The Lord Mayor of Hof, Eva Döhla, has just personally experienced the consequences of climate change. Her city was also affected by the flood last week. Businesses and apartments were flooded, cars swam in underground garages. There was property damage of ten million euros. “The clean-up work will take weeks and months,” said Döhla, fortunately no people were harmed.
Big politics decide on many questions of sustainability: EU, federal government, states. But how does it get there where people live, in the cities and municipalities? And what can they do themselves to make people’s lives more sustainable, in terms of traffic or living? Two Lord Mayors and one Lord Mayoress discussed this at the SZ Summit: Dieter Reiter (Munich, 1.5 million inhabitants), Ulf K Merger (Kiel, 247,000 inhabitants), who is also Vice President of the German Association of Cities, and Eva Döhla (Hof, 46 000 inhabitants).
They represent a large, medium-sized and small municipality, and it turned out that they have a common problem: They would like to make their environment more sustainable, but often they are not allowed to make a decision.
“If I declare something to be a major political goal, I have to back it up with funds.”
Take traffic as an example: “Why am I not allowed to decide how high my parking fees are?” Asked Munich’s mayor rider. The federal government poses problems of all kinds to the municipalities, but when it comes to finances, they have little to report. The federal government is providing two billion euros for the promotion of local public transport – a drop in the hot asphalt when you consider that Munich alone will have to spend 42 billion euros on this over the next few years. “If I declare something to be a major political goal, I have to back it up with funds,” said Reiter.
The mayor does not see himself well supported by the state either: “I am unhappy that the Free State has neglected the S-Bahn for decades.” Their unreliability means that many commuters drive to Munich by car and clog the streets. It is now a matter of jointly replacing the vulnerable signal box at the Ostbahnhof, “and not until 2030, but soon”.
Today, Kiel is suffering from a mistake that city politicians made 40 years ago: They abolished the tram because they believed that it was no longer needed. “It is incredibly difficult to make amends for this mistake,” said OB Fighter. The use of public after-hours traffic in Kiel is “a terrible ten percent”. Now a new light rail is planned, for which you need 90 percent funding from the federal and state governments. Planning and construction would take a long time, and it will certainly not be finished before 2030. And then everything depends on the will of the citizens: The Wiesbaden and Aachen, for example, spoke out in a referendum against a light rail.
Fighters complained that higher-ranking authorities “have already reversed one or the other cycle path”. You have to trust the municipalities more and shouldn’t be allowed to control them. One topic that she is also currently concerned with is speed restrictions. Eight cities in Germany want to introduce Tempo 30 nationwide. Reiter thinks this is an exaggeration: “Tempo 30 is already 90 percent of the streets in Munich, you don’t have to do it everywhere for ideological reasons.”
Take housing as an example: “The greatest challenge for us is that the nurses or police officers who maintain public life can stay in the cities,” said Kämper. There have been “partially perverse increases” in booming municipalities. Fighter, who also represents the German Association of Cities, announced drastic steps: “We will still implement regulations that were previously unimaginable.” One possibility is to limit rent increases to the level of inflation. Kämper also finds the returns for investors in residential construction too high: “We could at least skim some of it and invest it in social housing.”
For Munich’s OB rider, the basic prices are “the root of the problem”. He is committed to implementing a proposal that still comes from the late Mayor Hans-Jochen Vogel: to limit the gain from real estate without performance and to make it available to the general public. In Munich, land prices rose by 39,000 percent within 55 years. However, only the federal government can implement this.
In one point there was a difference between the three mayors. “With us, the building land is still affordable, the buses are empty and parking spaces are available,” said Eva Döhla. A city like Hof could therefore benefit from the development of the past few years, which made metropolitan areas more expensive and less attractive. Döhla believes that the corona pandemic and the trend towards home offices are also contributing to this. She knows a young family that has just moved in. “The father works in the financial sector in Frankfurt and he can work great from the farm”.