In the traffic light coalition agreement, a large number of new apartments were promised each year – nothing is left of that now.
► Construction Minister Klara Geywitz (46, SPD) had big plans by 2025, 400,000 new apartments should be built every year. That’s what it said in the coalition agreement between the SPD, FDP and Greens – can the mega election promise be kept at all?
puff cake! Yesterday, Geywitz admitted that this goal would not be reached until 2024 at the earliest.
The construction industry had warned Geywitz again and again: The 400,000 apartments cannot be created at the moment. In fact, an estimated 250,000 homes were completed last year.
Stefan Müller (47), parliamentary director of the CSU in the Bundestag, says to BILD: “The Minister of Construction is the last person to notice that her policy has failed. In the past few months, she should have taken countermeasures here. The traffic light construction policy is a complete failure.”
► Geywitz Excuses for the construction botch: the Russian war in Ukraine, the increased interest rates and the supply chain problems.
So is the problem only the external circumstances?
The chairwoman of the Bundestag building committee Sandra Weeser (53, FDP) contradicts: “The fact that the war of aggression on Ukraine is the source of all problems is only half the truth. Many hurdles have been built up in Germany over many years, but unfortunately we are feeling them at a high price at the moment.”
What is meant are the many bureaucratic hurdles for builders. Weeser demands: “Germany must become a home-ownership country again!” To do this, the ancillary construction costs and the real estate transfer tax must also decrease.
► Tim-Oliver Müller, Managing Director of the Main Association of the German Construction Industry, would also like less bureaucracy that the federal states have so many building regulations of their own, annoys him, he demands more courage from the federal states: “So that we don’t have 16 regulations for balcony parapets have more – and get into standardized building that quickly.”
According to Müller, there are also problems in the federal government: “We need two things to give the housing market a boost: reliable new construction funding of 15 billion euros a year. We were promised this funding backdrop, so far we haven’t seen anything.”
There is a crisis in the housing market
The spokesman for construction of the Union faction, Jan-Marco Luczak (47), warns: “The decline in housing construction is dramatic, we are running into a real crisis on the housing market with far-reaching consequences.”
▶︎ Another problem, according to Luczak, is the increasingly stringent energy standards, which are driving up construction costs. In fact, according to the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), construction prices for residential buildings rose by 16.9 percent in November 2022 compared to November 2021.
“These are home-made mistakes, so the construction minister can’t hide behind the Ukraine war alone,” says Luczak.