The apartments on both sides of the construction site are already finished and the tenants have moved in – here in the so-called Riegerhöfe, there in the apartments around the Edeka supermarket on Tegernseer Landstraße, which opened in autumn 2020. In between, however, the craftsmen are still at work, namely on the property on Riegerweg, where the municipality of Taufkirchen is building 44 rental apartments.
“It took a while,” says Mayor Ullrich Sander (independent), who invited to the topping-out ceremony for the building that day. As early as 2016, the idea of building their own rental apartments on the area that the municipality was able to acquire within the framework of socially just land use came up for the first time – with the help of the “Housing Pact Bavaria” funding program. A year ago, the excavators finally got there, and since then both the budget and the schedule have been met, emphasizes Sander. The goal: At the beginning of 2023, nurses, educators and city hall employees in particular are to move into the two- to four-room apartments – at a rent of 12.50 euros per square meter. Just for comparison: That’s almost ten euros less than what you shell out next door in the Riegerhöfe.
“Affordable housing often looks like affordable housing – like shoeboxes,” says Klaus-Michael Dengler, managing director of the Munich housing association Gewofag. “But that’s not the case here. These apartments are very reasonably priced.” Gewofag acts as a project tax for the construction work, which is what caused the initial delay, explains Sander. After all, the municipality of Taufkirchen is also a shareholder in Gewofag, which is why a so-called in-house procedure was sought. However, its admissibility in the Bavarian Housing Pact had to be checked by the government of Upper Bavaria, which alone took a year and a half.
The construction costs for the project are around twelve million euros. The municipality receives 30 percent of this from the support program, which also provides for a low-interest loan. “It’s tremendous help,” emphasizes Sander, without which rents couldn’t be kept so low. However, it is not yet clear who exactly will benefit from the low prices. In one of the next meetings, the municipal council will decide on a catalog of criteria for the award, which will then be carried out by the Taufkirchner housing association. More than 100 applications have already been received there, reports third mayor Christiane Lehners (CSU).