Families in the city often live too cramped

Living in a doll's house: Every third family in the big city lives in a flat that is too small, and six percent of all tenant households in metropolitan areas live cramped. Families and people with a migration background are affected more often than others. At the same time, about the same number of people live in particularly large flats.

There has been a shortage of affordable housing in Germany for years. Recent figures from the IW Institute in Cologne show that about six percent of tenant households in large cities live in cramped conditions, i.e. have fewer rooms available than there are residents.

At the same time, six percent of tenant households also live in spacious flats. A flat is considered spacious if the number of rooms exceeds the number of occupants by three. Older tenants in particular live in spacious flats. Many do not move into smaller flats even when the children leave home or the partner dies. For many existing tenants with old contracts, it is cheaper to stay in a larger flat than to move to a smaller flat with a more expensive new contract.

After the turnaround in the real estate market, renters can no longer easily switch to home ownership. Inflation, the energy crisis and high interest rates have hit the real estate market hard. Even people with high incomes can hardly afford real estate compared to the beginning of 2022. At the end of 2022, couples with a median income of around 3,730 euros net who wanted to buy a single-family home could only afford 28 percent of the properties on offer. At the beginning of the year, it had still been 40 per cent. Even households with high incomes had to limit themselves: For the highest-income fifth of society, not even half of the single-family houses advertised were affordable, 47 per cent - at the beginning of the year it was still 62 per cent. Couples in the highest-income fifth earned around 5,000 euros net.

Usable living space is actually there, says architect Florian Fischer-Almannai in a programme by Deutschlandfunk Kultur, it just needs to be used more efficiently again. He calls for an offensive of conversion and better use of existing living space.

(Photo: © NoName13, Pixabay)