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Construction site in Leipzig: Still a long way from 400,000 new apartments per year
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Jan Woitas / dpa
Serial construction, faster approvals, densification: There is no shortage of ideas on how the federal government consisting of SPD, Greens and FDP wants to combat the tense situation on the real estate market.
However, these seem to have had little fruit so far: the authorities issued significantly fewer building permits in February, as the Federal Statistical Office has now announced.
Accordingly, the construction or conversion of 28,060 apartments was approved.
That was 6.6 percent or 1998 less than in February 2021. In the first two months of the current year, the number of building permits remained almost unchanged at a total of 57,713 compared to the same period last year (57,712 building permits).
Even approved projects are often not built
In the first two months of 2022, a total of 50,376 apartments were approved for new residential buildings to be constructed.
In the two-month period, this was – thanks to an increase in January – at least 0.3 percent more than in the same period last year.
However, the number of permits for single-family homes fell by 16.3 percent to 13,047 units.
In the case of two-family houses, however, the number of approved apartments rose by 13.0 percent to 5,480 and for multi-family houses by 8.7 percent to 30,829.
Things had looked a lot better recently: in 2021, the authorities approved more new construction projects than they had since 1999.
The Ampel partners actually wanted to build on this – and work together to build 400,000 apartments a year, 100,000 of which are publicly funded social housing.
Federal Building Minister Klara Geywitz (SPD) is developing, among other things, plans for new houses in the modular system.
The number of building permits is an important indicator of the housing shortage in many cities.
However, it says nothing about how many units were actually completed.
Apartments that have already been approved are often not built at first because craftsmen and construction companies do not have the capacity due to high demand.
Experts warn again and again that the backlog of apartments that have been approved but have not been completed for various reasons is growing.
apr/dpa
