Own home: It's not just the Greens who have their sights set on the family home

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The excitement was huge, some politicians apparently believed that eco-fascism was just around the corner.

“Fight off the beginnings,” warned the deputy chairman of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group, Ulrich Lange.

Why?

The Greens supposedly wanted to “let the dream of owning a home burst”.

The development policy spokesman for the FDP in the Bundestag, Christoph Hoffmann, told the Greens via Twitter that they were “inhuman, crazy eco-socialists”, followed by the hashtag: “#Botparty”.

The reason for the outrage was an interview that the parliamentary group leader of the Greens in the Bundestag, Anton Hofreiter, had given the “Spiegel”.

The demand for a ban on single-family houses is not even raised there by the Greens.

“Of course the Greens don't want to ban their own four walls,” Hofreiter says when asked.

“By the way, they could look very different,” explains the Green man further, and names “single-family house, row house, apartment building, apartment building”.

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Hofreiter made no secret of his skepticism towards single-family houses.

They consumed “a lot of space, a lot of building materials, a lot of energy”, and they also caused “sprawl and thus even more traffic”.

The debate is inconvenient for the Greens.

In Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg, state elections are due in just under four weeks.

And in the Swabian hit song “Create, create, build a house”, no high-rise or row house, and certainly not a prefabricated building, was meant.

The single-family house is still considered to be the Germans' favorite residential property.

In 2019, there were more than 19.2 million residential buildings in Germany, 15.9 million of which are of the type with one or two apartments.

The number of single-family homes has also grown steadily since 2001.

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But this boom is now causing problems for many cities and municipalities.

In Hamburg-Nord, the Greens and Social Democrats recently decided not to allow the construction of new single-family houses.

Instead, multi-storey buildings are provided in the development plans.

Reason: The area is missing, one wants to condense inner city spaces.

Anyone who wants to build a single-family home there will have to move from Hamburg-Nord to the surrounding area in the future.

This enclosure of the Germans' favorite form of living is not an ideological whimsy of the Greens.

When the Union warns of single-family homes

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Corresponding restrictions can be found in many metropolitan areas, even in smaller cities.

Even politicians from the CDU and CSU often decide against so-called land consumption and in favor of densification in local politics.

In May 2019, for example, the CDU parliamentary group in the mother city of Rhineland-Palatinate, which has a population of 12,000, opposed “planning an area close to the center of our community with single-family houses”.

That is "irresponsible also from a social point of view and wrong from an urban planning point of view".

Instead, the CDU parliamentary group pleaded “for a more balanced mix of apartment buildings with needs-based apartment sizes, possibly with underground garages, and single or two-family houses”.

Therefore, the Green push could make the situation even worse

Affordable housing is scarce in metropolitan areas.

However, since the area is limited, a green district office manager in Hamburg is taking a different route that not everyone likes.

Source: WELT / Eybe Ahlers

Around the Chiemsee in Bavaria, where the CSU holds conservative majorities in the municipalities and cities together with the free voters, it looks no different.

The region is not only very popular with holidaymakers.

For decades, many Munich residents have also moved their residence to the Chiemgau.

Some places, like Bernau am See, have more than doubled the number of houses there in the past few decades.

There are no bans on single-family homes there.

But now almost no building land is approved anymore.

On the one hand, because the CSU wants to protect the farmers there, who have lost more and more land in the past.

On the other hand, to prevent urban sprawl in the region between the lake and the mountains.

The increasing demand for affordable living space stands in the way of "increasingly limited space," says a position paper from the CSU regional association Rimsting.

The small community is located at the north-western end of the Chiemsee, the idyllic view of the water and mountains.

A dream landscape that can hardly save itself from building inquiries.

If all of them were approved, there would soon be nothing left of the landscape.

There is political will in Bavaria to "reduce a further sealing of areas", it says in the CSU paper.

And further: “In the next few years, urban densification and an increased supply of apartments will be the inevitable consequence.” These CSU sentences could also have been from Anton Hofreiter.

In any case, they don't sound like an offensive to build new single-family houses.

"Single-family houses are the dream of many families"

But that does not mean that the single house type is now being phased out everywhere.

The decision on where and how which house types are placed on the green meadows lies with the municipalities.

And they face completely different problems at Chiemsee than in Eichsfeld, Harz or Mecklenburg, for example, where the communities often complain about rural exodus.

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“Detached houses are the dream of many people and families,” says urban development expert Norbert Portz.

He works for the German Association of Towns and Municipalities, an organization that deals with housing issues on a daily basis.

In the meantime, however, Portz sees “a discrepancy between desire and reality” when it comes to single-family homes.

Source: WORLD infographic

This is difficult to implement in many metropolitan areas such as Munich or Hamburg.

“The areas are finite.

Some municipalities therefore decide to no longer designate certain areas for new buildings or to combine the designation with requirements.

In the end, the local authorities have to decide. "

He considers bans to be "completely wrong - but I didn't understand Mr. Hofreiter that way either".

Portz, however, decidedly against “branding the desire for a single-family home as unecological in principle”.

If such a house is supplied with regenerative energies such as a solar roof, is energetically efficient and a garden with orchards lies in front of the door, the ecological balance "certainly looks better than an industrially used field".

Single-family houses are also often barrier-free and can be used as multi-generation houses.

Portz also assumes that the discussion about single-family homes could turn again due to the pandemic.

Home office will remain a new normal state for many people even after the Corona crisis.

"But that means that you need space that single-family houses can offer more than smaller residential units on one floor."

Portz believes the debate about vacancies is at least as important as the discussion about urban sprawl and the building boom.

“The dilapidation of houses in town centers is a big problem, especially in structurally weak cities and communities,” he says.

Encounters, communication and trade should take place in the centers.

"Town centers stand for home, they have to be kept alive".

But in many regions this is becoming less and less successful.

Anyone walking through towns like Goldberg in Mecklenburg or Herzberg am Harz will notice more and more abandoned buildings and shops from year to year.

Portz fears that the negative development will be exacerbated by the corona crisis.

“We estimate 50,000 retail stores to close.

We have to take countermeasures here, also through more living in the centers. "

Just how?

When broadband cables, daycare centers, schools, shopping opportunities, medical care and connections to buses and trains are missing, small communities usually have no chance.

Who wants to move there?

But even when the basic supply is there, municipalities have to be very creative in order to stop the rural exodus.

The German Association of Towns and Municipalities (DStGB) proposes a range of measures to counteract the desertification.

Portz advocates expanding the “Young buy old” program.

This helps young people to buy vacant buildings.

“It would also be sensible to exempt home buyers from real estate transfer tax when purchasing vacant properties in town centers that they want to convert into residential use,” says the urban development expert.

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According to the DStGB, the requirements for monument protection, which sometimes drive up renovations financially, should be handled more flexibly, especially in interior construction.

In the end, it all comes down to the question of how and where Germans want to live - and the most precise, creative answers possible.

At the end of the day, municipal and city councils in Germany still decide on site what their municipalities should look like.

This also and especially applies to the future of single-family homes.