The controversy over the "reform of the century" is getting sharper

The reactions to the agreement of the government factions of the SPD and the Greens with two popular initiatives on the future orientation of social housing range between "misjudgment" and "a turning point". The key points only became public on Wednesday, and the Hamburg Parliament was already arguing about this topic on Thursday. However, there will only be a vote on this at the meeting in just under two weeks.

That's what the "Century" reform is about: In future, around 1,000 social housing units with a 100-year rent control are to be built in Hamburg every year. This is intended to protect tenants in publicly funded apartments from excessive rent increases for this unusually long period of time. In addition, the sale of municipal apartments and residential land in the Hanseatic city should be fundamentally excluded in the future. "In return, the popular initiatives have promised to end the referendum process," it said.

The housing industry associations in the Hamburg Alliance for Housing - the BFW Landesverband Nord, the Hamburg Landowners' Association, the IVD Nord and the Association of North German Housing Companies (VNW) - issued a joint statement on this. “The compromise with the popular initiatives will not result in more affordable housing being created. Instead, it significantly jeopardizes the construction of subsidized and privately financed housing on the city's land. In this respect, we consider it a dramatic mistake," it said.

SPD faction leader Dirk Kienscherf sees it differently: "With the agreement that has now been reached and significantly more funding, we are opening a new chapter in our successful social housing policy. Hamburg is once again a driving force in Germany.” The special responsibility of the state with regard to ensuring adequate housing for all groups of the population also belongs in the Hamburg constitution. Especially in connection with energy-related renovations, it will be important that living space really remains affordable. His counterpart, Dominik Lorenzen from the Greens, resorted to a current crisis vocabulary: "The results mean nothing less than a turning point in land policy."

Anke Frieling, urban development policy spokeswoman for the CDU parliamentary group, does not want to believe that: "The compromise found by the SPD and the Greens with the popular initiatives is the entry into a socialist housing and housing concept. 100-year rent control, no sale of urban areas and ever-increasing climate protection goals are massively endangering the urgently needed housing construction in Hamburg. She called on the SPD and the Greens to enter into a broad discussion with everyone involved before adopting it. The FDP has a similar criticism: “According to the Red-Green Party, this rotten compromise is intended to solve the housing problems in this city. The opposite will be the case! Instead of looking for answers to high land prices, rising material costs and the increasingly urgent shortage of skilled workers together with the industry, red-green ties this millstone around the neck of the housing construction companies, ”said the deputy FDP state chairwoman Katarina Blume.

After a nationwide primary school education comparison, the members of the Hamburg Parliament also argued on Thursday about the city-state's performance. Hamburg's elementary school students took sixth place overall in the IQB education trend 2021 presented in mid-October - the best result achieved so far. "Not a single federal state has made such a huge leap," said Senator for Culture Carsten Brosda (SPD), who represented the school senator at the lectern in the current hour. The opposition criticized that it was not decisive which place you occupied. You have to look at the concrete results - and they are too bad to rest on your laurels. Left-wing MP Norbert Hackbusch complained that humility was appropriate. The CDU MP Birgit Stöver gave an example from the statistics: In the area of ​​reading skills, 17.7 percent of Hamburg's fourth graders did not even reach the minimum standard. That's no reason to be happy, said Stöver.