Build, build, build - that is the motto to fight the housing shortage.
But this is not that easy.
There is a lack of building land.
New building areas on previous arable land or meadows often meet with great resistance from the population.
And so the municipalities are targeting other areas on which a few apartments could be built: for example, unused wasteland within the cities or on the outskirts.
And newly developed properties that are already building land but are still not being built on.
Dyrk Scherff
Editor in the "Money & More" section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
Follow I follow
There are not so few at all.
And so the pressure to build on these areas increases.
The municipalities cannot do that themselves, however, they do not own the land.
The owners, on the other hand, are not always interested in building it.
Those who mean it with them claim that they only own the land in order to speculate on increases in value and not to use them.
This is quite lucrative in large cities with rapidly rising land prices.
Therefore, the thumbscrews should now be tightened.
The laws were tightened
The new building land mobilization law, which has been in force for a few weeks, is intended to be a means of achieving this. Although it is best known to the public through the dispute over a ban on converting rental houses into condominiums, it also includes a few leverage to force landowners to build. What are they threatened with? And what ways are there to evade coercion?
First of all, it must be made clear that the building code has long given municipalities the right to issue building bids to owners of land that is ready for construction. But so far hardly any municipality has used it. Because the effort is great. In each case, it must be checked individually whether any exceptions make a bid inadmissible. Because the building must, for example, be “economically justifiable” for the owner, that is to say simply, he must have enough money left over for it. This is not always the case, especially with the currently sharp rise in building prices. And if an owner who could build refuses, he can be expropriated, but the hurdles are high and also require extensive work. There are hardly any resources for this in the building authorities. You are already overloaded by examining the many building applications.Many building bids also failed because of lawsuits brought by the owners in administrative courts.
Municipalities sell land with building obligations
Nevertheless something is moving.
The municipalities are increasingly making properties that they sell themselves subject to the condition that buyers must build on them within four or five years.
Otherwise contractual penalties will be due and the property may be returned to the municipality.
But that rarely happens.
Firstly, because this is a huge effort, and secondly, because the municipalities do not have the money for the buyback.
Boris Palmer, the mayor of Tübingen, is trying something different.
He simply wrote to 240 owners of undeveloped land in the city and asked for development.
That brought him plus points in public, but how many new buildings will actually be built remains to be seen.
Because Tübingen also faces the same hurdles as the other municipalities.
They are also not easy to overcome because most of the properties do not remain undeveloped because of their owners' lavish speculation. Indeed, it is sometimes the lack of money. First of all, the family buys the property because it was just available. However, the necessary equity is still missing for the home, which the bank still has to raise despite a loan. And that can be more than 100,000 euros in the big city. The family first has to keep saving for a few years. The other case is the parents who buy two plots of land but only build one for themselves and reserve the other for the children or even the grandchildren so that they can build in their vicinity when they are of the right age and perhaps have started a family Has. That too can result in wasteland for many years.