AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
We're wrapping up Climate Solutions Week here at NPR. This year's theme is Rethinking Home. And all week, we've looked at ways our homes and communities can be more resilient and offer solutions to the changing climate. And for the week's finale here on WEEKEND EDITION, we have NPR's climate solutions correspondent, Julia Simon.
JULIA SIMON, BYLINE: Hello, Ayesha. Today, I want to take you to a place that's working to combat climate change through their housing. That place is Vienna.
RASCOE: Vienna, Austria? You're not talking about, like, Vienna, Virginia.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON: No.
RASCOE: OK.
SIMON: Vienna, Austria.
RASCOE: OK. OK.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHILDREN PLAYING)
SIMON: A few months ago, I traveled to the Austrian capital.
My hat just flew off 'cause it's very windy.
In this big, grassy park with playgrounds full of kids. There's a bunch of apartment buildings around this park, but one stands out. It's a modern building. It's got lots of wood, lots of windows. On one of the top floors, I see a guy in a beanie waving. This is Sebastian.
SEBASTIAN SCHUBLACH: Schublach, if you need the full name.
SIMON: Yes.
Schublach works at a think tank. He's lived in this modern building for about six years with his wife and two young daughters. He takes us on a tour. Shall we go upstairs?
SCHUBLACH: Yes, we can go upstairs.
SIMON: Yes. Let's do it.
(SOUNDBITE OF ELEVATOR BEEPING)
SIMON: It's six floors, lots of shared amenities.
Nice sauna.
SCHUBLACH: Yeah, nice view.
SIMON: With a view, yeah.
And, Ayesha, there are a lot of climate-friendly aspects - things that help the building reduce planet-heating pollution. There are solar panels.
SCHUBLACH: They're on the rooftop.
SIMON: Oh...
SCHUBLACH: Over there, you can...
SIMON: ...Just over there.
SCHUBLACH: Yeah.
SIMON: There are cool window shades on the outside of the apartment that help keep out the sunlight and the heat in summer.
SCHUBLACH: Yes.
SIMON: Do you mind showing us?
(SOUNDBITE OF DOOR SCRAPING OPEN)
RASCOE: This all sounds really nice. But, I mean, he must be paying a lot for this.
SIMON: Well, for a four-bedroom, utilities included, plus the shared space, he pays about $1,700 a month.
SCHUBLACH: Which is not cheap-cheap, but it is definitely affordable.
SIMON: Oh, God. You don't want to know what people are paying in America (laughter).
SCHUBLACH: No, I don't want to.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON: Ayesha, the whole reason we came to Vienna is because this climate-friendly apartment - it's not some fancy private apartment. It's actually subsidized by Vienna's city government. It's something called social housing. It got going a hundred years ago, after World War I. There was a housing crisis, and the city built thousands of apartments. So there's city-built housing, and there's social housing that Schublach lives in. It's city-subsidized housing - housing developers get loans and land from the city. Altogether, there's over 400,000 social housing units around Vienna, and about half the city's residents live in them - about a million people.
RASCOE: That's a lot.
SIMON: It is a lot. And in recent years, city leaders realized that those 400,000-plus apartment units that they own or subsidize - that could help them move off fossil fuels and reach their climate goals.
RASCOE: So how are they doing that?
SIMON: Well, let's start with the city-built housing. With the new city-built housing, it's all mandated to have solar panels. Many have efficient heat pumps. The city is also heating buildings with something called geothermal energy. That involves drilling into the earth to heat homes. And the city is retrofitting old buildings. They're putting in new windows, doors, insulation.
RASCOE: But what about the city-subsidized housing? Like, how do they get that to be climate-friendly?
SIMON: For city-subsidized housing, the city says, you housing developers - you want this land and subsidies? You got to compete for it. There's a point system for how many nice qualities the building design has. If the project has more climate-friendly aspects, the developer gets more points to win.
RASCOE: So that's a lot of motivation for developers to make a climate-friendly design.
SIMON: Right. There's land on the line and money on the line. And this right here - this housing competition - researchers say it's key to a lot of Vienna's innovation in climate-friendly housing. Social housing is popular in Vienna, and people around the world are noticing.
JUNG YOON: I have been absolutely inspired by Vienna's work.
SIMON: This is Jung Yoon.
YOON: I'm the chief of policy for the mayor's office in Chicago.
SIMON: Yoon went to Vienna last April to learn about Vienna's social housing. And there were lots of representatives from other U.S. cities on her trip.
YOON: From Nashville, from Seattle, from Philly.
SIMON: She went to Schublach's place.
YOON: Yes, we went there. It was beautiful.
SIMON: Yoon brought back lessons from Vienna to add to the work Chicago was already doing. This spring, the city of Chicago passed an ordinance that basically will help allow the city to develop and own new apartment buildings. 30% of the apartments will be affordable. And it will have regulations that reduce the energy use. And, like Vienna, Chicago sees housing as a key way to reduce their climate pollution. Yoon says more than two-thirds of Chicago's greenhouse gases come from buildings. We're in a moment where, on the federal level, the government is backtracking on climate action and proposing big cuts to public housing. But on the local level, there already are examples of green social housing popping up, Ayesha. There's a affordable housing building in Seattle with solar panels and energy-efficient air conditioning. There's an affordable housing building in Yonkers, New York. It has really high energy efficiency standards.
SIMON: I spoke to politicians across the country who are supporting efforts to build new apartments that are both affordable and climate-friendly. And, look, Ayesha - there will still be people in the U.S. who want their house in the suburbs. Schublach in Vienna - he grew up in the Austrian countryside, which he says is like America in that way.
SCHUBLACH: I think it's very similar to the American dream of owning a single-family house in the countryside. Yes. And the downside is that this dream, for most people, has become unaffordable. Some say it has become kind of a nightmare.
SIMON: But Schublach says he's found a new dream. In his green social housing, he's found a sense of community. In his apartment building, the oldest inhabitant is almost 80 years old, and the youngest is less than a month old. They're all there for each other.
SCHUBLACH: If somebody needs a banana at 8 p.m. because the kid would not eat anything else, then you get a banana within one minute.
SIMON: And the next time there's a storm or a heat wave - because there will be a next time - Schublach says he will be there for his neighbors, and they'll be there for him. Ayesha, you know, I keep returning to this one thing this climate researcher told me. She told me, in Vienna, a hundred years ago, they probably didn't imagine that now there would be thousands of beautiful, climate-friendly apartments. They started with one building - just one building. That was their North Star.
RASCOE: That's NPR's Julia Simon. To see photos of the people in this story and to find more stories from Climate Solutions Week, go to npr.org/climateweek. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.