Unterhaching – Affordable living space can be created in tiny houses – district of Munich

The new home is 7.50 meters long, 2.55 meters wide, four meters high and has been in a garden in Pullach for six months. Tiny house is the name of this form of living in a small space, which Felicia Rief and Jonas Bischofberger discovered for themselves and which they say is flexible, affordable and self-determined. More and more people are showing interest in these mobile small apartments, so that cities and municipalities are now gradually giving up their initial reservations. Tiny houses can help create affordable living space. This is also the view of the SPD in Unterhaching, which submitted a corresponding application to the holiday committee on Wednesday evening.

It is almost impossible for young people in and around Munich to be able to afford their own small apartment during their studies or vocational training. Exorbitant rents make it difficult to start your own life, and you can hardly afford to own your own four walls. So why not “take up this 21st-century housing trend” for the younger generation in the community, the SPD asks, and suggests letting the community-owned housing association GWU allow tiny houses or similar to be rented out. A pilot project would at least be a first step.

There is no room in Unterhaching for an entire village

Up to now, this mobile form of small housing has mainly been found in rural areas, where large plots of land are available and nobody thinks of building up to make the best use of the expensive land for living space. The first tiny house village in Germany was founded in 2017 in Mehlmeisel in the Fichtelgebirge. SPD parliamentary group leader Peter Wöstenbrink, who formulated the motion, knows that there is certainly no land for an entire settlement of tiny houses in the densely populated suburban Unterhaching. Rather, he has in mind using parts of the property that are not suitable for permanent development for the tiny house project. He still does not want to comment specifically on what that should be. He already has ideas, but is waiting for suggestions from the administration.

However, he was met with a certain amount of skepticism in the committee. The second mayor, Johanna Zapf (Greens), who chaired the meeting, announced that it would have to be checked carefully whether tiny houses were ecologically justifiable and did not have too high a heating requirement. Her colleague in the Greens, Stefan König, sees this mainly because these mini-houses only consist of external walls. Although Korbinian Rausch from the CSU finds the idea “totally charming”, he does not see it as a suitable solution for the lack of affordable living space for Unterhaching “because of the small floor area and the energy inefficiency”.

The Unterhachinger town hall administration will now look at the proposal and show a few possibilities, as town hall spokesman Simon Hötzl says, the peripheral properties mentioned for one or two tiny houses already exist.

It is precisely in such areas that the association “Simply living together” sees sensible locations for tiny houses in urban areas: as “ecological fillers” and everywhere where it is no longer possible to build taller. Thorsten Thane, who founded the association in Wolfratshausen a few years ago, is not only thinking of fallow land, backyards or areas on flat roofs, but also of large, unused gardens of single-family homes that could be made available for rent or help in the household.

But Thane knows from his own experience how difficult it is to find a suitable location for a tiny house, how many building law hurdles have to be cleared and what prejudices sometimes circulate. The director and TV producer decided in favor of this form of living because he had calculated that, as a freelancer of retirement age, he would simply no longer be able to pay the rents in the region. “But I started at a time when nobody knew the term tiny house and many thought of hippies smoking pot,” he says. In the end, he failed in Wolfratshausen not only because of the requirements to find a place with a water connection, electricity and sewer, but also because of the immobility of the authorities. There are parking space statutes and specifications that the tiny house must fit into the environment. “The problem is that building law doesn’t differentiate between mobile and immobile forms of living,” he says. For a while he parked his converted circus wagon on a property without living in it. But that was then also classified as a black building. Eventually he sold his tiny house.

In Munich, the interim use of urban areas is being examined

But he hasn’t given up on his idea of ​​living in a small house, he will realize it in another area. However, the municipalities in the Munich area are now further along. In July, the Munich city council approved a motion by the parliamentary groups of the Greens and Pink List as well as the SPD and Volt, according to which the interim use of municipal and private properties as well as small properties for the temporary installation of tiny houses will be examined. In Penzberg, too, the city is in the process of finding a plot of land for this type of housing.

Felicia Rief and Jonas Bischofberger quickly got the opportunity to set up their tiny house in Pullach through a lease agreement with the garden owner. Its advantage was that it is relatively small and falls under the 75 cubic meter rule for indoor log cabins, so no planning permission is required. “It’s also private property, and you need staying power on public property,” says Rief. For her, it is the form of living that she imagines, above all because her tiny house is more to her than minimalism, namely also practical sustainability with photovoltaics, solar thermal energy, a toilet without flushing, a constructed wetland with gray water purification, facade greening and permaculture. But she also says: Tiny houses don’t fit everywhere, they are only “one possible solution” for creating affordable living space.