Germany Needs 50% More Homes to House Migrants

The German government expects 800,000 migrants to flee to Germany from the Middle East by the end of 2015 and they will need homes. With rising house prices and high density already on the territory of Europe's leading economy, the country's task to accommodate these new migrants will not be easy.  The full report is available here.

Ramping up construction and public spending: Germany will have to increase the pace of construction for public housing from the current 240,000 to 400,000 new homes a year in order to handle the increasing influx of migrants from the Middle East. There have been calls to develop the private sector’s role in the construction. The government may have to cut rents in public social housing in order to ease the burden, nevertheless billions of public euros will have to be diverted into this project.

Desperate times, desperate measures: There has been a fair amount of creative political thinking in Germany over the last months. When the authorities of Olpe seized a hotel by law to accommodate arriving migrants in February, they set a precedent, which has inspired similar suggestions by federal representatives in Hamburg. A Munich-based economic think tank has also suggested dropping the minimum wage to help the job market absorb vast number of arriving migrants. At the same time, it looks like Germany, Europe’s champion for a carbon-free future, may be forced to drop construction standards on energy efficiency to bring down the costs.

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