This came up in local news (HR, our public TV service in Hessen), and centers on an interesting topic. Housing.
Frankfurt has a serious problem with affordable housing. When you talk about one and two bedroom places.....within a reasonable amount of rent, it's a massive problem to find these in Frankfurt these days.
So, enters LIDL, the discount grocery operation.
They have a strategy of building new grocery stores every quarter, and they want them within the city limits. So, they'd like to buy property....easily getting city permission...to have a multi-floor building.
The first floor would be the grocery operation itself, and the five floors above would be affordable apartments. The first such structure in Frankfurt is a 110-apartment complex.
Expectations? The politicians are happy...LIDL is happy...and the affordable apartment crowd seem happy.
If you look at previous building ideas.....you were buying a property and putting one single grocery onto it....taking only three meters of the height into consideration. So you spend the same amount of money to buy the property....but now put five floors over the top. Cash flow can be figured and you bring in more cash.
The disadvantages? I can only see three at present. First, unless there is constant supervision, you could easily slip from an average working-class neighborhood....to a ghetto situation. That would screw up the whole long-term strategy. Second, no one has said much over the quality angle of the apartment complex. Third, parking? Maybe there is some parking deck under the grocery in the plan, but you never see this mentioned much. The grocery certainly has to have some parking for it's customers....so you wonder about this renter requirement.
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