“Just embarrassing”
The federal government only built 42 apartments in 2023
October 7, 2023, 12:03 a.m
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The housing costs for citizens’ benefit recipients will exceed the 20 billion threshold this year. Nevertheless, the federal government only acts as a builder to a very modest extent. The Left calls the low number of completed apartments “just embarrassing.”
Despite a sharp increase in spending on housing benefit in the social budget, the Federal Real Estate Agency (Bima) has only completed 42 federally owned apartments this year. This emerges from a response from the Federal Ministry of Finance to a small query from the left-wing politician Caren Lay, which was submitted to the Editorial Network Germany (RND). Since the “housing offensive” was declared in 2018, Bima has built 174 apartments, it goes on to say. She expects that 200 apartments will be completed by the end of 2023.
“The federal government only built 42 apartments in 9 months. That’s just embarrassing,” criticized Caren Lay, the left-wing parliamentary group’s housing policy spokeswoman. One cannot speak of a “housing construction offensive” when the federal government has only built 174 new apartments in the five years since 2018. “Anyone who organizes construction summits in the Chancellery and talks about building 400,000 apartments every year should set a good example,” she told the RND.
The housing offensive announced in 2018 stipulated, among other things, that the federal government itself would act as a developer and create apartments for its employees. However, apart from announcements, there has been no significant progress so far, said Lay. “The federal government must finally build itself instead of blaming others for the lack of living space and shirking its own responsibility.” As the Finance Ministry’s response also shows, Bima expects construction of around 3,300 apartments to begin by the end of the year, the RND further reported.
Housing costs are rising by two billion euros
According to the Construction-Agrar-Environment Industrial Union (IG BAU), the federal budget would also benefit massively from a larger supply of social housing. Because of the increased rent prices, the job centers’ payments to citizens’ benefit recipients for their accommodation increased sharply. This was the result of calculations by the Pestel Institute on behalf of IG BAU. The experts put the payments this year at over 20 billion euros for the first time. In 2022 it was still 18.2 billion euros.
IG BAU mainly blames rent increases for the increase. This is “an enormous additional burden for the taxpayer. The state is paying heavily for the rent explosion,” union chairman Robert Feiger told the Funke newspapers on Tuesday. The trade unionist estimated that 50 billion euros would be needed for social housing construction by the end of this legislative period.