There is a gaping hole in the middle of Düsseldorf.

Where actually around 900 rental and owner-occupied apartments, shops and day-care centers are supposed to grow into the sky is fallow land.

The lively district called Grand Central has only existed on colorful plans for years.

A similar picture in Hamburg.

Beer has not been brewed on the Holsten site in the popular Altona district for a long time.

Nevertheless, old industrial halls are still standing there, and demolition excavators have punched holes in some of them.

The 1,200 apartments, 365 of which are socially funded, which Hamburg so urgently needs, have so far only been promises.

Judith Lembke

Editor in the "Housing" department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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Birgit Ochs

Responsible editor for "Housing" of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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In Offenbach, right on the border with Frankfurt, the residents are waiting for the "future-oriented urban district" that has been promised to them.

Instead, two twenty-storey concrete skeletons have been welcoming arrivals for years - as the city's sad calling card directly on the motorway.

And Stuttgart fears that the prestigious monuments on the Eiermann campus will continue to deteriorate.

5,000 people could live and work on the 20-hectare former IBM site.

But this project is not progressing either.

The list can be expanded to include other prominent locations in large and small cities.

The same picture everywhere: there are full-bodied commitments and big plans, but little or nothing is happening.

Who gets hurt, who wins?

Whether the apartments, offices and day-care centers will be built is more uncertain than ever.

Because the plots belong to the Adler Group, which according to its own estimates is the fourth-largest listed housing group in Europe.

But things are not going well for the rapid climber since the allegations of unclean business have been circulating around the world, which even the auditors at KPMG have not refuted.

The bad news is increasing every day.

Business partners and investors keep their distance.

On the capital market, as in the real estate industry, people are waiting for the big bang.

The question is who will be harmed and who could benefit.

The focus is primarily on the project developer Consus, whom Adler boss Stefan Kirsten described this week as the group's "problem child" because he has massive liquidity problems.

In the affected cities, there are doubts that the cash-strapped society will develop the prominent wasteland at all – and they feel betrayed by Adler.

"Companies like this don't celebrate topping-out ceremonies, but rather profits on the capital market," says Harald Schwenk, spokesman for housing construction for the Greens council group in Düsseldorf.

He says that Adler is basically not about building: "These are actually bankers who sell stories to investors." Düsseldorf is particularly affected, where there are four other projects apart from the 3.8-hectare Grand Central area.

"Almost 5,000 apartments are on fire," says Schwenk.