Offenbach If you want to understand Offenbach, you should follow Matthias Schulze-Böing to the viewing terrace of his workplace. There he sees two worlds: on the horizon the outlines of the skyscraper of the European Central Bank (ECB) can be seen – Frankfurt, the booming center of Germany’s financial world, is on the other side of the Main.
Schulze-Böing directly opposite sees dilapidated and aging houses, but also a dozen construction cranes and numerous construction workers, whose machines emit roaring noise. There is a lot of work going on in Offenbach, the concrete sins from the past decades are to give way to future buildings. The 65-year-old looks satisfied with the new construction projects and sees the city on the right track. “Offenbach no longer has to hide.”
Schulze-Böing is the man of numbers in Offenbach. He is the head of the municipal job center and heads the Office for Employment Promotion, Statistics and Integration. But his optimism and many of the indicators are anything but positive: The city is heavily indebted with almost 350 million euros, unemployment is falling at 8.5 percent, but far above the national average.
GDP is growing below average, the number of academics is declining, companies are hesitant to invest, every eighth inhabitant lives in communities of needs, and there is a lack of housing – Offenbach’s list of problems is long.
It is therefore not surprising that the city is spurned as the Bronx of the Rhine-Main area. In the “Future Atlas” of the economic research institute Prognos, Offenbach has fallen to 236th place in the past years, in 2004 it was 28th. Every three years, Prognos uses 29 indications to determine the economic viability of 401 German counties and independent cities.
A rare descent
The crash is unusual. Offenbach city center is closer to Frankfurt than many parts of the Main metropolis, airport and long-distance train station are nearby. “Normally, regions near dynamic cities are the outlet for their growth pressure,” says business geographer Matthias Kiese from the Ruhr University in Bochum. When rents become too expensive and space becomes too small, companies move to the surrounding area. This attracts specialists and lets the city treasury ring.
At least in theory. The Offenbach district shows how it can work in practice in the Rhine-Main region. Taken together, the 13 municipalities rank 36th in the Prognos ranking – and the trend is rising. How can it be that the city and district have developed so differently?
A look back into the past is worthwhile for an answer. Schulze-Böing says that global developments such as the Offenbach energy transition have hit more than other regions. The French nuclear company Areva (today Orano) employed around 700 people until the closure of its second largest German location in Offenbach in 2017.
The pressurized power plant division of Siemens their engineering location to Frankfurt. 430 employees have left Offenbach. And five years ago, Man ‧Roland went bankrupt, formerly the second largest manufacturer of printing presses. 1,000 people lost their jobs.
Mayor and treasurer Peter Freier (CDU) explains the descent of Offenbach with these “individual business events”. They are always bitter, as the city loses trade tax revenue. There are many small and only small companies in Offenbach. Not even one percent of the companies pay more than 100,000 euros in trade tax, Freier says. This shows how dependent the city treasury is on individual large companies. “If one of the big taxpayers has a cold, we get the flu directly.” And there were many colds in Offenbach.
The most recent bankruptcies are reminiscent of the past century. Offenbach was once famous for its leather goods, and the chemical and metal industries boomed. This mainly attracted guest workers. With the disappearance of the old industry, the city lost many jobs, but the immigrants remained. The often unskilled workers had a hard time finding new jobs.
It is sociologically proven that immigrants migrate to their compatriots’ networks. That is why many poorly trained people headed for Offenbach, especially during the EU expansion. Today there are quarters in the city in which many migrants and the unemployed but hardly any Germans of origin still live. In Northrend, for example.
Modern architecture should attract high-income earners from the Main-Rhine region.
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(Photo: Michael Scheppe, Handelsblatt)
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Kai Vöckler stands out there. In 2011, the urban researcher and doctor of art studies moved to Offenbach with his family after having lived in Berlin-Kreuzberg for 30 years. Vöckler holds an endowed professorship at the University of Design. “Offenbach has the thankless task of successfully integrating poorly trained immigrants,” says the 58-year-old.
He observes that many high-income families, including those with a migration background, leave Offenbach’s problem areas. “Those who create social advancement see better advancement opportunities for their children elsewhere.” Figures from Prognos prove this. According to this, between 2014 and 2017 almost 2,000 people of German nationality left Offenbach, at the same time more than 7,000 people with foreigners Immigrated origin.
