Renewing Europe's Housing by Turkington Richard Watson Christopher

Author:Turkington, Richard, Watson, Christopher [Turkington, Richard, Watson, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447310129
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Published: 2015-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The decline of social housing in West Germany and the rise of the Social City programme (1990–2010)

Since the 1990s, renewal in West Germany has been shaped by several important factors. First, and with the exception of the booming south of the Republic, housing supply reached a high level thus reducing the need for new rental housing production and allowing more focus on the existing housing stock (Friedrichs, 1997).

Second, tax exemption for housing associations was abolished in the late 1980s giving them more operational freedom, which they used to sell parts of their stock. This resulted in a decline in the social housing stock, for example in Cologne, from 116,000 units in 1990 to 53,000 in 2005, and in Hamburg from 300,000 to 130,000 over the same period.

Third, since the late 1990s, social inequality has increased. Average real incomes rose between 1992 and 2003 but have since declined (Grabka and Frick, 2008, 102–4). Inequality is especially evident in the distribution of wealth. While the lower 50 per cent of households account for 4 per cent of total net assets, the upper 10 per cent own 47 per cent of assets (Deutscher Bundestag, 2005, 45), and these processes of widening inequality were continuing in 2011 (OECD, 2011).

Finally, the number of people unemployed grew steadily from 1.6 million in the reunified Germany in 1991 (6.2 per cent) to 2.4 million in 2000 (8.4 per cent) and reached 3 million (10.2 per cent) in 2006 (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2008, 118). As a consequence, the number of people dependent on social assistance increased from 2.04 million in 1991 to 2.9 million in 2004 (IDW, 2006, 79).

Migrants, those not completing nine years of schooling, and single person households are the worst hit by poverty (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2008, 165, 168) and, since they are not evenly distributed, then neither is poverty. Only a few neighbourhoods have high proportions of residents dependent on social assistance, but the number of such areas increased between 1990 and 2010 (Friedrichs and Triemer, 2009). These alarming trends led several German cities to publish ‘Poverty’ or ‘Social’ reports examining social conditions and poverty, and their spatial and non-spatial dynamics. The first report was produced by Bremen in 1987, followed by Stuttgart in 1990, and Munich in 1991: by 2008, almost all larger German cities had published them.

As a response to these growing socio-spatial problems, the federal government launched a programme to alleviate conditions in deprived or ‘multi-problem’ areas, referred to as the joint Federal-Länder programme Social City: Urban Areas Requiring Specific Renewal. The programme started in 1999, with cities required to apply for funding for their deprived areas. By 2010, the number of such areas had reached 603 in 375 different communes with total expenditure on the programme of almost €3 billion.3 The programme’s distinctive characteristic was its integrated approach combining physical and social measures such as neighbourhood management, local job creation, language courses for migrant families and advice on cooking and nutrition. Around one third of the budget was allocated to social measures

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