Greenpeace criticizes:

230,000 apartments are empty in Austria

There are 230,000 empty apartments in Austria, while at the same time around 60,000 new apartments are being built every year. This is according to calculations by the environmental protection organization Greenpeace. It is therefore calling for a vacancy tax to prevent further soil sealing.

One example of this is France, where vacancy rates have been reduced by 13 percent since the introduction of the levy in 1999, according to Greenpeace. It also points out that 11.5 percent of all apartments in Austria are registered as secondary residences. The highest rates of secondary residences are found in Burgenland, Lower Austria and Salzburg.

In any case, the population is growing much more slowly than the newly built living space. "While this grew by 6.3 percent in the period from 2011 to 2021, living space has almost doubled in the same period," says Greenpeace.

Average vacancy rate of 4.7 percent
The average vacancy rate is 4.7 percent. Carinthia (5.7 percent), Tyrol (5.6 percent) and Salzburg (5.2 percent) have the highest rates, with Vienna at the other end at 3.4 percent and Vorarlberg at 3.9 percent.

"If vacant apartments and sporadically used second homes were reactivated, we could save up to 4170 hectares of land for new buildings - that's roughly the total amount of land Austria uses in a year," Greenpeace expert Melanie Ebner calculated in a press release on Monday.