Despite higher prices and a gloomy economic outlook, the federal government is sticking to its goal of building 400,000 new homes in Germany every year.

On Wednesday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Federal Building Minister Klara Geywitz (both SPD) presented a results paper that an alliance of federal and state governments as well as housing and building associations has been working on since April.

On more than 60 pages, it lists projects that are intended to increase the speed of house construction.

Geywitz spoke of 187 specifically attributable and dated measures that must be initiated and implemented by everyone involved.

Julia Loehr

Business correspondent in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

However, most of the individual points are not new.

Serial and modular construction, for example, will play an important role, in which a building type with slight modifications is built in several locations or prefabricated components are used.

This should reduce costs.

More staff at the building authorities should speed up building permits, as should the digitization of construction files.

The package of measures also states that greater attention should be paid to climate and resource protection along the construction process.

Scholz tries to be optimistic

In the coalition agreement, the traffic light coalition had set itself the goal of building 400,000 new apartments per year, 100,000 of them social housing.

Recently, however, the number of completions in Germany has been declining again and was less than 300,000 a year.

In their report, members of the alliance call the government's goal "ambitious".

Scholz tried to be optimistic: "I think that will work," he said.

Because projects are being canceled elsewhere, construction companies now have more capacity for social housing.

"It's getting better every year." Geywitz also emphasized that it was important to stick to the goals.

The demand is still great, the implementation is problematic.

The general association of the German housing industry GdW – itself a member of the alliance – expressed more skepticism than the two politicians.

"The constructive measures must not hide the fact that conflicting processes within the federal government and some projects in the alliance's package of measures will make the goal of 400,000 new apartments per year, 100,000 of them social housing, unattainable for the foreseeable future," said association president Axel Gedaschko.

He criticized the "one-sided focus on ever higher and more expensive energy efficiency standards".

The tenants' association and the owners' association Haus & Grund also reacted sceptically.

The decision by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology to allocate only one billion euros a year in federal funding for efficient buildings for new builds triggered a great deal of criticism among housing construction companies.

The Ifo Institute reported on Tuesday that 16.7 percent of construction companies are now reporting the cancellation of housing projects.

In the previous month it was 11.6 percent.