The new house-to-house fight: the home sweet home is no longer sacred

Do the Greens want to ban single-family houses? Of course not. But the dispute shows the conflicts, contradictions and abysses behind the green Biedermeier: The world will not be saved harmoniously.

There are two sorts of subjects in our country: those that are causing great excitement. And those in which the excitement about the excitement determines the debate in parallel. When it comes to the German home, there is no stopping it. So what happened this week, except that the British import mutant causes every fifth infection and we are probably not allowed to travel at Easter? (There was not yet an arrangement for hiding eggs.)

Well, the Green politician Anton Hofreiter had made a number of reflections on the German home in "Spiegel". These include: "Single-party houses consume a lot of space, a lot of building materials, a lot of energy, they cause urban sprawl and thus also more traffic." The background to this are plans by a green district manager in Hamburg not to include any new single-family houses in development plans. A few messages and tweets later the story emerged that the Greens – after schnitzel in the canteen, oil heaters, SUVs and everything that is fun – now also want to ban single-family houses.

While the journalistic army of fans – as well as some local politicians who are also struggling with urban sprawl or vacancy – jumped at the poor Hofreiter, Green boss Robert Habeck felt compelled to give a guarantee for the German four walls: "It will pass on single-family houses in Germany" said Habeck, one of the most notable clarifications in this country in a long time.

Excitement about excitement

And he added: "The single-family house is part of the ensemble of housing options in Germany", which almost sounds a bit like Loriot. The Greens put an explanation on their homepage to bring the house blessing out of the imbalance: "The own four walls are important for many people – this includes the single-family house. Tenement houses. " You never would have thought that such sentences would have to be written at all.

There it was again the prohibition party – a steep template for the political Ash Wednesday, for the FDP, CDU and Haus & Grund. The excitement about the excitement spread at the same time: one should leave this prohibition party cliché, please, after all, land consumption and urban sprawl are very real problems. Apart from the fact that many of these new housing estates are also extremely ugly.

As is so often the case, the debate is exaggerated – and yet it has a real core. One could of course assume for a moment that many are extremely irritable in the final spurt of the second lockdown (which is presumably a third lockdown especially for the British mutant) and that some are on the verge of going nuts. The fact that a dispute about home ownership breaks out, while politicians are drumming that please continue to hide in this, is a, well, pandemic irony.

Despite an exaggeration, however, we should record for the record of this election year what some have suppressed: Of course, the will to save the world will not stop at home. He hasn't done that for years. Anyone who builds today must observe regulations that are as thick as the Otto catalog was once. It has to insulate, there are more and more "photovoltaic obligations" and regulations when replacing heating systems. Every bush, even if it has been flattened by excavators, has to be preserved or replaced and rock gardens removed.

"How much living space is enough?"

And mentally, people like Hofreiter are already sitting on the roof and shouting into the chimney that all these wood stoves, which provide cozy warmth in the German affluent Biedermeier, will soon be over. (The pellet heating, which was the last eco-craze ten years ago, is already considered a pollutant sin again – watch out if you get caught in a fine dust filter bubble on social networks.) No, the house is no longer sacred, especially if it stands alone and is too big. It will, like the German auto industry and the German poets look over landscapes, be sacrificed for a higher goal.

So it wasn't meant to be like that, but it wasn't an outlier either. There is a certain way of thinking that does not stop at property, because this is always a climate-eating property. Ultimately, so the will, everyone has to change, everyone has to make sacrifices, and there must be no prohibition of thinking. The new green bourgeoisie has never shed its radical core, there are even party conference resolutions of the Greens from 2019 in which it is calculated how much sand and gravel a house uses.

The pioneers of "Fridays for Future" (FFF) have long since had the square meter size for apartments in their program, which means: Even the old apartment is no longer safe – in which bigotry and stucco thickness are known to be proportional to each other. "How much living space is enough?" FFF raised this question in a study and found an answer: in 1960 every German would have had an average of 19 square meters of living space, now there are 47, so far too much space is heated. "Limiting this increase and ideally reversing it would be a powerful lever to reduce emissions". Ergo, according to FFF: Multi-generation apartments and a "cross-generational exchange of apartments" could stop the increase in living space. Which one could maybe even organize through Airbnb.

Change does not stop at the front door

If something rings in the memory of one or the other during the "allocation of living space", then let it ring, you are correct. Yes, Hofreiter didn't mean it that way, and of course it was rendered distorted. (Which is part of every debate.) But it was only elicited from him what it is about in the medium term, because this is the basic conflict: every breath is, to put it pointedly, in the end also a piece of the end of the world.

If things go well, the rescue is funded by KfW, and if everything doesn't go fast enough, something has to be banned. I don't see bans as the devil's work per se. Along with incentives and regulation, they have always been one of the means in environmental and climate policy. (Hey, I grew up with catalysts and CFCs.) "If necessary, it will have to go through bans," said a high-ranking and highly-traded green in a Berlin restaurant that ironically is said to have the best schnitzel outside of Vienna.

So if you are currently planning to look for the new dream in the country (not the green) because of Corona, home office and such, then do it quickly.

The lesson from the dispute over single-family houses is not that Anton Hofreiter was misunderstood or quoted – especially since he addressed problems worth considering with the imbalance and imbalance on the German real estate market and urban sprawl. The lesson is that the "change" towards the future, which some people in this country want to achieve and also want to force, will not stop at our front door. He also doesn't do it in front of our language, not in front of the factory gates, not in front of our offices, not on the way to work, not in the daycare centers and canteens, not: in front of our prosperity. Everyone is free to ask for something like this – just as everyone is free to get upset about it and reject it.

Horst von Buttlar is editor-in-chief of "Capital". This text first appeared on Capital.de.