There is a shortage of housing, especially in the metropolitan areas, but housing construction has plummeted in the past year. Housing experts do not see any fundamental change for 2023 and 2024 either.
(Photo: IMAGO/Michael Gstettenbauer)
Berlin A third of the planned affordable apartments in Germany will not be built in 2023 and 2024. This was the result of a survey by the central association of the housing industry GdW among its member companies.
“A chain of historically poor building conditions and blatant mistakes by the government are currently causing affordable housing construction to collapse dramatically,” said GdW President Axel Gedaschko on the occasion of the presentation of the survey among socially oriented housing companies. “And that in view of the expected – and necessary – high level of immigration to Germany.” The GdW currently sees rents of up to a maximum of twelve euros per square meter as affordable.
The construction industry also warned on Wednesday of a “drama in residential construction”. The number of building permits has been declining for months, it said. Felix Pakleppa, General Manager of the German construction industry, reported on increasing cancellations of projects that had already been approved. The GdW companies, for example, want to build almost 20,000 fewer apartments instead of the 61,000 apartments originally planned for 2023 and 2024.
The prospects for social housing are similarly poor. More than a fifth of the social housing planned for 2023 and 2024 will not be realized by companies, it is said. Instead of 20,000 new social housing, around 4,200 fewer would be created.
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The housing industry has identified three reasons for this: Unreliable and insufficient funding, increased material costs and higher interest on financing. In addition, a lack of construction and trade capacities, material bottlenecks and increased energy costs have an impact. “The federal government must immediately change and counteract in order to avert a drama for those looking for housing,” Gedaschko demanded.
Energetic refurbishment also breaks down
An equally dramatic situation can also be seen in the planned modernization projects. According to the association, the GdW companies will not implement around a fifth of the measures.
Of the approximately 272,000 residential units originally planned, 53,000 fewer will be renewed. Apartments that get a renovation should also be renovated less expensively.
This applies above all to energy-related refurbishment. Instead of 200,000 apartments, only around 157,000 will be renovated in terms of energy efficiency in 2023 and 2024 – a drop of more than 20 percent, according to the GdW. Not only the housing construction goals, but also the climate goals would become increasingly unattainable.
The task of the government would be to help with a long-term funding concept and to promote affordable housing “as a social issue of our time”, said Gedaschko. Unfortunately, she does the opposite.
After several abrupt funding stops with subsequent significant tightening of the funding conditions, the federal government again tightened the funding requirements at the beginning of 2023 without prior notice, criticized the association president. For example, with the federal government’s so-called QNG sustainability seal, which must be achieved in addition to the E40 energy efficiency standard for funding, the maximum CO2 emissions were tightened by 14 percent almost overnight.
criticism of the government
EH40 means that a building only uses 40 percent of the energy that a legally defined standard house requires. The smaller the key figure, the lower the later energy requirement of the property. Up until the beginning of 2022, EH55 buildings were still being funded. The state seal of quality QNG from the Federal Ministry of Building, in turn, is associated with requirements for the ecological quality of buildings, such as the use of low-emission building materials.
For the whole of Germany, the housing industry expects a slump in completions to around 280,000 apartments for 2022, only 242,000 for 2023 and only 214,000 in 2024. In 2021, 293,393 apartments were completed in Germany. The new federal government had planned to provide 400,000 new apartments every year, 100,000 of them social housing.
Last week, the “social housing” association had already sounded the alarm and called for a special fund of 50 billion euros by 2025 in order to avert the expected “collapse” on the social housing market.
More: Associations are demanding a construction offensive from the federal government due to the record housing shortage