Affordable housing: Klara Geywitz has to deliver

It’s a day of her liking. “You can see that Berlin is building,” says Klara Geywitz, who has just spent a good half hour on the construction site of the “Buckower Höfe” in Berlin-Neukölln. A “real role model”, praises the Federal Minister for Building. The quarter, created in the 1970s, is being renovated, modernized, densified and embellished.

In her green leather jacket, the SPD politician stands at the end of the tour in the shell of a future day care center. She is often asked whether affordable housing and climate protection are not contradictory, says Geywitz: “This shows that both are possible.”

Geywitz is Germany’s first female construction minister. For the first time since 1998 there is an independent Ministry of Construction. But the tasks that lie ahead of the 46-year-old social democrat are enormous. Maybe too big. Because a key election promise of the SPD-led government is: 1.6 million new apartments in this legislative period, 400,000 apartments per year, 100,000 of them in social housing. And please do it in a climate-friendly way.