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New building area in Velbert in the Ruhr area: the more rural, the more single-family houses
Photo:
Hans Blossey / imago images
The housing shortage in Germany is great: Everyone takes up almost three times as many square meters as they did in the 1960s, and building can hardly keep up with this development.
On the question of how this need can be met, Green politician Anton Hofreiter recently criticized in a SPIEGEL interview, "One-party houses cause urban sprawl" and thus initiated a comprehensive debate about the future of single-family houses.
But even if there is now a local ban on single-family houses in Hamburg-Nord: The dispute over this ecologically questionable form of living has probably long been decided in practice.
According to the Federal Statistical Office, almost 60 percent of all approved apartments are already being built in apartment buildings in the fight against the housing shortage.
The trend towards single- and two-family houses has long been declining: Since 2005, the proportion of apartments in these houses has fallen in favor of accommodation in multi-family houses.
In 2015, as the authority has now announced, for the first time since 1997, more apartments were built in multi-family houses than in single and two-family houses.
Specifically, according to statisticians, around 256,000 apartments were completed in 2019.
Around 143,000 apartments were created in a total of 14,400 newly built apartment buildings.
Even if single-family houses have fallen behind in terms of new builds, they still dominate the existing stock: two thirds of all residential buildings in Germany were single-family houses in 2019.
Together with the two-family houses, the proportion was around 83 percent.
Comfort vs. costs vs. ecology
Because single-family houses require space, they are much less common in large cities: The proportion is lowest in Stuttgart at 35.4 percent;
Düsseldorf, Frankfurt am Main and Gelsenkirchen follow with 40.1 percent each.
Districts with a size between 100,000 and 200,000 inhabitants, on the other hand, have the highest proportion of single-family houses: The East Frisian districts of Aurich (86.1 percent) and Leer (85.9 percent) are next to Dithmarschen in Schleswig-Holstein (85.5 percent) Top.
Apartments in multi-family houses have an average living space of 78 square meters - in single-family houses, residents have an average of 152 square meters.
Detached single-family houses offered their residents even more space with an average living space of 157 square meters.
Read here:
Do you live generously - or in a tight space?
But statisticians also know: "Living and building are increasingly caught in the field of tension between the desire for comfort, growing costs and ecological requirements." In 2019, the share of residential construction area in the total settlement and traffic area of the municipalities nationwide was just under 28 percent.
The remaining part of the area is used for other purposes, such as public facilities, industry and commerce, sports, leisure and recreation facilities as well as traffic routes.
Icon: The mirror
apr / AFP
