Two policy fields dominate the political debate in central Europe on a regular basis: affordable housing and the careful use of natural resources in times of climate change and growing inequalities. Land is one of these essential resources. Land at suitable prices is regarded a crucial factor for realising affordable housing but is at the same time a scarce resource . The land market is often not able to provide building land suitable for affordable housing , even more so in urban areas with a high pressure on the real estate market. Such undesirable market outcomes are typically countered with land policy instruments. Against this background, our research analyses land policy instruments for the case of Austria that aim (i) to make land available for affordable housing, (ii) to set incentives for urban redevelopment and (iii) to intervene in price formation on the land market. The availability of data to evaluate the effectiveness of such land policy instruments though is poor. Therefore, the research adopts a policy analysis approach to assess existing instruments concerning their intentions and innovative content, their allocative and distributive mechanisms, application limits and legal foothold. While Austria is known for its long-standing and continuous affordable housing policy, the land policy toolbox developed rather hesitantly. Constitutional restrictions regarding interference into private property rights lead to the application of mainly allocative approaches in statutory planning. Due to the role of states in planning legislation and of municipalities in land use planning, land policy interventions take place with a high level of local and regional differentiation. Some of the more recent land policy approaches try to combine land use planning with housing promotion schemes and their price regulation mechanisms. The research points out both (i) the inefficiency in providing land for affordable housing at large scale due to fragmented options for land policy interventions and on the contrary (ii) the flexibility of the existing framework to establish tailor made approaches at municipal level.