In a press conference with the Green State Councillor Stefan Kaineder in Linz, she also harshly criticized the “back-of-the-envelope calculations” according to which only five percent of Austria’s land is built up. If you take mountains etc. out of the equation, the figure is 15 percent.
Two thirds of Austria is not a permanent settlement area, but mountains, pastures or wasteland, according to Weber, a retired professor of spatial planning at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (Boku). If you look at the remaining “net Austria”, not five but 15 percent is built up, she repeatedly countered the calculations put forward by politicians – most recently by Chancellor Karl Nehammer (ÖVP). “That’s a lot,” especially if the country wants to feed itself.
Things went particularly badly in Upper Austria
“The development of settlements in Upper Austria has gone particularly badly,” Weber states. She refers, among other things, to a study by a research group led by ecologist Helmut Haberl from Boku. In this study, Austria was divided into a grid of 100 by 100 meters using satellite images from several decades and the settlement density was analyzed. It emerged that urban sprawl increased sixfold between 1975 and 2020. However, urban sprawl not only costs a lot of money – due to the decentralized infrastructure from transport links to flood protection – Weber explained, but the remote locations are also more vulnerable in the event of a disaster.
State Minister for Economic Affairs Markus Achleitner (ÖVP) had only reported on Monday that things were improving in Upper Austria: “Since 2021, around 50 percent less new land has been used for building land and traffic areas in Upper Austria,” he said, “92.4 percent of Upper Austria’s area is grassland.”
“Yes, it was even worse in the 1970s,” said Kaineder, referring to the Haberl study, but according to the 2020 Upper Austrian Soil Information Report, 2.1 hectares are still used every day for residential, transport and commercial areas in Upper Austria, and that is almost as much as the Spatial Planning Conference recommends for the whole of Austria (2.6 hectares).
Achleitner firmly rejects this figure: “The Spatial Planning Department of the Office of the Upper Austrian Provincial Government has determined, based on the digital zoning plan, that the land use in Upper Austria for building land and traffic areas in the past year 2023 amounted to 0.55 hectares per day.”
Criticism of the handling of vacant properties
Kaineder and Weber also criticize the way vacant properties are handled. According to Wifo, 20 percent of the apartments in Austria are empty, says Kaineder. In Upper Austria alone, according to Greenpeace calculations, there are around 30,000 apartments with a total living space of 2.6 million square meters, and the vacant properties could be used to “recreate the city of Vienna.” Weber’s conclusion: “Austria is built.” Achleitner considers this statement to be “false and unrealistic.” “That would mean that families would no longer be able to create living space for themselves and businesses would no longer be able to settle or expand in order to create new jobs. We use our land resources as sparingly as possible, but we still want to enable our country to continue to develop positively.”
Weber says that we need to focus on renovation, for example by adapting housing subsidies or creating incentives for saving land. Like Kaineder, she is therefore in favor of a vacancy tax. Weber believes there are many starting points for more economical use of land: “We need to lead the communities out of the murderous race for local taxes,” which encourages building and sealing, and she sees a need to change the financial equalization here. As far as municipal taxes are concerned as a possible driver of land consumption, Achleitner points out that 290 of the 438 municipalities in Upper Austria are already represented in one or more cooperative communities that jointly develop industrial building areas and share the municipal taxes. Weber, however, doubts that these municipal cooperations really work, saying that “every mayor is running for his own municipality” and wants to bring the municipal taxes there, she says.
Another approach: second homes
Another point that could be addressed, for Weber, is second homes: “It is shameful how the registration system is being abused,” she says, referring to second homes in her home region, the Salzkammergut.
In Upper Austria, she misses an “obligation to use building land designations” – the lack of which is now “a rarity”, she points out, for example, in Vorarlberg, where undeveloped building land becomes grassland again after a certain period of time. Achleitner stresses that in Upper Austria there is no longer any new designation of building land without the conclusion of building land security contracts, thus ensuring that building land that has already been designated is actually used. But it was precisely this approach that Weber criticized in the press conference, because “by their nature, building land contracts are limited to the re-designation of ‘greenfield'”.
