The investor model for the renovation of the wholesale market hall is only a charming idea at first glance. If the city council doesn’t take over the project again now, it loses all influence – and risks failure in the end.
It is undoubtedly a charming idea: The Büschl Group, one of Munich’s largest housing construction companies, is getting involved in one of the city’s most important and complicated construction projects. She is putting up a new wholesale market hall with guaranteed affordable rents for the traders and on top of that she prefers to build apartments instead of the offices planned so far, according to the city’s new strict Sobon rules, which ensure a high proportion of affordable living space. Nevertheless, the city council should say goodbye to this charming idea at the meeting of the municipal committee this Thursday or at the latest in the general assembly at the end of April, call off the investor solution for the new building and put the project back in the hands of the city.
There are plenty of reasons for this, some of which appear in the draft resolution by municipal officer Kristina Frank: The newly emerged legal question of whether the investor project must be put out to tender across the EU instead of handing it over directly to the Büschl Group creates a process risk and thus a high level worrying uncertainty. After all, there is enormous time pressure when building the wholesale market hall, since the city alone has to invest tens of millions of euros in the maintenance of the dilapidated halls up until 2030 in order to keep the wholesale market running at all. Whether and at what cost the old halls would be maintained beyond 2030 is an open question.
Time pressure is increasingly weakening the city’s position
In addition, the leasehold negotiations with the investor would have to restart. Georg-Kronawitter-Platz (formerly Sattlerplatz) shows that the length of such negotiations is unpredictable. Nothing has progressed there for years because the city has been negotiating tenaciously with the investors there about the amount of the leasehold rent and other costs. The construction project is not directly comparable with the wholesale market hall. But what both projects have in common is that they are enormously complex and there are no comparable cases of heritable building rights. In the case of the wholesale market, there is also the fact that the time pressure weakens the city’s negotiating position. Also to be considered is the danger that the negotiations could collapse in two or three years, which would mean even more time wasted than is already the case.
It is also still completely unclear how many apartments above the wholesale market hall are legally feasible at all, for example because of the noise that delivery traffic causes even in the middle of the night. So many good answers would have to be found to many open questions in order for the investor wholesale market project to be a success.
The city has more influence and thus more security when it builds itself. And then it would be an ambitious, but at least feasible goal to open the new inner-city wholesale market in 2030.