![]() The war was unkind to both victors and vanquished, destabilizing democracies and monarchies alike. This coincided with a dramatic leftward shift in Vienna’s politics, but in an unusual form. Universal suffrage followed voting rights, once held by only two per cent of the population, were now granted to all, regardless of income or gender. When Austria and its allies were defeated in the First World War, the Habsburg monarchy collapsed. Here, the development industry wields outsized power over our elections, land speculators are reaping the benefits of our collective city-building efforts, homelessness is on the rise and wage earners are experiencing housing stresses that force them to accept insecure accommodations in crowded dwelling units. While what Vancouver is now experiencing is nowhere near this bad, there are echoes. ![]() About 29,900 of these homeless were children. In 1913, over 461,000 people lived in asylums (homeless shelters by another name), an astonishing quarter of the population. The gravity of this housing crisis and the plight of the people can be measured by the number of the homeless. Evictions were immediate, without cause and without adjudication. One-month leases were common and rents could be raised at any time with no recourse. With public policy so heavily tipped to landlords, renters had no protection. Males of wealth, most of them landlords, were the only residents who could vote they numbered 60,000 of Vienna’s two million residents at the dawn of the First World War. This Vienna was a city run by and for the landlords, wealthy owners of lands that had once been farms but now sprouted apartment buildings. Some workers used their beds in shifts, hiring out sleeping space during the day while the principal tenant was at work - all to pay the usurious rents. Vienna, during the last days of the Habsburgs, demonstrated its wealth in the form of impressive building façades.īut behind the façades was a grimmer reality: workers crowded 10 to a 300-sq.-foot flat. Please enable JavaScript before you proceed. ![]() Your browser either doesn't support JavaScript or you have it turned off. Shubh Patil, Audience Development Analyst, The Tyee If you’re in, click here to start your Tyee Builder membership. This is all in service of putting resources into the hands of our talented, independent journalists and publishing their work for all to read, without locking articles behind a paywall. I spend all of my time finding the best possible ways to ask our readers this: If you find value in what The Tyee publishes, if you want us to be able to do it today and long into the future, will you consider signing up to be a Tyee Builder? You can give one-time, monthly, or annually at a level that works for you, and you can cancel any time. And even to maintain our membership levels, we must continually sign up new supporters as a small number of our recurring supporters’ payments lapse each month. Keeping up with our membership goals means the difference between us growing our newsroom or not. These readers, a few thousand of them, are the only reason why we can publish multiple original stories per day, and pour resources into investigative reporting, which is expensive and very difficult to fund on a local scale. Right now, the percentage of readers who choose to do so hovers between 1 to 2 percent. Our business model relies on a certain number of readers agreeing to financially support our editorial budget. You see, The Tyee is a non-profit, reader-supported publication. I don’t write or edit articles, but I play a key role in making sure The Tyee can do its work. If you’re a regular reader of The Tyee, you probably haven’t come across my name before. The Tyee works because of reader support.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |