Home Story

 A couple of months ago....Hamburg went and made up a rule for a particular region of the city.....that single-family 'new' homes were forbidden from approval for construction.  The hype?  Well....there's only x-amount of space for construction, and it'd be better if folks would take open property left, and ONLY build multi-family homes (apartment/condo type buildings).  

Naturally, the Green Party were a key element in this rule construction, and one of their key members....Anton Hofreiter....chatted up the subject a good bit.  In return, a number of non-Green Party folks got negative about the Hamburg rule, and Hofreiter's discussion going against single-family homes.

I noticed yesterday....of HR (out public TV folks in Hessen), the subject came up again.  This time, via Henning Baurmann, the dean of the architecture department at Darmstadt's University of Applied Sciences.

His commentary went this way....viewing the cost of housing the Frankfurt Rhein-Main region (to encompass Hanau, Darmstadt, Wiesbaden, Frankfurt and Bad Homburg)....regular single-family housing is reaching a point of being unaffordable.

If you wanted to buy a single-family home, with a real yard/garden, and garage....you were talking about 757k Euro (average).....roughly 900k US dollars.  In the Darmstadt area, it's now around 600k Euro (average).  In the Marburg area (about 70 km north of Frankfurt), you'd need around 425k Euro for such a house. 

In his frame of mind....just on pricing alone....affording a single-family dream house is going to be near impossible over the next decade.  If you figure 20-percent down-payment, and the monthly mortgage for 30 years?  You'd need to be successful at whatever trade you had in mind.

But he added this one single extra issue....'home-shaming'.

I had to go and look up the term.  This is basically where you've bought a pretty large lot....put up a decent sized house, then added a serious amount of garden area, with a hut for 'hiding out', then thrown in a two-car garage, and maybe added a kids playground of some sort.  You've probably taken up twice the normal space that a regular guy would have bought.  It's not your normal half-acre mini-home with tiny front-yard, and just a single car garage on the side of the home.  

In simple terms, you've created a huge foot-print which is noticed by others and condemned for over-indulging.  

In my village....about half the houses are in this fashion...but they were already built and standing back in the 1970s and 1980s.  

Then he added the really terrible addition....air conditioning.  Anyone who has been out of the country for twenty-odd years....would remark upon arriving and driving around urbanized areas.....a lot of newer houses seem to have AC units hanging off the roof or in the back-yard.  

If I draw a 1,000 foot circle around my place....there's around six new properties (the older houses were gutted and torn down), with all six of the newer places having either some limited AC situation, or a complete full-blast AC unit.  One housing unit put the AC unit on the roof (it took a fair amount of effort to get it up there) and obviously...it cools the three bedrooms on the second level (not the rest of the house).

Where this is leading to?  Baurmann suggests that there is a rethinking of home priorities and construction going on.  The path of the past twenty years?  It's probably going to come to an end....either voluntarily by people looking at different home ideas, or the city planning folks making strict rules on what can be built (like Hamburg's one suburb rule on multi-family homes).

If you held to the single-family 'dream-home' in the future?  I think this will only lead to people looking for going far out away from urbanized jobs.  Example, you might work in Frankfurt, but live in 60 km east of there in a smaller town like Heigenbrucken, and ride the train 54 minutes to reach your job.  Or maybe you'd live in Wetzler (60 km north of Frankfurt) and ride the train 60 minutes to your job. 

This would lead to a lesser rule-related construction situation, and lesser cost. 

I look over the three-story house that my German father-in-law built in the mid 1960s...for around 25,000 DM's (what would amount to 12.5k US dollars).  Between him, his brother and some donated time by associates....most of the labor was free and done on weekends.  The value of the house sixty years later?  Around 750k Euro (figure around 900,000 US dollars).  If he was alive today....he'd be in total shock.  The real estate guy today would also tell him...if he'd just added another 20 square meters on each floor....it'd be a million Euro home or worth at least two-million DM's.