The Greens want to enforce a legal right to home exchange. "This way, single elderly people can exchange their apartment, which is perceived as too large, with the young family, which desperately needs more space," the newspapers of the Funke Mediengruppe quoted from a leading motion from the federal executive committee. He should be decided in the coming week at the party conference of the Greens in Bielefeld.
Specifically, according to the report tenants of housing companies can exchange their leases with each other. The respective rent remains therefore unchanged in the exchange. The mechanism would thus leverage rent increases for new leases.
Anyone who trades his apartment should also be financially supported when moving to the Greens' request, the Funke Mediengruppe continued. Excluded from the scheme should be small private landlords. In addition, landlords should be able to object to the exchange if the new tenants do not have enough income.
Association of the housing industry speaks of "window dressing"
The German Tenants Association welcomed the push. The proposed solution "on the one hand tenants a legal right to exchange their apartment and enter into the previous terms of the exchange apartments," said CEO Ulrich Ropertz the spark newspapers. The concerns of the landlord side were taken up.
The Federal Association of Housing GdW sees the proposal against it critically: The Greens would "extremely intervene in the ownership," said GdW President Axel Gedaschko the spark newspapers. Such a law was "incompatible with the constitutionally guaranteed private autonomy".
A legal claim to a home exchange described Gedaschko as a "window dressing", since so no new housing is created. "Without incentives for more affordable housing and thinking of city and countryside and infrastructure, the problem can not be solved in the housing market."