In the building committee of the Unterschleißheim city council, the SPD and the Greens exchanged blows with the CSU on Monday evening as to whether the construction of terraced houses is still up to date. The reason for this was the planned multi-generational quarter in Lohhof-Süd on Kreuzstraße: an investor and the city itself want to build on areas there, a bypass is intended to relieve the existing adjacent settlement of traffic. There, however, residents are up in arms against the apartments planned in the vicinity of their single-family and terraced houses. 305 signatures were submitted to City Hall to support this. The CSU supports the protest.
The conflict, which had been smoldering for a long time, erupted in the preliminary decision-making meeting of the building committee, in which a statutory resolution for the development plan was made, in which building heights and building density were determined, but no statements were made about single-family or terraced houses. Because of the explosiveness, one wants to discuss this later. But the city councilors are already attacking each other violently, accusing each other of social indifference or deliberately ignoring the citizens’ will.
CSU city councilor Brigitte Weinzierl, who is also president of SV Lohhof, visibly irritated some in the city council when she said that terraced houses or single-family houses should also be made possible for higher earners with higher education, because these people are important for certain “tasks” in clubs and are therefore pillars of public life.
So far, the plans envisage the creation of flat-roofed buildings with a wall height of up to 9.5 meters behind a green strip on the urban part of the area that has not yet been developed. Greater heights are only to be reached in the rear area, away from the settlement, up to 14 meters in the case of the retirement home, which is also to develop a soundproofing effect for the new quarter with around 180 residential units. Also planned are assisted living, a daycare center, offices and shops, and a building for the police station, which could be relocated there from Oberschleißheim.
In the Lohhof-Süd settlement, what the city is planning in the neighborhood is closely monitored.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf/Stephan Rumpf)
The debate was about the building density and the number of floor areas (GFZ), which should be between 1.0 and 1.2, which the CSU considers too high. In this specific case, this would mean that 1.0 or 1.2 square meters of floor space may be created on one square meter of land. But at the latest with Weinzierl’s statement on the social structure, reservations about the residents of apartment blocks were also on the table. Johannes Bittner (CSU) said that he himself did not want to live in “any apartment”. He denied that a high quality of life was possible there. He is happy for his terraced house. And it’s not modern at all to suddenly propagate apartment blocks: “I can’t hear that anymore.”
Jürgen Radtke (Greens) asked which survey Weinzierl based their statement on, and he praised the approach to space-saving construction. His parliamentary colleague Tino Schlagintweit (Greens) countered Weinzierl directly with the fact that well-designed settlements with multi-storey apartments could be of high quality if open spaces and meeting places were created there. It is “unfair” to “defame” such forms of living.
In particular, the CSU refuses to make the settlement pressure in the region the maxim of its actions. Stefan Diehl said that would not solve the problem. In terms of settlement density, Unterscheißheim is ranked 53rd in Germany, and without the town of Riedmoos it is even ranked third. Traffic on Kreuzstraße as a feeder will double.
Annegret Harms (SPD) then accused Diehl of having a “very selfish and very anti-social view” of the subject. Many young families were desperately looking for affordable housing. Her parliamentary colleague Katharina Bednarek pointed to town houses that are difficult to sell and said that these are unaffordable for many given the land prices.
The Social Democrat Thomas Breitenstein called the planned apartments the “best program for flushing terraced houses onto the market” anyway. Because there are many older residents of such houses in the city who would like to move into a smaller apartment.
There is heavy through traffic in Lohhof-Süd. A bypass should bring relief.
(Photo: Florian Peljak)
There was also disagreement about how to assess the protest against the plans in Lohhof-Süd. While Stefan Diehl from the CSU said that the collection of signatures should be appreciated and that the displeasure expressed in early citizen participation via the online tool “Consul” was a representative citizen vote, the SPD protested vehemently.
Thomas Breitenstein described it as “abstruse” to see the vote as representative. Residents there spoke out. And anyone who has a house and is asked if they want to have a building across the way, say no at first. Diehl then described the online tool “Consul” as worthless. Then you can get rid of that too. According to the town hall, this was never purchased as a substitute for a referendum, but only to listen to the citizenry.