160 nations in one city
These figures can be seen in the cityscape: women with headscarves push their strollers over the weekly market on Wilhelmsplatz, people from the Middle East and from all parts of Europe crowd around the stands. In Offenbach, people from 160 nations live together, almost 63 percent of the inhabitants have a migration background – higher than anywhere else in Germany.
“Offenbach has always been a city that was strongly influenced by migration,” says Schulze-Böing. And this population structure, which is characterized by people with poorer education, little prospect of staying and language difficulties – it explains part of the Offenbach crash.
But politics has also made mistakes over many years. She missed upgrading the city center, where the concrete on many buildings is crumbling today. And after the turn of the millennium, location promotion for companies only played a subordinate role in politics, says Markus Weinbrenner, chief executive of the city’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry (IHK). Approval procedures were lengthy, decisions were slow to take, he reports. “You didn’t have the feeling that you could rely on promises from the town hall.”
And so the companies moved only a few kilometers to one of the 13 municipalities in the district. The individual regions may be different, but overall they benefit from Frankfurt as a location. And the departments do their part: the approval process for special buildings only takes 26 working days on average, says District Administrator Oliver Quilling (CDU). “We want to support companies as service providers.”
The building application has also been working digitally for several months. And the municipalities are trying to attract entrepreneurs with lower trade tax rates than in the surrounding area. The fact that the district has rolled out the red carpet for the companies may partly explain the positive development of the districts.
However, the municipalities also had other, better starting conditions: the district was not as industrial as the city, the mix of industries is different, and it is easier to open commercial spaces on the green lawn than in the city bordered by forest and main .
Offenbach also suffers from the debt burden with all his problems. The city is under the municipal rescue umbrella and is therefore subject to budgetary constraints. Reforming the situation does not make it easy for the ruling “Tanzania” coalition of CDU, Greens, FDP and free voters.
“Household security forces us to make unpopular decisions,” says Kämmerer Freier. The most recent example: Offenbach raised property tax B drastically in the spring – from 600 to 995 points. It is not so high in any other city in Germany. But Offenbach needs the money. The reason for this is an actually encouraging development: the population numbers are increasing faster than anywhere else.
Almost 139,000 people lived in the city at the end of June – five percent more than at the end of 2015. Remarkable: According to Prognos data, 42 percent of the births were from the foreign population. But the problems also grow with the population: the city has to build new daycare centers and schools – and invest around 130 million euros by 2020.
Turn through master plan?
With all the problems, Offenbach is not resigned. There is a lot of hope in the “Master Plan 2030”. Before the local elections in 2016, the city adopted a strategy for the future across party borders, which it developed for a year together with citizens, entrepreneurs, associations and the IHK.
The goal: By 2030, space for businesses and 5000 new residents is to be created on around 200 hectares. “The strength of the master plan for urban development is high,” says IHK boss Weinbrenner. “Guardrails have been smashed for 15 years. This ensures clarity for entrepreneurs and investors as well as binding politicians. “
The first changes are already visible: luxury apartments and office properties with a view of the Main have emerged in the harbor, once the symbol for the industrial city. This situation deliberately attracted high-income households that bring money to Offenbach. This has created an attractive neighborhood for many people in Frankfurt. Schools and shops are new, you can be in the neighboring town in a few minutes by S-Bahn.
Offenbach no longer has to hide. Matthias Schulze-Böing (Head of the Office for Employment Promotion, Statistics and Integration)
And rents are lower than in the Main metropolis – but significantly higher than in the rest of Offenbach. The harbor looks like its own quarter in the city, not only structurally, the population structure also seems to be different from the rest. It seems questionable whether the Neu-Offenbach residents and the long-time residents from the immediately adjacent problem area of Nordend mingle.
Further west on the Main, a new service park is being built around the Kaiserlei roundabout. The insurers want to be there Axa and set up the Landesbank Helaba. And further projects are planned in the coming years: The inner city is to be modernized, according to the plan, an innovation campus should attract founders to the northwest.
Schulze-Böing can gaze out over Offenbach on the viewing terrace. Through the master plan, he establishes a “new kind of civic pride”. City researcher Vöckler agrees: “Offenbach’s image is in a blatant disproportion to reality.”
But it will still take years before Offenbach recovers from his tarnished picture. “If a city has a negative image, it will take a long time,” says Professor Kiese. “Sometimes it doesn’t help to rebuild the whole city.”
Read the entire Future Atlas series here:
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