Yet there if always mountains of money for ridiculous projects like superexpensive highways in the city or car subsidies. But building new affordable housing is always refused with an absurd excuse like "we don't want to distort free market principles".
In Munich, a modest 3-room flat costs 20 annual average for the city of Munich salaries.
And that's without paying any fees for the purchase of the said apartment and those fees can easily add a couple of extra years to the calculation. Then we have the interest rate of the bank, and of course the ever increasing prices of virtually everything but the salaries.
You also need 10% down payment of the said property in cash to ensure a lower interest rate, that's already a lot of money. So do the math to figure out how middle class people can afford a flat in Munich, where a rent for a 3-room flat is almost 2K, which by the way is more than 65% of the average salary in the city.
And all the constructions now within the city are luxurious properties where prices are double or triple that.
It is an absolute disgrace and it has been like this for at least 10 years. A friend of mine bought his flat around 10 years ago and now his flat costs 2.5x more. Crazy!
And then Germany is complaining that they cannot find skilled workers, so tell me would you go to Germany with those prices, relatively low salaries for high skilled positions and high tax burden?
There are good reasons to go to Germany, like relatively high salaries (it always depends on where you're comparing. At least in the fields I'm about to work in you earn significantly more in Germany than in Austria), high security, good schools and universities, ... (similar to Austria in that regard, maybe slightly worse).
The only reason against Europe in general is that you pay a lot for mandatory purchases (a home (doesn't matter if rented or bought), groceries, ...). Personally I still prefer that over cheaper costs of living but less security, worse child- and healthcare etc. but something has to change, because it's only getting more extreme.
If the development of 50 years ago to today will continue for the next 50 years something like a civil war is inevitable.
The issue is near global no matter the wealth of a country. Why? We have allowed homes to be investment vehicles like stocks. This is what you get and given that those who own the homes do not want to see their value go down, you better believe they have infiltrated the government to ensure it. It is working. Maybe a little too well as things are getting desperate and surely cannot be sustainable.
We also have a larger population. And we have smaller household sizes, which means that the number of households has grown even quicker than the population.
And higher rates of urbanisation, which means those households all want to live in a few overcrowded urban areas.
And we have more households owning multiple homes, either as investment, for recreational usage or to rent it out.
Solving these issues will not be simple, but it has to be done.
On that day, the single father from Afghanistan, who had been living in Germany for more than 16 years, received notice that his lease near Bonn was being terminated because the owner was apparently planning to use it.
Due to high interest rates and construction costs, the German government is far from achieving its ambitious goal of building 400,000 new homes a year, including 100,000 social housing units.
Peter Kox, managing director of the Deutschen Mieterbund Bonn/Rhein-Sieg/Ahr, told DW: "Almost 50% of people in the large cities of Düsseldorf, Cologne, and Bonn are now eligible for subsidized housing based on their income.
There is a reason why Chancellor Olaf Scholz says that housing is the most important social issue in Germany: It not only affects single-parent families, the unemployed, students, and refugees, but increasingly the middle class as well.
Now, he says, some members who Kox hasn't heard from for years are coming forward looking for a place to live: "For example, because their landlords is trying to get rid of them so that they can rent out the apartment again at a higher price."
At the same time, they warned of a "dangerous scenario in which a crisis in the housing construction sector could trigger a domino effect and cause massive damage to large parts of the economy."
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