Downstairs a kiosk and a nail salon, upstairs only one of ten apartments has been occupied for years – the house at Occamstrasse 1 is a dreary appearance. A phenomenon that doesn’t fit here at Wedekindplatz in Schwabing, where Occamstrasse and Marktstrasse meet Feilitzschstrasse and where there is always life, during the day and especially in the evening.
But over the years, this house at Occamstrasse 1 has become a symbol of vacant living space – and of how little the city can do about it. Last week, the Munich Administrative Court dealt with the building and a lawsuit brought by the company that owns the property against the city, which partially suffered defeat.
In 2022, Altschwabing Projekt GmbH, behind which the Bogenhausen lawyer Michael Georg Sachs is the managing director and main shareholder, submitted an application for a preliminary ruling to the Local Building Commission (LBK). This is a preliminary stage to the building permit, in which the basic features of a project are checked for their admissibility.
The LBK largely rejected this application. She rejected an extension in the backyard as well as converting the ground floor to a shop and restaurant. The city also considered the large-scale renovation to be inadmissible under monument protection law. Occamstrasse 1 is not a monument itself, but according to the city administration, it is “an important part of the Alt-Schwabing ensemble”. The LBK considered the mansard roof facing the courtyard and the terrace on the second level of the attic to be incompatible with monument protection.
However, the court declared the planned extension and conversion of the ground floor to be permissible. During an on-site visit, it was found that the building depths in the neighborhood were similar to those at Occamstrasse 1 with an extension, explained the presiding judge Uwe Schöffel in the oral hearing. And in view of the numerous pubs in the immediate area, the LBK must also allow catering at this location. In its ruling, the court obliged the city to adjust the preliminary decision accordingly.
However, the decisive factor for the admissibility of the project will be “the protection of monuments,” emphasized Judge Schöffel. However, the plaintiff’s lawyer withdrew this aspect shortly before the hearing. This will probably be dealt with again at another time, said Schöffel. It remained unclear what was the reason why the plaintiff did not want the monument issue clarified by the court this time. His lawyer did not want to comment in the hallway of the court, and his client Sachs left a request unanswered.
Altschwabing Projekt GmbH took over the house in 2018 from two people who had inherited the building. The purchase price at the time was nine million euros. The land value of the property, which the city regularly collects, has increased significantly since then: at the end of 2018, the year of the sale, it was 16,000 euros per square meter (this includes a certain amount of possible development), and three years later it was the value is already 19,500 euros – an increase of almost 22 percent. It remains to be seen whether the real estate crisis that has arisen since then will have a negative impact on the land value for this property. The city wants to make the new values public in the summer.
It is now unclear what will happen next with the building. In 2020, in response to a request from the Die Linke/The Party faction on Occamstrasse 1, the social affairs department announced that it wanted to take action against the house owner using the means of misappropriation law. However, in response to a current inquiry from the SZ, the department stated that such an approach was currently not possible due to the ongoing court proceedings.
However, as things stand, renovation, conversion and then a new residential use of the house are not foreseeable. And the managing director of the owner company left the question of whether he would perhaps rent out the empty apartments again, at least temporarily, unanswered. After all, he recently said that Evening Newsthat he currently has no intention of “pushing out” the last remaining tenant.