Dieter Reiter looks a little enviously at the loggias of the new building at Hanauer Strasse 20. He doesn’t have a balcony at home in Sendling. “You got it better than the mayor,” he says to the small group of residents who came on Wednesday to the symbolic key handover for 118 new company apartments of Stadtwerke München (SWM).
Apartments with relatively low rents for a company’s own employees are a matter close to the heart of the mayor. He actually expects companies in the city to relieve the strained rental market with company apartments, said Reiter. “What doesn’t help me are statements from DAX companies that their employees earn so much that they’ll find something.” That only drives up prices and makes it more and more difficult for urgently needed specialists with lower incomes to find them.
The Stadtwerke, on the other hand, have been building for their employees for ten years. The expansion offensive envisages 3,000 company apartments by 2030, a place to stay for almost every third of the 10,000 employees. One invests “a high three-digit million amount”, says a spokeswoman. Construction is being carried out on SWM’s own land, which previously housed depots, substations, parking lots or central heating systems, which are either reduced in size or no longer required – an in-house conversion of space, so to speak.
A thousand units have now been completed, almost 400 of which have been newly built since 2011. They include eight company apartments on Isoldenstrasse in Schwabing, 36 on Kuglerstrasse in Haidhausen, and 114 on Postillonstrasse in Moosach. 56 furnished apartments on Dantestraße in Nymphenburg are reserved for new employees from abroad for a limited period of one year.
In 2023, 85 company apartments plus a daycare center are to be completed on Katharina-von-Bora-Straße in Maxvorstadt, two years later 230 units in the quarter on Hanauer Straße, and the big chunks will follow in 2028/2029: 140 apartments at Michaelibad, 330 in the creative district on Dachauer Strasse and a total of 570 on the bus depot site at the corner of Westendstrasse and Zschokkestrasse in Laim. There are also initial plans for the SWM site south of the Isarphilharmonie and for the substation on the corner of Landshuter Allee and Nymphenburger Straße.
It remains to be seen whether the target of 3,000 company apartments by 2030 can actually be achieved in view of rising construction prices and shaky supply chains. “But nothing should change in our fundamental intention to continue there,” said Werner Albrecht, SWM Managing Director Human Resources, Real Estate, Pools, when the keys were handed over on Hanauer Strasse.
This new eight-storey residential building is connected to the “Hybrid M” municipal utility complex. In addition to the bus depot of the Munich transport company, there is a multi-storey car park and a six-storey office building. The bar shields the 118 company apartments from Georg-Brauchle-Ring.
Around 9,500 square meters of living space have been created on the 7,000 square meter property, divided into one to five room apartments with 43 to 125 square meters. A good half is barrier-free, 17 units can be expanded to be wheelchair-accessible. The rents are based on the lower end of the rent index, explains the SWM spokeswoman. Means, for example: two-room apartments with an average area of 66 square meters cost 1047 euros warm, in the voluntary Munich model of SWM 880 euros.
The rents for the apartments in the new building are based on the lower end of the rent index.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
An employment contract is a prerequisite for moving in. For the first time, however, the municipal utilities are not only giving out the apartments to their own employees, but are also starting a pilot project for cooperation with other municipal subsidiaries. The Munich Foundation, which supports the old people’s home, is allowed to accommodate employees in five units, and the Munich Clinic in five more.
The waiting lists are already full at the Stadtwerke alone. One of the new residents on Hanauer Strasse had to wait two years to move in, and only a handful of apartments are still empty. Werner Albrecht reports that 58 percent of the tenants come from the mobility sector. Hassan Hussein is not one of them. He is the sauna master next door in the Olympic swimming pool and is happy that since September he only needs ten minutes to get to work and no longer has to cycle an hour from Germering. The apartment is nice, the ten-year-old son has found a place in the football club, only daycare places are still missing. But that won’t happen until 2026, when the next two SWM houses are finished.