Anyone wishing to rent privately in Vienna today has to dig much deeper into their pockets than ten years ago. The development of rents on the private market was not only faster than on the rest of the housing market. It has also significantly outpaced inflation and income growth. Renting privately is thus becoming increasingly difficult to afford. Who can still afford a private rental apartment in the city under these circumstances? And where are there still affordable apartments at all?

These are the questions we wanted to answer at the Institute of Spatial Planning at TU Wien. In cooperation with the newspaper DerStandard, we (Elias Grinzinger, Florian Pühringer, Antonia Schneider, and I) analyzed more than 10,300 real estate ads for the period 2011-2019 on a small geographical scale. The results are presented on an interactive website https://mietmonitor.wien. Maps, tables and diagrams show how (un)affordable private renting is in Vienna today. Several newspapers have picked up the project, e.g. DerStandard here or Wiener Zeitung here.