Shortly before the start of the winter semester, many students are still looking for a place to stay – with rents continuing to rise. The latest “Student Housing Report” shows how dramatic the situation is in some cities.
Students in Berlin now pay 500 to 1000 euros for a room, says Leah from the “Referent*innenRat”. This is the name of the AStA, the general student committee at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She herself left Baden-Württemberg to study in the capital in 2021, looked for an affordable place to stay there for six months – and found nothing.
She then moved to Brandenburg and commuted to the university, over an hour each way. “Back then it was possible because of Covid,” says Leah. “That probably wouldn’t work today.” But she still knows people who live in Brandenburg because they can’t find anything in Berlin.
The situation is really dramatic, says Matthias Anbuhl, chairman of the German Student Union. A quick survey of eleven of 57 student unions at the end of September showed that 35,000 students are on the waiting lists for a place in a dormitory at these eleven alone.
Residence hall space only for every tenth student
Across Germany, the student unions offer 196,000 dormitory places – at an average rent of 279 euros. “This is actually the cheapest form of living apart from the parents’ house,” says Anbuhl. But currently there is only an offer available for almost ten percent of students.
Things are not looking any better on the private housing market. The situation has continued to deteriorate, according to a new investigation. The rental prices for student apartments rose again by 6.2 percent compared to the previous year – this is the result “Student Housing Report 2023” by the financial service provider MLP in collaboration with the German Economic Institute (DIW), which was presented today in Cologne.
The report examined 38 university locations nationwide. Students are now competing with all those who can no longer afford a condominium or home due to increased interest rates. That makes the situation even more difficult. And it’s not just the basic rents that are rising, but also the additional costs – keyword: energy crisis.
Frankfurt am Main and Munich are therefore among the most expensive cities for students this year. A student model apartment of 30 square meters costs almost 700 euros to rent, and a shared room costs almost 500 euros. Students could still live relatively cheaply in Chemnitz or Magdeburg – in the example calculation of the report for around 300 euros in Chemnitz and 240 to 250 euros rent in Magdeburg. The current BAfög housing supplement of a maximum of 360 euros is just enough for these two university towns.
Unwearable Housing conditions out of pure necessity
In Berlin, the housing situation for students is frightening, says student Leah. They often lived in living situations that they didn’t actually want, just because they had no other option: with older people, for example, where they had to do the housework, in a student union even though this lifestyle didn’t suit them, as queer people in a queer-hostile shared apartment . And some shared apartment advertisements link the accommodation offer with sexual innuendos and expectations.
It is even more difficult for foreign students. She knows fellow students from India who were studying computer science in Berlin, “who are sold the most expensive, run-down shared apartments, with three bunk beds in one room for 400 euros.”
Worry about him Science location
Leah demands that the federal and state governments need to create affordable housing more quickly. The AStA also supports the proposal to expropriate private housing companies and real estate groups.
The DIW, which co-publishes the “Student Housing Report,” is calling for tax incentives for investors to designate more building land and faster building permit procedures.
The German Student Union criticizes significant failures over the past 15 years: The number of state-funded study places has increased by over 50 percent during this time, but the number of state-funded dormitory places has only increased by seven percent. Where the housing situation is tight, this could ultimately endanger the science location, says CEO Anbuhl, because very good, very talented people can no longer afford to study there.
What the federal government is doing
In April of this year, the federal government actually launched the 500 million euro “Young Living” program to create new dormitory places for students and trainees. The federal states responsible for implementation planned to create 5,700 new places, the Federal Ministry of Construction announced upon request tagesschau.de with.
The program is to be continued for the next two years and provided with 1.5 billion euros. In addition, over 18 billion euros would be made available to the federal states for social housing. Students could also live in such apartments. This will probably no longer help those who are starting their studies now and are still looking for accommodation.