Example Berlin. The city limits the conversion of rented apartments into property, through a permit reservation for existing buildings with five apartments or more. The Senate in Hamburg also decided to make changes – with building bids that can order housing and strengthened municipal rights of first refusal for land. The basis for this is provided by the so-called building land mobilization law, which has been in force nationwide since June. The two city-states expect the amendment to provide “opportunities for more affordable housing” or “clout in the action against speculation”. And in Munich? The Bavarian state government does not seem to be in any hurry to implement key points of the law. That is now triggering criticism.
The implementation is currently “carefully examined and weighed up taking into account a large number of aspects,” says Kerstin Schreyer (CSU) at the request of the SZ in the building ministry. No rush? Oh well, “apparently no desire”, criticizes Natascha Kohnen, housing policy spokeswoman for the SPD parliamentary group. “This procrastination is grotesque”, to the detriment of the municipalities and ultimately the tenant, “nothing will happen for months”; or maybe nothing at all in the end.
Much of the federal law comes into force automatically, with no leeway for the states. It is different with the more difficult conversion into property, the right of first refusal and building bids for “tense housing markets”, which could certainly be interpreted as interventions in the free market: Here, the law from the house of Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) only creates an authorization for the states. “This means that the respective state government decides on the introduction of such a conversion ban,” says the building ministry in Munich. Whether Bavaria will make use of it and how a regulation will be structured in terms of content is in the “examination” – without a fixed schedule.
In the answer to a plenary request from the Green MP Jürgen Mistol, it was also said that “the formation of opinions within the state government has not yet been completed”; in addition, one wants to hear the municipalities before issuing a regulation. “The state government could act immediately,” said Mistol. “Community-friendly is different.” The CSU denies the municipalities urgently needed measures, also sums up the SPD housing expert Kohnen. “Especially in Bavaria there are many municipalities with tense housing markets, where building land must be mobilized for affordable housing.” The federal law should therefore be implemented without delay.
In the course of the legislation, the state government had held back a little in the choice of words; probably because the novella comes from the department of the CSU Minister Seehofer. The criticism, however, was unequivocal: the law missed the purpose of mobilizing building land, said Bavaria’s building minister Kerstin Schreyer (CSU) in May, “with its extensive encroachments on property, it has an anti-investment orientation”. There is “a lot of discussion about rental sharks, but there are also many people who use home ownership as an important component in their private retirement provision”. The building policy spokesman for the CSU in the state parliament, Jürgen Baumgärtner, wanted to “stop” the “Home Ownership Prevention Act”.
It has now been decided that pressure will come from the tenant lobby. Schreyer’s “refusal” shows that the Free State “apparently has little or no interest in the situation of tenants in Bavaria,” complained the German Tenants’ Association (DMB) in Bavaria. The DMB Nuremberg recently announced: Without the implementation of the law, the municipalities in the housing market are condemned to “continue to just watch”. The fact is that there is speculation – rules are necessary for this. Anyone who owns a buildable area can wait years and watch how the value increases on their own – “while others are desperately looking for an apartment and still others take advantage of the shortage of apartments with high rent demands”.
Uwe Brandl (CSU), President of the Municipal Assembly and Mayor of Abensberg in Lower Bavaria, recently discussed in an article in the that there is a lack of building land by no means only in large cities Bavarian State Newspaper. A medium-sized community in Upper Bavaria, for example, told the community day that it had 750 expressions of interest for a small plot of land to build a single-family home. And cities and municipalities would now have to experience how the federal law “together with its common good-oriented control elements for more interior development and low-price living space is being torpedoed”.