Munich: New construction area on Rappenweg – Munich

In the east of Kirchtrudering the city is actually over – on the right a corn field that covers the train tracks towards Haar and the Wasserburger Landstraße, on the left a corn field, behind which the trade fair city of Riem can be guessed. But then the dead-straight Rappenweg leads to a settlement: “Munich’s eyesore and an ecological time bomb” stretches across a filled gravel pit, as Mayor Dieter Reiter just said in the city council’s planning committee.

That should change. Most of the corrugated iron shacks and containers in this illegal commercial area full of small car companies have now been cleared, many areas have been leveled and site fences have been erected. A new quarter with apartments and businesses is to be built there. Concrete figures for areas, height, density and structure are not in the resolution with which the planning committee has now taken the first step towards a legal basis for the project. In any case, so many people should live and work on Rappenweg that the city is examining a tram corridor and having a new S-Bahn stop on Schwablhofstraße examined together with the Bavarian Ministry of Transport.

The planning department only wants to name key data for the project when it is clear how the contaminated sites can be remediated and a resilient transport connection can be ensured. But of course numbers are still circulating. In 2021, for example, the mobility department used a preliminary study by the property owners from 2018 for its feasibility study. According to the mobility department, it is the “maximum variant” – of 3400 apartments. Together with the planned 1,500 units on Heltauer Strasse and the 2,500 in the fifth construction phase of Messestadt Riem, this would result in a considerable number of new apartments for Trudering within a radius of three kilometers.

The main problem on the Rappenweg is the 18-hectare former gravel pit, which was backfilled from the 1950s to a depth of 19.5 meters with gravel, but also with ash, slag, rubble and plastic residues. In the 1960s, the illegal commercial buildings settled on it – without a canal and decent roads. First, the city wanted to flatten them, then later achieve a refurbishment that at least satisfied simple standards. The administration finally gave up this idea in 2016 “because the owners involved showed no willingness to cooperate”, i.e. did not want to spend any money on cleaning up contaminated sites.

Then the city looked for a new approach, the CSU brought up housing construction, property developers began to take an interest in the area. A third of it – a total of 24.5 hectares – was taken over by Bayerische Hausbau. The Büschl Group and the real estate group Ten Brinke also bought in. The fact that the project development has been dragging on for years is now proving to be an advantage for investors: alongside the Dreilingsweg and Heltauer Strasse projects, the planning area is one of the three “transitional cases” that are not yet subject to the more stringent social requirements for private residential construction projects. For them it still applies that only 50 and not 60 percent price-regulated rental apartments have to be built that are tied to 40 years.

The road connection is being completely redesigned. The administration actually wanted to extend the Rappenweg – a cul-de-sac – to Haar-Gronsdorf in order to create a second access to the area in addition to Schwablhofstraße. At the same time, this would have resulted in a new connection to the Gronsdorf S-Bahn station, where the city owns land that it also wants to use in part for residential construction. But the breakthrough has failed for decades due to a property owner on Rappenweg who does not want to sell, and now the administration is giving up the connection with the Gronsdorf project for the time being. As an additional development, the Mauerseglerstraße towards Wasserburger Landstraße is now being examined – including a new underpass under the railway tracks.

The city councilors still want to pursue the breakthrough to Gronsdorf. In the planning committee, a supplementary motion from SPD/Volt and Greens/Rosa Liste found a majority to also keep the Rappenweg option open, to continue property negotiations with the owner who was unwilling to sell, but also to examine their expropriation. A dedicated pedestrian and cyclist underpass on Schwablhofstraße is also to be examined.

The topic of contaminated sites took up a lot of space in the debate. Expert opinions should clarify whether they should be taken out of the ground or – if the groundwater is not endangered – covered. “The owner is liable for what is on his property,” explained city planning officer Elisabeth Merk. But if the city gets involved in the project, said Alexander Reissl (CSU), then the owners must also “help finance the whole thing with the amount of use”. Brigitte Wolf (Die Linke) formulated what that means in concrete terms: At the moment there is talk of four to five-story buildings, but if you “know what the remediation of contaminated sites will cost, I can hardly imagine that it can stay that way”.

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