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 the fact that, in Berlin, the newly arrived people from Germany's south-west had ousted the original population, and that local bakeries around the Käthe-Kollwitz-Platz 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 United States. Red Baron remembers that New York's Greenwich Village became a Schickimicki (trendy) quarter, so its original population moved south of Houston Street (to Soho). In the meantime, other NY quarters, like Harlem, have gentrified, 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 United States. Here, much of the historic building stock was destroyed during the war, or continued to disappear during the rebuilding phase in the 50es and 60es. Nowadays, urban building authorities watch like lynx-eyed to ensure 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 with Romanesque arches into the leaves of trees planted along the street. The two downsides 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 at 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 need for additional parking space for more and larger cars is just one sign of the replacement of the original population. The potential for upgrading a quarter will create pressure for appreciation that eventually displaces the population.

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

Freiburg's housing situation is stressed because many people from northern Germany would like to move in. This pushes up prices for renting and, especially, for owning 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, given that in Germany only 43% of the population live in their own homes, compared with 69% in the UK and 65% in the US.

**