By Petar Atanacković
On the 1st of January this year there was a very significant legislature change in Germany: non-profit status for entities in the field of social housing was re-introduced. This is a change which is long overdue, because diverse negative impacts of its abolishment in 1989/1990 had already become obvious in the following years.
The act of abolishment at the end of the 1980s followed a series of corruption scandals involving the management boards of several prominent housing entities connected with municipal authorities, trade unions and cooperatives. The new stance toward social housing was very much influenced by the then dominant neoliberal narrative: it was claimed that private entrepreneurs, understood as efficiency epitomized, could do it better, faster and maybe even cheaper than slow, bureaucratic, inefficient and corrupt public actors. The result was quite the opposite: social housing in Germany started dying out as early as the 1990s, and today, 35 years later, we have an acute housing crisis in the country.
Expectations with regard to the re-introduction of this legislature vary from one actor to another, as do estimations of how significant the impact of the new legislature could be. What is certain, however, is that we will be able to see (and estimate) the first effects of the new legislation only in 5-10 years. And however strong (or weak) its effects turn out to be, its re-introduction is nevertheless an excellent signal to all stakeholders in this field and a clear symptom of the paradigm switch in Germany.
Further information: