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The municipal construction company GBO receives eight plots of land from the city for new buildings in Bieber-Nord, Bürgel-Ost and An den Eichen. This is the first time that apartments on the second funding path are to be built.
The Offenbach magistrate’s decision on Tuesday sounds pretty simple. The city stores eight properties in Bürgel-Ost, Bieber-Nord and An den Eichen in the capital investment of the non-profit building company (GBO). This increases its capital to six million euros and can handle additional construction projects amounting to 31.5 million euros with loan financing of 80 percent. Several hundred apartments could soon be built. “That has not happened for decades,” says Mayor Felix Schwenke happily.
Behind this, however, is “a long and intensive planning process,” as the Social Democrat put it. The result of the three-year process, subject to the approval of the city council on February 11th, is more than satisfactory to the mayor. After all, when he voted, he promised to create more affordable housing. There weren’t many alternatives. The clammy municipality cannot buy occupancy rights. Handing over the land to GBO on a long lease was not an alternative because the construction company would not have been able to take out the larger loans that are necessary for major projects.
After many phone calls with other municipalities, Schwenke came across the storage of urban land in the municipal construction company. “This model also had to be subjected to numerous legal checks, for example with regard to European state aid law, public procurement or tax law,” says GBO managing director Annette Schroeder-Rupp. 150 to 200 apartments are to be built on each of the vacant lots. “It will be the task of the GBO’s supervisory board to decide on appropriate specifications as a voluntary commitment for the implementation of the building project and for the consideration of publicly funded apartments”, explains Schwenke the further procedure. How many apartments are ultimately funded depends, among other things, on the amount with which each apartment is subsidized.
Schröder-Rupp hopes to be able to submit the first building applications at the beginning of next year, so that the first excavators can start rolling in the third quarter of 2022. “We want to build not only cheaply, but also qualitatively,” explains the GBO managing director. So there would be no high-rise buildings. Another new feature is that the subsidized apartments are for households that are eligible for the second subsidy channel. The approximately 3800 subsidized apartments in Offenbach, 2150 of which belong to the GBO, are all on the first funding path, i.e. classic social housing. “With the eight properties we want to make an offer to people with middle incomes,” says Schröder-Rupp. But the Offenbachers, who are eligible for the first funding route, are not excluded, emphasizes Schwenke. They too would have the chance to get one of the new apartments. “We look at where the housing pressure is greatest,” says the OB, referring to poor seniors and poorer, larger families.
In the case of a one-person household, the income limit for the housing entitlement certificate has not been raised for a long time. It is currently 16,351 euros net. For a family of four, it is 36,085. How many people would be eligible for the second funding path has not yet been recorded by the housing office, the OB reports. So far there has been no offer for this.
The government coalition of the CDU, Greens, FDP and Free Voters is also satisfied: “The criteria agreed with the OB, which provide for the allocation of properties primarily to Offenbach residents, are particularly gratifying.” The coalition also wrote that properties that the city had given a long lease, should in principle remain in the possession of the city. For a long time, leasehold properties were sold very freely. That should no longer happen in the future.
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