It's about the family house again - after Grünen, Geywitz now wants to pull the brakes
Created: 04/16/2022, 13:09
By: Florian Naumann
Klara Geywitz at the end of March during a tour of a construction site in the south of Berlin's Neukölln district.
© IMAGO/snapshot-photography/F.Boillot
The next traffic light dispute?
The SPD is digging up the Häusle issue again.
With the Greens, she should break open doors.
But the FDP smells "ideology".
Berlin – At the beginning of the 2021 election year, the Greens got a bloody nose with warnings about the new single-family house.
Now the SPD is tackling the issue again in the new traffic light coalition and a completely new energy debate: Minister of Construction Klara Geywitz wants to "contain" the new building in order to reduce land use and protect the environment.
Geywitz told the
taz at the weekend
that a debate about "good living" was necessary.
In recent decades, the living space per person has continued to increase.
"We are talking about how our own eating or mobility behavior influences the climate, but not yet when it comes to living." However, the coalition partner FDP is already reacting allergically to the request.
Detached house on the traffic light agenda: Geywitz calls for a different use
The SPD politician emphasized that it was “economically and ecologically nonsensical” for each generation to build new single-family homes.
Hundreds of thousands of single-family homes have been built since the 1950s.
"Most of the time, families no longer live in them, but one or two senior citizens." Initially, five people lived in 150 square meters, "but then the children move out - and the house doesn't shrink at the moment".
The solution is a different usage cycle, said Geywitz.
“It would be good if the next generation of young families bought old houses and renovated them.
We need government incentives to do that.
Then you can combine both: save space and make the dream of your own house possible.”
Geywitz for slowing down the house construction - FDP reprimands "ideological debate"
The minister went on to say that it had to be built differently - with smaller living areas but larger communal areas.
“But we will not make any regulations as to how many square meters an apartment can have.
In other areas we focus on repairing instead of throwing away or sharing instead of owning.
If we want to achieve the climate protection goals, we also need a rethink in the living area, i.e. more together instead of 'everything mine'."
From the minister's point of view, it would also be good to build more with wood and clay.
"That would be my wish.
Wood is a great way to improve the CO2 balance of the building sector, you can also build multi-storey with it.”
Despite the announced waiver of specifications for apartment sizes, the coalition partner FDP went on the barricades on Good Friday.
Geywitz could "take care of rising construction costs, KfW funding, supply chains or speeding up the process and reducing bureaucracy," tweeted Munich FDP member of the Bundestag Daniel Föst: "But no, she'd rather start an ideological debate about the dream of a single-family home."
Geywitz' Ministry of Construction criticized: environmental aid filed a lawsuit
According to the Federal Environment Agency, there were around 42.8 million apartments in 2020, a good five percent more than in 2011. In the same period, however, the living space actually used increased significantly more, by 6.5 percent - mainly because of the larger living space per capita.
The Ministry of Construction, like the Transport Department, recently received a kind of reprimand - according to data from the Federal Environment Agency, the construction sector emitted more greenhouse gases in 2021 than the maximum amount provided for in the Federal Climate Protection Act.
Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing (FDP) and Federal Building Minister Geywitz now have to submit emergency programs within three months.
The German Environmental Aid (DUH) announced on Wednesday that it had filed a lawsuit against the Federal Building Ministry with the Berlin-Brandenburg Higher Administrative Court.
The emergency program presented last year because the 2020 climate target was exceeded was not sufficient, argues the DUH.
(
dpa/fn
)
