Rats, mountains of garbage, mold: When landlords ignore their obligations, tenants suffer. The options for helping those affected are not the same in all federal states.
The fact that Lower Saxony has a law that is intended to protect tenants if their landlord shirks responsibility sounds good at first. And yet even the best law fails if it is not implemented.
Like in Oldenburg, where tenants froze for months, garbage piled up and attracted rats. The landlord demanded the full rent, but stopped paying bills for electricity and water, for example. These are houses owned by the now insolvent Munich real estate group Omega AG, and tenants all over Germany are suffering.
NDR and “Süddeutsche Zeitung” have reported how those responsible speculated and why the misery of their tenants could become so great.
The Omega case is big, but not an isolated case. “It’s hard to believe how often this happens,” says Beatrix Zurek from the SPD. She is Vice President of the German Tenant Protection Association. She would like to see housing supervision laws in all federal states that could oblige municipalities to intervene. “So that the municipalities can intervene effectively and in a targeted manner,” says Zurek.
The municipalities could then, for example, order house owners to repair run-down accommodation under the threat of fines.
Only eight states have it Housing inspection laws
There are such housing supervision laws in eight federal states: Hamburg, Berlin and Lower Saxony have one, as well as Bremen, Hesse, Saarland, Saxony-Anhalt and North Rhine-Westphalia. Schleswig-Holstein is planning one, the other federal states apparently are not. Zurek believes that the state is shirking its responsibility instead of fulfilling its duty of care.
Just like in Zurek’s homeland. Until 2004, Bavaria had a housing supervision law that was repealed “through deregulation and de-bureaucratization,” as the Bavarian Ministry of Construction reported upon request. A reintroduction is “not necessary”.
The municipalities have enough rights to take action against housing problems, and tenancy law has also been significantly improved. Federal Construction Minister Klara Geywitz (SPD) sees it similarly. Your ministry says that affected tenants could, if necessary, enforce their rights in court.
Tenants should help themselves
This makes tenant advocate Zurek angry. When living space deteriorates, it primarily affects those “who are least able to defend themselves,” she says. So families with little income, single parents or workers who come from abroad, “to name just a few”. People who couldn’t afford another apartment.
And these are usually the people who are worried about taking action against the landlord. Or who are wondering how to take action against a landlord who they can simply no longer reach. Like in Oldenburg. Tenant Kathi A. spent weeks trying to find someone from the Omega company to be responsible. Who finally repaired the heating that had been out since November.
“We still don’t know who is really responsible for us,” she says during a visit at the end of January. Eleven degrees outside, it’s barely warmer inside, despite two fan heaters. Kathi A. remembers that she even called a supervisory board at Omega AG – to no avail.
Garbage disposed of at your own expense
The city of Oldenburg claims not to have known how bad things really looked in the Omega houses, despite reports in the local press about the conditions. In September, the responsible waste authority tried to get Omega to dispose of the waste, a spokesman said when asked by NDR and SZ with. In December, they had the garbage disposed of at their own expense, using a so-called replacement procedure. It is unlikely that the city will ever see the money for this again.
In other places in Lower Saxony, the Housing Protection Act is also being implemented only slowly, as a survey by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Economic Affairs showed. Of the 138 municipalities surveyed, ten have so far applied the law to a total of 161 properties.
However, these ten were satisfied, according to the ministry. Often it would have been enough to call for the elimination of grievances by referring to the law.
Possibilities and limits of Regulatory laws
North Rhine-Westphalia shows how well a housing supervision law can help. In the first two years after the law was introduced in 2014, the authorities intervened 6,200 times, the Ministry of Construction proudly reported at the time. It has presented a 152-page guide that describes all possible scenarios in detail, including model orders. This makes it easy for municipalities to take action against owners.
And yet even the best law has its limits, as a mayor from Hesse shows. Claus Steinmetz has been fighting for years in Wabern, northern Hesse, against companies from a corporate network that is apparently letting apartments in half a dozen towns and communities fall into disrepair.
Since he was elected in 2015, he says he has constantly had problems with around 80 to 90 apartments NDR and SZ. “It’s really bad and of course people suffer extremely from it, including families with children.”
He was able to help some, ordering the renovation of apartments several times and declaring others completely uninhabitable. Nevertheless, he says: “Our options are slowly being exhausted.” Steinmetz would like to see stricter laws. “It cannot be the case that real estate in Germany becomes objects of speculation and then simply rots away.”
Rescue from a surprising side
In Oldenburg, rescue finally comes from a surprising source: a small Volksbank. They had given a loan to buy the houses. And apparently no longer interested in waiting for the outstanding repayments: While Kathi A. was still cold, the bank applied for receivership at the Oldenburg district court.
At the beginning of February, the receiver began work and first had the heating in Kathi A’s house replaced. Kathi A. had already moved out by then. She couldn’t stand the constant freezing anymore.