For a long time it was not clear whether the building land reserves in Germany would be sufficient to meet the major construction challenges of our time. A new study by the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR) shows: There is enough building land for millions of new flats.
A central challenge of our time is to build enough affordable housing. The new Ministry of Construction's goal is to build 400,000 new flats per year, 100,000 of them in publicly subsidised housing.
The motto is: create living space, conserve land.
The Leibniz Institute for Ecological Spatial Development (IÖR) and the Institute of the German Economy (IW) were commissioned with the study. The researchers surveyed almost 3,000 cities and municipalities of all sizes, calculated the regionally differentiated areas available as building land, determined the residential units that could be realised on them and calculated how the housing demand could be realised with the available areas. The results are available at www.bbsr.bund.de/baulandumfrage.
The building land survey shows that there is sufficient land potential for housing construction in the cities without having to build on greenfield sites outside the cities. "With clever building land concepts and allocations, municipalities can ensure that not only high-priced flats are built on the developable land, but also affordable housing," explains Dr Markus Eltges from BBSR.
"There is enough building land in Germany, as much as the size of Berlin or 140,000 football pitches," explains Federal Minister for Building Klara Geywitz. "More than half of this enormous land potential can be built on in the short term. In order to avoid sealing and wasting land, it is important to develop within the city and to make wise use of brownfields and gaps between buildings. There is land to build on. What matters now is the common will to bring as much affordable housing as possible onto the housing market quickly," says Geywitz.
(Photo: © Fred T., Pixabay)
