Erhaltungssatzung or how to Outmaneuver Gentrification

Remember my blog about Schrippe und Weckle? The vice-speaker of the German Bundestag (parliament) Wolfgang Thierse had criticized that since, in Berlin, the newly arriving people from Germany's south-west had ousted the original population around the Käthe-Kollwitz-Platz local bakeries had started to offer exotic schwäbische Weckle instead of the common Berlin Schrippe.

What is called gentrification does not seem to be a problem in the States. Red Baron remembers that New York's Greenwich Village changed into a Schickimicki (trendy) quarter such that its original population moved south of Houston street (to Soho). In the meantime, other NY quarters became gentrified, like Harlem, and nowadays, it seems that the Bowery has become a new trendy quarter. Why should one fight such changes since they are generally linked to upgrading the building stock?

Well, Germany is quite different from the States. Here much of the historical building stock was destroyed during the war, or it continued to disappear in the rebuilding phase in the 50es and 60es. Nowadays, urban building authorities watch lynx-eyed that the remaining historical substance of a city is conserved.

When Red Baron moved to Freiburg fourteen years ago, he was looking for an apartment big enough to get over the loss of a house and garden in Geneva. He finally found a place to live of sufficient size in a part of town called Unter-Wiehre. 

The house was built in 1903 and was declared a listed building after the war. A contractor had bought the house, redesigned the inside with apartments equipped to modern standards, and sold them to people wanting to make Freiburg their home. In this case, the listed entry meant that the developer had to keep the outside of the building untouched except for the new painting but was allowed to fit out the attic that had previously been used as a storage room into an additional apartment, thus making more money. 

Red Baron lived on the second floor, the so-called bel etage. From my office, I looked through a window where the side wings had romanesque arches into the leaves of trees planted along the street. The two downers of the apartment were a missing elevator and a lack of parking space.

Red Baron's apartment on Reiterstraße.
Elisabeth is looking out of the window into leafless trees.
It was the beginning of March 2001.

The latter is an essential argument with which a city's planning and building department may intervene in the fight for the Erhalt (conservation) of a living quarter. The necessity of additional parking space for more and bigger cars is just one sign of replacing the original population. The potentiality for upgrading a quarter will create an appreciation pressure that eventually displaces the population.

Local Erhaltungssatzungen (preservation ordinances) aim to keep the population structure in certain quarters of a town intact but can interact only on the level of urban planning. Hence these ordinances merely present soft means of regulation. They cannot prevent gentrification but will considerably slow down the process in the case of coveted quarters, as speakers from Berlin, Hamburg, and Stuttgart at the symposium demonstrated in their talks.

Freiburg's housing situation is stressed because many people from northern Germany would like to move in. This pushes prices for renting and especially for the ownership of residential apartments. In the final discussion, Baubürgermeister Martin Haag said that he did not think gentrification was a problem for Freiburg yet. He considers the acquisition of residential property a good thing, considering that in Germany, only 43% of the population live in their own homes compared with rates of 69% for the UK and 65% for the US.

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