A while ago I came across a strange sentence. I think it was at one of those home-warming parties where people are talking about Farrow & Ball shades inside and admiring the square-foot gas grill outside on the patio: “Living has gotten tough.”
The sentence is strange in that the verb live usually comes without an adverb, at most one lives “for a long time”, “eternally” or “likely”. So why exhausting? The sentence came back to me these days when the country was in heat pump fever and millions of Germans wrote the first farewell letters to their oil boilers and gas boilers.
At that time, the sentence had a different context: the money was cheap, the houses were far too expensive. And those who wanted to live better and more generously, and above all in their own home, either had to tap into their parents’ reserves, inherit them, or earn very, very well. But even then it was stressful, stretching, shortening and calculating, and many of my generation’s fellow sufferers had to bury the dream of owning their own house. Or the dream became a compromise, even whole cohorts moving into shrunken versions of what they once envisioned.
The 0.9 percent interest was of no use if the uninsulated terraced house with 105 square meters and a damp basement was for sale for 890,000 euros. The parties were then usually given by those who had made it – with oh and noisy under the new roof. (They saved on the garden fence, the parents paid for the next ski holiday.) Back then, mostly people stood around the gas grill with big grins, who were happy to say that they “had bought it back in 2014”. Housing was also an insider-outsider issue.
Every house needs a mega update
This time is history, because the effort to do with housing is now taking the form of a pincer attack: interest rates have risen rapidly, prices have only fallen moderately so far. Owning real estate has become even more unaffordable for millions of people. More and more experts are also warning of “interest rate stress” that rising financing costs could overwhelm real estate owners throughout Europe. You can also see all the drama in these three graphs.
All those who have a house or an apartment will also have a huge task to do by 2030. Your house needs a mega update, and Farrow & Ball is no match for that.
Is living exhausting? I also asked Rolf Buch, the boss of Vonovia, that last summer. And he said, "You could say that, yes. The challenge is great.” The EU stipulates that by 2030 the 15 percent of buildings that are currently in the worst energy class would have to be renovated. "But if you don't do that, you will have to pay fines."
At the moment, one percent of the building stock in Germany is renovated every year (Vonovia, meanwhile itself in a crisis, still managed three percent.) "If we continue at this speed," says Buch, "at least seven percent of the entire German stock will be under the punitive regime of the EU will fall.”
When the grandparents move in with the oil boiler
Windows, facades, roofs, insulation, heating, so every homeowner has to make a plan. Whether as owner or landlord. You can scold the EU or find Habeck stupid, that doesn't help much. My advice is: even if there will be grants and exceptions, and we are becoming more and more a republic of hardship cases - it is better to make this plan.
That's not easy these days, because new details of the heating requirements are constantly leaking out, which are a little reminiscent of the Corona rules. Some things are thrown out and are then drafted again, one reads about quotas of 65 percent, transitional periods of two or three years – and those over 80 can even spend the rest of their lives with an oil boiler. It will be interesting to see who decides that the parents will move in at home after all - and will not be deported to the home. (Age takes on a whole new value.) So it takes patience for everything to be law. But even then it gets complicated. Since every building is different, there are only a few off-the-shelf solutions.
The Greens completely underestimated that their plans for combustion engines and heating systems would bring them “very close” to people, as Robert Habeck is said to have put it. Climate protection is no longer abstract as in a survey, in which one naturally finds it great. Or far away, when ThyssenKrupp is experimenting with green steel, or a founder of Bill Gates gets millions for his new CO2-reduced super cement.
Climate protection becomes concrete, complicated, sometimes existential - and exhausting. Habeck's ministry wanted to pull these programs through as if the Greens had a broad mandate from all Germans (rather than 14.8 percent). They did it in such a way that psychologically it became a backlash.
And economically it could become madness: because many people quickly install a last-minute gas heating system or even an oil boiler (which ties up specialists who then do not install heat pumps). Or we experience what Ifo boss Clemens Fuest calls the "Havana effect": In Cuba, as is well known, limousines from the 1950s are kept running with every means available.
This spring, we can safely say, the heart pumps beat to the rattling of the heat pumps in this country. We experienced a lesson in how not to create such a transformation. Better would be longer periods, clear rules - and a little more trust in market forces. (You could also continue to control the replacement of the heaters via the CO2 price.)
However, I can say from experience: Insulating is not that bad. In my brother's house, a half-timbered building, we even installed hemp insulation many years ago - before that I didn't even know what was going on. If the house were to burn down, we've been joking ever since, you won't just scream, you'll grin.
Also read: In the worst case, there is a risk of foreclosure of the apartment
