They are supposed to build more apartments than planned and that even more climate-friendly than before, for this the municipal housing associations GWG and Gewofag will need substantial financial injections in the coming years: City building councilor Elisabeth Merk puts the need by 2030 at 725.8 million euros, as from a resolution proposal for the planning committee emerges. The committee meeting that was canceled in the city council last week due to corona infections will be rescheduled this Tuesday via video conference. The topics can be discussed, but no voting can take place for legal reasons. This must be made up for in a regular city council meeting.
The template says that with the additional money, the two companies could build a total of 14,840 new apartments in the ten years from 2021 to 2030, 9531 of them in the EH40 energy standard, which the green-red town hall coalition wants to make the norm. If you add in a special program of 250 million euros that has already been agreed and which will run until 2025, this results in a total of almost one billion euros for this decade, which the city council GWG and Gewofag should also make available.
However, that should not be enough to meet the new requirements of the parliamentary groups of the Greens / Pink List and SPD / Volt. As the city hall coalition made public with a city council proposal at the beginning of October, it expects 2000 new urban apartments per year instead of the previous target of 1500 apartments, which GWG and Gewofag would just achieve according to current calculations with the planned special programs. The new specification could not be taken into account in the current submission, it is “dealt with elsewhere”, writes City Building Councilor Elisabeth Merk.
GWG and Gewofag are not allowed to increase rents until the end of 2024
She names several reasons why GWG and Gewofag could only achieve their previous new construction goals with additional funds. The “rent stop” decided by the city council stipulates that there may be no rent increases until the end of July 2024. Overall, the municipal companies waived “revenue potentials of around 100 million euros” for five years, writes Merk.
In addition, there would be enormous increases in construction costs: In August 2021, they were 11.8 percent above the level of the previous year. The consequences of the corona pandemic also cost money because rents were deferred and construction work was delayed due to closed borders. In addition, the planned annual surpluses of between ten and 30 million euros flowed completely into the new construction activities. All in all, Gewofag is going “with the current economic planning to the limits of its economic efficiency”, the GWG is “already taking on a disproportionately large amount of outside capital for its new buildings”.
According to Merk’s calculations, GWG and Gewofag need 339 million euros in order to secure the new construction targets initially until 2025 and then stabilize them until 2030, but this is calculated using the previous energy standards. In the future, your new buildings should meet the passive house standard EF40, which makes building technology significantly more expensive. The additional costs for this are 386 million euros up to 2030 – which adds up to 725 million euros.
“If we want to achieve our political goals, it costs something,” says the SPD
These are numbers that don’t shock Christian Müller, leader of the SPD / Volt parliamentary group, they were expected, he says: “But if we want to achieve our political goals, it costs something.” He also points out that the additional expenditure could at least partially be compensated for by federal and state subsidies, “the coalition agreement from Berlin gives reason to hope”. Müller’s parliamentary group has already launched an annual 100 million euro program to create more affordable living space for trainees and senior citizens. This will be intertwined with the additional expenses now planned for GWG and Gewofag, explains Müller.
In the committee meeting, the planning department also brings another pot of money on the way, from which GWG and Gewofag in particular, but also other builders, would benefit: a subsidy program “Wooden housing in Munich”, in which a total of 60 Million euros are available.