At the turn of the twenty-first century, when public authorities all over Europe increasingly retreated from their responsibility for housing, Vienna refrained from large-scale privatizations. Upholding the system of state-subsidized housing, the Austrian capital supported new architecture as a means to regenerate the inner city and to promote innovative social policy. This was based on original design that took from a variety of mostly modernist precedents. Examples for new residences that follow this strategy include the Car-free Model Estate (1996-99, Cornelia Schindler/Rudolf Szedenik), the women-led scheme Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky-Hof (1993-97, Liselotte Peretti, Gisela Podreka, Elsa Prochazka, Franziska Ullmann), and the residences on the former railway station Nordbahnhof (1992-2015, master plan by Boris Podrecca and Heinz Tesar, buildings by various architects). This article will present Vienna’s turn-of-the-twenty-first-century housing as a successful strategy to provide affordable residences that respond to current needs, and at the same time a way to harness innovative architecture for social policy goals. The Vienna case also suggests that the “neoliberal turn” in housing provision was a matter of political choice rather than economic necessity.