“10 more years of housing shortage”
The real estate industry is preparing for more difficult years
01/22/2023, 08:10 am
400,000 new homes per year is the declared goal of the federal government. But the goal is currently a long way off. High rents are already pushing poorer people out of the city centres. And if the bleak prognosis for the real estate industry is correct, it will continue to be so for a number of years.
The Federal Association of German Housing and Real Estate Companies (GdW) has warned of an ongoing crisis in the housing market. “It is not possible to simply build 400,000 new apartments per year from scratch. The housing shortage will therefore continue for at least ten years,” said GdW President Axel Gedaschko “Bild am Sonntag”.
The federal government is doing too little to achieve its own housing goal. Gedaschko called on the federal, state and local governments to take tough countermeasures. The federal states and municipalities should make all plots of land available that can be built on, and the federal government should support construction with grants and low-interest loans.
According to GdW forecasts, the federal government clearly missed its target of 400,000 apartments last year, and the number of apartment permits has also been declining for months. In a study by the Pestel Institute presented last week, the housing deficit in Germany was estimated at 700,000 apartments.
FDP calls for “construction booster”
Since then, the warnings from the construction industry have increased. “The distribution of the scarce living space will lead to further displacement of poor people from the cities and threatens to become a social dynamite,” explained Harald Schaum, vice-chairman of the industrial trade union Bauen-Agrar-Umwelt, to the newspaper. Almost eleven percent of households in Germany already have to spend more than 40 percent of their income on housing. The FDP has already called for a “construction booster” for 2023. “The concepts have long been on the table,” said Daniel Föst, the party’s housing policy spokesman. The tenants’ association, on the other hand, calls for a reform of social housing.
The vast majority of Germans also expect more effort from the federal government in housing policy. According to a survey by the opinion research institute INSA, 80 percent believe that the government is doing too little to create more living space. Every second tenant (48 percent) considers his rent to be too high, every seventh (14 percent) states that he was unable to pay his rent on time last year.