The cost of connections: Social and environmental burdens of short-term rentals

Vienna is famous for both its rich Habsburgian architecture and strong policies towards affordable housing. And Vienna keeps building: In the 2000s, the city relocated its main train station to the former site of an old cargo rail yard and developed a large new city quarter in its neighborhood. This is where we, two young scholars from Sweden and Germany, lived for three months during our participation in the YSSP at IIASA.

IIASA focuses on solving global issues, especially centered around environmental sustainability. At the same time, the realities of collaborating in an international environment mean that we and our colleagues would travel to Vienna and find a place to live in a short-term arrangement. It was not lost on us that some social and environmental costs related to such trips conflict with the sustainability goals of our research, as our train pulled into Vienna main station.

We exit the train station towards the south and turn left, where shiny new semi-high-rises sprawling with balconies stand in a walkable neighborhood, surrounding a big, boomerang-shaped park.

Bloch-Bauer-Promenade is the backbone of this area. Administratively, it is part of Favoriten district, but its urban fabric reflects something very different from the apartment blocks and fast-food shops around Favoritenstraße. The ground floors of the buildings host some small organic shops, a café, a climbing gym, and sports and music studios. Some social and cooperative housing projects proudly light up the street with their wooden constructions and shared gardens.

Another thing stands out: The ubiquity of temporary housing in the form of short-term rentals. Furnished apartments, some are proudly advertised; some are only identifiable more subtly. One of the stylish buildings has a whole floor dedicated to visiting musicians, connecting to Vienna's musical history. Another catering to exchange students and professionals on a temporary stay. This was our home for our summer visit at IIASA. For one of us, a shoe-box-shaped building right in the middle of this area; the other one in a Singapore-style high-rise at the area’s edge.

While the apartments come fully furnished, they might not be functional homes at the get-go. In one of our apartments (officially a student home, but unofficially also home to young professionals and flight attendants), there was no cutlery, no cooking equipment, no bed sheets, or towels. These must be purchased by new tenants. Stores such as Ikea, Action, or online shopping are at hand to buy whatever is needed for a basic household. Fast-forward 12-24 months, or only three months in our case, tenants move out and on with their lives. Their newly bought household items pile up in the general trash.

So, come the last week of August, the trash room was a collection of good-to-use items that were waiting for their pick-up to one of Vienna’s district heating plants. There may be hesitation to take over someone’s duvet and bed sheets (even though we do this in hotels all the time), but what about plates, pots and pans, irons, or hairdryers?

Unofficially, the house permits you to place things for free use in the entry area. Some parting inhabitants follow suit. But by experience, things quickly got cleared out by a thorough morning clean. There is no more formalized mechanism for handing things over to new users in the building. Selling the items through the online second-hand market Willhaben appeared too much work for most.

In contrast, the other apartment in the high-rise could almost be a hotel. Furnished and without the need for extra appliances, this short-term rental even came with sheets and towels. As comfortable as this was for the short-term stay, it was odd in its own way. This building is a residential multifamily house in a prime location by the station, but it appears that most people are not long-term residents. Tourists come in and out of the building. There are even written messages from contractors requesting to come into apartments where no one appears to be staying. Judging by the small share of apartments with lights on in the evening, many of the apartments must remain empty most of the time.

The emptiness of the buildings may imply different types of usage. Where apartments are short-term rentals, then maybe they are waiting for new tenants. But being prime real estate, buildings like these constitute good assets for investments, and renting out makes such assets a harder sell. Empty units are more liquid but translates to structures devoid of use for social functions. Like the wasted household items in one of our apartments, the empty space itself constitutes emissions and energy usage in the other one, adding a social cost of unused dwelling space.

Energy usage is another part of our experience in these houses. The high-rise is connected to the district heating and cooling network around the main station. Maybe it’s the same district heating plant where the unused household items get incinerated. District heating and cooling is an efficient form of managing indoor climate in both summer and winter but has the “disadvantage” of being relatively cheap, and therefore often active. Temperature is regulated even if nobody is home.

The other apartment showed a similar neglect of energy costs. The student apartment building was uncomfortably hot. The few cooler nights did not bring relief: The central heating activated as soon as outdoor temperatures dropped to somewhere below 20°C. A broken ‘always-on’ thermostat caused this contribution to the oppressive indoor heat. Many inhabitants purchase portable air-conditioning devices to achieve acceptable indoor climate, constituting further energy usage and emissions. Unnecessary heating results in unnecessary cooling.

While it would have been possible to petition the landlord to fix this problem, the short nature of our stay decreased the motivation. One of our colleagues had experienced blinds in their apartment not working, and a landlord unwilling to fix it. Because of the transient nature of the stay, combined with a power imbalance between tenant and landlord, issues with housing quality have a lower chance of being addressed. The obvious consequence is worse housing for the short-term renters. In the worst case, this might result in poor upkeep and insufficient renovation, causing a quicker turnover of the building stock. In the case of short-term rentals that are scattered among regular rentals, one possible side effect might be the weakening of tenants’ ability to organize in negotiations with landlords, resulting in similar effects.

There is another way in which short-term rentals might impact Vienna citizens – rent prices. Tourism and companies like Airbnb’s effect on rental and housing prices is well-documented, and these types of short-term rentals are of course no different. Rents in these places are indeed much higher than elsewhere, particularly when measured per square meter. We both paid above 40€ per square meter, which is four times the average rent paid by households in Austria, or nearly double the average rent for Vienna's10^th district. Vienna admittedly has achieved a good social mix in this new development and subsidizes rents for small businesses. However, these private developments seem to crowd out investment by raising prices. Houses seem ready to be turned into hotel rooms, should the business falter.

These possible negative consequences of short-term rentals – wasted household items, empty apartments, poor upkeep, and high rents – are all currently part of the cost of travel and short-term stay, across all purposes but including scientific collaboration. Having access to some sort of housing (adequate or not) has been necessary for both of us to visit IIASA over the summer. Many researchers do the same around the world.

Research stays are invaluable for connections and scientific advancement, and among other things let the two us have this discussion and article about housing, but it comes at social and environmental costs beyond the obvious ones of travel. We do not see this as unavoidable. Already from our cursory autoethnography one can begin to see the outlines of policies and choices that would avoid this waste. But that is for another blog post.

Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.