The woman with the gray short haircut is the same age as the house: 71 years.

Her father built the apartment building in Frankfurt's Ostend himself, and she grew up there.

One thing her father had given her and her sister when they inherited the house and rented it out themselves: he wanted happy tenants who didn't keep moving in and out.

The rents are therefore relatively cheap, one square meter of living space costs less than ten euros a month.

Many tenants have been living in the twelve apartments on Luxemburgerallee for a long time.

The oldest tenant has even been there for 25 years.

"The house community works," says the woman.

Rainer Schulz

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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It should stay that way.

The two previous owners have reached an age where they can no longer look after their house as well.

They have been thinking about selling for a few years.

But they want to put the apartment building in “good hands” – and not just any buyer who would upgrade the house and raise the rent so much that the long-term tenants would have to move out.

The two sisters could not imagine that.

"We wanted to get around the buzz of investors," says the former owner.

Keep rent low all the time

A year and a half ago she discovered an article in this newspaper.

It was about the city's plan to set up the cooperative real estate agency Gima to enable socially responsible house purchases.

The city wanted to mediate - between owners and buyers with a sense of responsibility.

The sisters asked the Gima, who put them in touch with a housing association.

She promised to protect residents from price increases and displacement.

A year and a half later, the time has come: the apartment building was sold to the official housing association in mid-April.

The long-established cooperative has around 1,400 apartments in Frankfurt and is committed to keeping rents permanently low.

Board member Martin Neckel reports on tough negotiations with the city, because the apartment building is on a leasehold property.

Because the ground rent is linked to the standard land values, which have meanwhile risen sharply, a sale on socially acceptable terms threatened to fail due to the exorbitant increase in ground rent.

However, a way was found together with the planning and building department: the amount of the leasehold was tied to the rent level.

In return for the obligation to cap rents, the interest rate, which is normally 2.5 percent of the standard land value in Frankfurt, was more than halved.

Construction department head Sylvia Weber (SPD) speaks of a pilot project.

It has been shown that the city urgently needs to adapt its leasehold rules in order to obtain affordable housing.

An interdepartmental working group is to make a proposal by the end of the year.

After the amount of the hereditary lease had been clarified, the property on Luxemburgerallee was sold to the cooperative for slightly less than the market value that the sisters from Haus & Grund had determined.

"Anyone who invests it could have gotten a lot more," says Mike Josef (SPD), head of planning.

But then the tenants would certainly have been squeezed out.

He hopes that the example will set a precedent: "We want to enable fair sales of apartment buildings." Gima board member Robin Mohr thanks the sisters for standing up for their tenants and not taking the easy way: "Frankfurt needs more owners as."