Christian Bernreiter fights against the void. He’s the Bavarian Minister for Housing and Building, and now he’s had a leaflet printed. In it he writes: “Housing is the social issue of our time.” He addresses his words to those responsible in Bavarian municipalities with a tight housing market. Please check whether they want to issue a misappropriation statute to take action against the unauthorized use of apartments, be it as an office or holiday home. And an empty apartment is also a misappropriation. “Valuable living space,” writes CSU member Bernreiter, “must not be left empty for no reason.” Who would want to contradict him there, especially in Munich?
Munich? Wasn’t there something? Aren’t there empty apartments in a conspicuously wooded district? No, there are whole houses, in Hartmannshofen, 29 in number, they are on very large lots. You can see how important Bernreiter’s initiative is.
The ministerial leaflet, along with a 28-page “work aid” for the fight against misappropriation, could be received by the city administration as a motivational boost. Munich has had a corresponding statute for a long time, and in the social department they have a misappropriation procedure underway – against the Free State. Because the empty houses in Hartmannshofen belong to the state-owned real estate agency Freistaat Bayern, and that falls under Bernreiter’s responsibility. Does the minister want to encourage the city’s vacancy investigators with his leaflet when he writes: “Let’s work together to ensure that living space remains available and affordable for our citizens”?
It can happen that government real estate is empty
If you ask Bernreiter’s ministry how the state vacancies fit in with the state anti-vacancy initiative, they say what has been said for a long time: “The Free State of Bavaria is concerned with creating new living space and preserving existing ones.” Of course, that also applies to government real estate – just that it can happen that something is “temporarily” vacant. An overall concept had been designed for the properties in Hartmannshofen, but the city didn’t like it because they wanted to preserve the garden city character. That is why the Free State is now working on an “adapted strategy”. But – three of the 29 houses are already being offered for sale.
Is that vacancy worth sanctioning? “We check,” it says, also for some time, from the social department. During the examination process, the examiners could read the ministerial “working aid”, under point 2.4: There is talk of living space that is “objectively” no longer usable due to defects. That should apply to some Hartmannshofen houses. However, if the owner “reproachably caused these defects” and they could be eliminated “with reasonable effort”, then sanctions can be imposed.
For many years, the free state real estate managers have known when the leased properties in Hartmannshofen revert to the state. Still, they let some houses come down. And apparently the deficiencies could be eliminated, otherwise the ministry would not have checked months ago whether refugees could be accommodated there temporarily.
Housing is not only a social issue, but also a political one. The empty houses in Hartmannshofen are about the wealth and inability of the Free State. In its press release on the new leaflet, the housing ministry probably unintentionally gives a political answer to cases in which “urgently needed living space” is misused: “For Bavaria’s building minister Christian Bernreiter, this is not acceptable.”