In 2018, the Süddeutsche Zeitung aptly headlined an op-ed on the subject of the housing shortage “The real problem of the nation is housing shortage”. A challenge in which linguistic superlatives are only appropriate. In the same year, Horst Seehofer, then Federal Minister of Building, after a “Housing Summit” which was supposedly about big things instead of spills, proudly proclaimedthat they want to spend an additional 5 billion euros on social housing by 2021:
“As far as I know, it is the greatest effort that has ever been made in politics to create more affordable housing in Germany.”
In February 2021, the Federal Ministry of Building then gave a positive assessment of the implementation, but you can look in the brochure “The housing offensive and its implementation status” the number of newly built social housing in vain. To the Federal association GdW According to the housing industry, it fell from around 27,000 in 2018 to around 22,000 in 2021. Interestingly, this number cannot be found at the Federal Statistical Office or on the website of the Federal Ministry of Building. Why not?
The new federal government has put a little more money into its hands, 14.5 billion euros by 2026. After all, that is the magnitude of what the federal government has previously spent on corona citizen tests. These are then certainly “very great efforts”. Compared to the hundreds of billions of euros for overcoming the financial crisis after 2007, the fight against Corona or now for armaments and price caps on the energy market, one could also speak of peanuts, a term that the spokesman for Deutsche Bank once introduced into the financial policy vocabulary . In any case, the comparison shows that affordable housing has had just as little political top priority status as care or the energy transition. When it comes to social housing, it’s not about “boom” and “double boom”, but only, to put it in Seehofer’s words, “the greatest effort that has ever (…) been made to create more affordable housing in Germany “.
Today the “Alliance for Affordable Housing”, so to speak the remake of the Seehofer housing summit, will present proposals for this legislative period. Will there be any good ideas for making better use of existing living space, for example when older people move from apartments that are too large to age-appropriate forms of housing, cross-generational housing or the development of land prices in metropolitan areas? Some things might work without a bang, but with brains.