page_title: Public housing
section_title: Germany
hierarchical_section_title: Public housing / Europe / Germany
caption_attribution_description: English: Apartment Houses build by Bruno Taut 1926-31
context_page_description: Public housing is a form of housing tenure in which the property is usually owned by a government authority, either central or local.
  Social housing is any rental housing that may be owned and managed by the state, by non-profit organizations, or by a combination of the two, usually with the aim of providing affordable housing. Social housing is generally rationed through some form of means-testing or through administrative measures of housing need. One can regard social housing as a potential remedy for housing inequality.
  Private housing, by contrast, is a form of housing tenure in which the property is owned by a private developer or by non-profit organizations and such, as opposed to public housing, in which a government authority usually owns the property.
  Although the common goal of public housing is to provide affordable housing, the details, terminology, definitions of poverty, and other criteria for allocation vary within different contexts.
context_section_description: Between 1925 and 1930 Germany was the site of innovative and extensive municipal public housing projects, mostly in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Frankfurt.  These housing estates (Siedlungen), were made necessary by the dreadful living conditions of pre-war urban tenements.  The right to healthy housing was written into the 1919 Weimar Constitution, but few homes were built until the economy stabilised in 1925.
  The new German housing estates were low-rise, no more than five stories, and in suburban settings.  Residents were provided access to light, air, and sun.  The size, shape, orientation and architectural style of Germany's public housing were informed by the recent experience of the Viennese, the Dutch, the anti-urban Garden City Movement in Britain, the new industrialized mass-production and pre-fabrication building techniques, the novel use of steel and glass, and by the progressive-liberal policies of the Social Democrats.
  In 1930 in the industrial city of Dessau, the Laubenganghäuser ('Houses with Balcony Access') were designed by Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer for a housing cooperative that wanted apartments it could let for no more than a quarter of the occupant's income. Working on a tight budget inspired money and space saving innovations, such as using balcony walkways for access to the apartments rather than having internal corridors and clever use of the internal space in the 47 m² (510 sq ft) apartments.
  Architects Martin Wagner, Bruno Taut and others built the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates, now a World Heritage Site, consisting of thousands of homes built in and around Berlin, including the Horseshoe Estate (named for its shape), and Uncle Tom's Cabin estate (named after a local restaurant). In Frankfurt the architect Ernst May lead the New Frankfurt public housing project, in which over 12,000 apartments were built 1925–1930. May ran his own sizable research facility to investigate, for instance, air-flow in various floorplan configurations, construction techniques, etc.  The Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky applied the principles of Taylorism to the kitchen workspace and developed the Frankfurt kitchen while working for Ernst May.
  Beyond technical research May also published two magazines and embarked on a significant public-relations project, with films and classes and public exhibitions, to make Neues Bauen acceptable to the public.  In the late 1920s the principles of equal access to Licht, Luft und Sonne ('light, air and sun') and the social effects of a state-guaranteed Existenzminimum ("minimum subsistence level") became a matter of lively popular debate all over Germany.  One indirect result of this publicity was the American housing movement: a young Catherine Bauer attended one of May's conferences in 1930, and wrote her influential book Modern Housing (1934) based on research done in Frankfurt and with Dutch architect JJP Oud.
  Increasing pressure from the rising Nazis brought this era to an end in 1933.  A majority of the German public housing experts had social democrat or communist sympathies and were forced out of the country.
  In East Germany, the communist administration built monolithic Plattenbau apartment blocks and estates. Most new residential buildings from the 1960s onward were built in this style, as it was a quick and relatively cheap way to solve the country's severe housing shortage, which had been caused by wartime bombing raids and the large influx of German refugees from further east.
caption: Bruno Taut, Uncle Tom's Cabin Estate, Wilskistrasse, