Sylt bans the construction of new holiday homes and wants to get the island's housing problem under control.
Could other communities follow suit?
Sylt – The vacation paradise Sylt has a housing problem.
The municipality therefore decided in mid-March to stop building new holiday apartments, inns and guesthouses.
With this, Sylt finally wants to get the imbalance between holiday and permanent residences under control and create affordable living space.
Because not only tourists are needed on the island, but also local workers.
The problem is well known in other popular tourist locations.
The government of the holiday destination Portugal, for example, is reacting to the housing shortage there with forced rentals.
Therefore, Sylt limits tourist living
In 2020, out of around 11,340 apartments in the municipality of Sylt, 4,600 were holiday apartments.
2,900 people had a secondary residence there.
An imbalance, even for a place that lives from tourism.
Because a functioning community also needs teachers, cashiers, postmen and nurses, as Deputy Mayor Carsten Kerkamm (CDU)
told
Focus Online .
The local workers would have to find housing and be able to afford life on the island, the politician continued.
The construction freeze that has now been decided is intended to preserve the “image of the town and landscape” and to meet the “housing needs of the population”, which is suffering from rising rents.
According to NDR
, Katrin Thies from the Merret citizens' network on Sylt,
enough
for sustainable tourism, called the decision
a "historic, groundbreaking decision".
It is the first time that the Sylt municipality is committed to limiting tourist living.
"Syltrification is not destiny": Could other communities soon follow suit?
In addition to Sylt, other communities in Germany are also familiar with the problems of excessive tourism.
In holiday resorts on the North and Baltic Seas and in the Alps, locals can hardly find affordable housing.
Because in the high season, short-term rentals often bring more income than long-term rentals throughout the year.
These apartments are then empty in the low season and are missing from the local housing market.
Other communities could soon follow Sylt's example, at least if it were up to Birte Wieda, the founder of the citizens' network
Merret's enough
.
"Syltrification is not destiny," Wieda said in a statement from the network.
“You can counteract this development.
However, you have to want it.” At the same time, she addressed the state government in Schleswig-Holstein and called on them to ensure an “effective misappropriation law” in order to “close the legal loophole on the misuse of permanent housing for all of us.”
Sylt is not the first municipality to take action.
Berchtesgaden is considered a pioneer, because the Bavarian town already pulled the handbrake in 2019 with measures against unused living space.
The municipality banned the conversion of main residences into secondary residences, and the result exceeded its own expectations: According to Mayor Franz Rasp (CSU), the number of second homes fell by around 20 percent.
There are now similar regulations in Bayrischzell, Ruhpolding and Schönau am Königssee.
Germany lacks affordable housing - not only in tourism strongholds
In Germany, however, there is a lack of affordable living space not only in tourist conurbations, but above all in large cities and university towns.
However, the parties do not agree on how they want to solve the housing problem.
A decision has now been made in Portugal.
The country is tackling its serious housing problem with forced rentals, going a step further than the German holiday island of Sylt.
According to official estimates, there are more than 700,000 vacant apartments in the western European country with around 10.3 million inhabitants.
While the purchase and rental prices in the metropolises of Lisbon and Porto are almost as high as in Germany, the average gross monthly wage is only 1,350 euros, and the minimum wage is only 760 euros a month.
Portugal is intervening in the housing market with forced lettings
The new program of the government under Prime Minister António Costa makes compulsory renting possible in regions with a higher population density if an apartment has been vacant for more than two years.
Costa announced this in a statement on March 30.
In addition, no new licenses for holiday rentals are to be issued, Lisbon wants to permanently freeze old contracts and limit new rent increases to two percent per year.
An end is also planned for the controversial “Golden Visa Scheme”, which gave non-EU citizens the right to reside in Portugal if they invested in real estate.
Parliament still has to approve the law.
Portugal could then become the first country in Europe where the government reacts to the housing problems with compulsory renting.
(dpa/AFP/bme)
