The municipality of Eppertshausen has big plans for the property at Schulstraße 5 – in the short and medium term.
© Door
In two contexts, the Eppertshausen community representatives dedicated their meeting on Tuesday evening to a house on Schulstrasse.
Eppertshausen – The property at house number 5, located opposite the Church of St. Sebastian, is to be prepared in the short term to accommodate new refugees. In the medium term, the municipality can now imagine demolishing the building and replacing it with a new property with social housing.
The apartment building is over 100 years old, in need of renovation and offers five apartments. Two of them are currently occupied; three more in sizes of 70, 77 and 82 square meters of living space are empty. The municipality assumes that the situation will deteriorate with the influx of further refugees in such a way that in the foreseeable future they will also have to use these three apartments to house these people.
There are currently 165 people seeking protection living in Eppertshausen, 90 of whom are Ukrainians and 75 people in the asylum area. According to a recent statement by Christel Sprößler (SPD), head of the social affairs department of the Darmstadt-Dieburg district, 50 new people are currently arriving in the district every week, currently more and more from the Ukraine.
Since those people in particular who do not come from Ukraine, but from Syria, Afghanistan and the Kurdish part of Turkey, for example, often cannot find a place to stay on the private housing market in a decentralized manner, the municipality of Eppertshausen provides communal accommodation on Jahnstraße. However, it is fully booked. For this reason, the district and the municipality also looked at the municipal properties at Hauptstraße 93 and Schulstraße 5 and checked whether they could be made available as refugee accommodation in the near future.
With a look at Hauptstrasse 93, it came out that due to the very poor condition, the property could not be repaired in the short term and in the medium term only at great expense. The situation at Schulstraße 5 is different: Here you can upgrade the electrics, floors, sanitary facilities and heating relatively quickly and thus accommodate at least 14 people in need of protection. This would initially cost the community 25,000 euros, which would be amortized within six months if the apartments were rented to the district. The community representatives approved this unanimously.
Mayor Carsten Helfmann (CDU) had previously reported on the community board’s intention to build a new building with social housing at Schulstrasse 5. The municipality has already done this on Mozartstrasse in the recent past, on its own and entirely at its own expense (supported only by an interest-free loan from the state, which financed part of the total amount), thereby ensuring more affordable living space in the village. The community board has now sent a preliminary building inquiry to the district building authority to find out whether Schulstraße 5 could be demolished and social housing created there. The answer is still pending. The medium-term plan for this spot initially has no effect on the plan to temporarily accommodate refugees there again before a possible demolition.