> That isn't true. There are a finite number of living people and if you just kept building housing in every major city, there would be enough for everyone who wants to live there.

That's sort of of neither here nor there. Sure, it's probably true, but try explaining that to anyone who hates bourgeois democracy. "If only we let the greedy property developers have it their way."

But the point that I'm trying to get across here with no small amount of irony (that I hope is fairly obvious), is that all the benefits of living in a communist dictatorship come from the dictatorship, not from the communism. Collectivized agriculture, state industries, socialized housings - all those things are worse than useless. What provided safety, stability and a guaranteed standard of life was the semi-serfdom imposed by the state.

> By implication you would also have an inability to import labor. And then if you don't e.g. have a local medical school, you don't have local doctors. If you have the local environment to sustain a major industry and a local population that could do 90% of the jobs, but the other 10% are specialists who would have to be paid to relocate then it can't open up there at all and you lose the other 90% of the jobs too.

The Soviet system did allow for movement. When a factory was opened and had to be staffed, permits were issued for the necessary people. In fact that was the only significant way for people from rural areas to be allowed the privilege to move to a city. Similarly, the problem with doctors was dealt with rather elegantly - every graduate of a medical school was assigned a specific town or village and was forced to live and practice there for decades.

The Soviet Union didn't abolish the movement of people. In fact, in the 1940s it was probably something of a champion in terms of internal migration. It's the freedom of movement that was abolished.

The city of Vienna has a fairly unique history. It used to be the capital of a massive empire that's now gone, and thus suffered a period of fairly prolonged decline.

It's population declined from 2.4 million in 1914[1] to 1.5 million in the 1980s[2]. The only reason why it's currently considered even close to a world-class city is that after the fall of the Berlin wall it was the natural financial hub for oligarchic capital.

I think we can all agree not many great and global cities have tons of free housing emptied by a prolonged period of decline. And that we can't really evaluate if the city is solving the economic problem well or badly, as right now it's simply less acute for historical reasons that have nothing to do with it's housing policy.

[1] https://ww1.habsburger.net/en/chapters/growing-city-vienna-e... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20107/vien...