Vienna has had the luxury of having had relatively little demand for housing for over a century. The population peaked in WWI and still hasn't recovered (it was 2.24m in 1916, 2.00m in 2023).
vienna also had a lot of buildings destroyed in the war which increased the demand. population was as low as 1.5 or 1.6m in the late 80s/early 90s. it grew back to 2m in just a few decades, and it is going to continue to grow, so i'd argue that it has recovered quite well.
Right, that makes a lot of sense because the city absolutely exploded during the preceding decades. But having the population stagnate has certainly made it easier for them to catch up than if the population had kept increasing.
Manhattan's population dropped 25% from its peak in the early 1900s. Pre-war was just a different era, this is more of a function of changing living standards, people live larger, not of contemporary housing dynamics.
