The question of adequate and affordable housing is the social issue of our time. In addition to rising rental and purchase prices in cities, however, developments vary greatly from region to region. The causes of this development are complex: rising land costs, increased construction prices and more complex building regulations are making the creation of additional supply more expensive or slowing it down. At the same time, several factors are making it more difficult to build up sufficient equity for real estate purchases.
There are already a number of measures in place to promote affordable housing in the long term. However, depending on the target group, market, and financing options, these are differently suited to providing a remedy within a given timeframe. An intelligent and well-balanced mix of suitable measures is required.
The Policy Atlas Renting, Buying, Housing provides an overview of various policy instruments. Brief profiles provide an initial overview of the broad spectrum of possible housing (construction) policy measures. It is intended to provide arguments in the political debate and offer guidance in the search for concrete and practicable solutions.
The following recommendations can be drawn from the assessments of the individual measures:
- For the rental market, only regulatory measures can alleviate the symptoms of the housing shortage in the short and medium term.
- In the long term, it is primarily the construction of new apartments that can lead to a rebalancing of housing markets in tight regions. A targeted expansion of supply should ease the market and prices should fall in the future.
- Legislators can influence this by simplifying the legal framework, speeding up administrative planning through digitalization and the use of concept procedures.
- At the same time, measures to create socially acceptable housing should not have a supply-inhibiting effect. For this reason, measures such as the Berlin rent cap or expropriation efforts must be clearly rejected. Instead, targeted subject-supporting measures such as housing benefit are preferable.
- To promote the purchase of residential property, access to financing should be facilitated and the equity hurdle lowered, e.g. through the granting of subordinated loans or the reduction of ancillary purchase costs.
Read the entire Policy Atlas ‘Mieten, Kaufen, Wohnen’ here as a PDF. Please note, to date the analysis is only available in German.
