation says thermal renovation can cut heating demand by up to 70%. A paper on housing bonds for CIRIEC, a research centre on the public and cooperative economy, shows how Austrian associations raise the long-term money such work needs.

In the local press the argument turns on one question: should the city build itself? The business paper Wirtschafts-Nachrichten, in a 2024 report calling Graz’s building policy a case for repair, blamed planning delays for the slump. Philipp Pointner, who chairs the city council’s audit committee for the liberal NEOS party, said in June 2026 that the KPÖ had “led Wohnen Graz into a financial dead end”. Kahr replies that the company cannot be run for profit, any more than kindergartens or public transport. The limited-profit sector has made its own case. The EcoAustria study, commissioned by ÖWG, calls Graz the most indebted provincial capital per head. It argues that each euro of housing subsidy given to the associations triggers about €3.30 of investment, far more than the city can raise by building alone.

From our library

Baupolitik in Graz – ein Sanierungsfall

The business press’s case that Graz’s building policy needs repair.

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Terrassenhaussiedlung St. Peter is the building Graz architects still argue from. Werkgruppe Graz designed it between 1972 and 1978, and its plan let owners shape their own flats. The estate holds 520 flats. It became a listed monument in 2025, after a first attempt failed in 2020 against residents’ opposition. The friction is unusual: a participatory icon whose owners resisted being preserved.

Hummelkaserne showed what the city could do with military land. ENW built four six-storey timber passive houses there with 92 flats, finished in 2016 as Styria’s first timber housing of that height. Rents came to about €6.70 per m² including heating and service charges. It completed the first part of the city’s special housing programme, and the programme’s pace has been argued over ever since.

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ENW Gemeinnützige Wohnungsgesellschaft

Builder of the Hummelkaserne timber flats and the Kirchnerkaserne municipal housing.

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The Kirchnerkaserne scheme takes the barracks idea further. ENW broke ground on 30 April 2026 for 80 affordable rental flats in two municipal buildings, designed by the architect Hohensinn and financed with Styrian subsidy. Kahr had campaigned for housing on barracks land for two decades. The build runs straight into the coalition’s investment cap.

Adlergasse in Puntigam is small and symbolic. Its 20 flats, handed over in April 2026, are the first municipal flats the city has built as its own client in 50 years. Am Grünanger in Liebenau set the tone three years earlier: 60 municipal flats arranged in four car-free courtyard clusters around shared gardens. Both are modest against the waiting list, and the 2026 control report questioned how fast Wohnen Graz can deliver more.

Reininghaus is the counterweight in scale. The former brewery grounds, bought by the Reininghaus family in 1853, are planned for about 5,200 homes for 10,000 people, and ÖWG is among the builders. A tram extension now links the district to the centre. Critics note how much of it, like the privately developed Brauquartier Puntigam with about 800 flats, answers the investor demand that the city’s study flagged rather than the waiting list.

Urban Future carries the conversation outward. It began in 2014 as a local urban mobility workshop in Graz and grew into what it calls Europe’s largest gathering of urban change-makers. The city that hosts it has the pieces for a different housing model: public land in old barracks, associations that know cost rent, and a record of letting residents design. Whether those pieces add up to more than a few hundred flats a year is the question Graz now has to answer.

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Urban Future

Graz-born conference on urban change.

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