The city of Dachau would like to limit population growth by stopping new buildings until 2024 and strict rules for densification measures.
Citizens willing to build are threatened with a mess of regulations.
Dachau
- The city council is in agreement on one point: Dachau's recent rapid population growth must be slowed down. "We don't want to grow any further," Sören Schneider (SPD) summed it up. But how this pious wish should be implemented, there is far less agreement among the city politicians. Gertrud Schmidt-Podolsky (CSU) spoke at the meeting of the building and planning committee on Tuesday of “fundamentally different ideological approaches”.
The initial situation is clear: According to the latest population forecast, the city of Dachau will crack the 60,000-inhabitant mark by the middle / end of the 2030s.
And: According to a current study by the Sparda banks in cooperation with the Institute for German Economy and the Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy, the square meter of living in the Dachau district already costs 5194 euros - with an upward trend.
So the Gretchen question is: How does the city council intend to prevent things from getting ever tighter in Dachau without telling the citizens to be able to build “only one bird house” (CSU city councilor Günter Dietz) on their own land, but to ensure that enough affordable housing is available for all citizens?
As far as future housing projects are concerned, an SPD proposal prevailed, which helped the Greens and the alliance for Dachau to gain a majority. Accordingly, the development of the MD site will be continued, but the planning for the Augustenfeld area, which has been decided for years, will be postponed in large parts. This affects the entire middle area, in which several residential buildings, a green area, a so-called urban center and a bicycle parking garage were planned. Only the TSV main site should still be allowed to be built on in this area so that sport, according to SPD spokesman Schneider, "can flourish". Otherwise, no new development plans for residential projects in the urban area will be drawn up until 2024. The construction processes that have already been initiated for the former Mitterndorf school, the senior citizens' housing complex on Augsburger Strasse,the Pollnstrasse 1 project and the new construction of the apartment blocks on Fünfkirchner Strasse can continue according to the resolution, as it is subsidized housing.
Building authority manager Moritz Reinhold warned the committee against overly strict prohibition thinking and asked: “Do we really want to allow no more one meter of building law?” CSU spokeswoman Schmidt-Podolsky also thought: “The construction freeze is paralyzing us!” The city councilors are enough of a man and woman To decide on a case-by-case basis “whether 20 or 30 additional apartments are possible somewhere”. And the stop of the ten-year-old plans for Augustenfeld should be carefully considered, according to Schmidt-Podolsky. Of course, these decisions had been made when the plans for the MD site had not yet been made; but putting the large-scale project, in which the citizens had also been involved, on hold was a "decision that affects generations!"
However, since a large part of the city's population growth also results from densification - for example by demolishing a single-family house on a piece of land and replacing it with an apartment building - the city would like to apply a brake here too in the future. The difficulty with this, however, is that the current building law grants the property owner certain freedoms: According to Paragraph 34 of the Building Code, the new development only has to fit into the surrounding area according to the type and extent of structural use, the construction method and the property area and the development must be secured be". A skyscraper on Richard-Wagner-Strasse would therefore, to name an example, be out of the question.
In order to prevent worse excesses, the city now wants to influence the building owners with “guidelines” and ordinances, such as a tree protection ordinance.
While CSU councilor Schmidt-Podolsky predicted that regulations of all kinds would only have the effect that the city would regularly have to contest expensive legal proceedings, OB Florian Hartmann held against it: Of course, the city did not want to curtail building rights with regulations.
But, says Hartmann, “if we don't regulate anything, it will end up costing us even more money”.
Urban pressure and the baby boom
The settlement pressure not only on Dachau, but also in the entire Munich area is high.
Since the rapid population growth also has expensive effects on local infrastructures - after all, new residents need roads, childcare facilities and schools - the municipalities are trying to counteract this.
As the first municipality in the region, the district town of Erding decided to brake growth in summer 2018: the city is only expected to grow by one percent per year.
Six months later, the Indersdorfer municipal council also stipulated that the population should only increase by one percent per year.
In the rest of the district, the goal of moderate and high-quality growth is also being pursued, but without pursuing a fixed percentage. Dachau Mayor Florian Hartmann believes that growth cannot be precisely controlled to the decimal point. In addition to immigration, according to statistics, there is another growth driver that cannot be regulated by the state: the steadily rising number of births.
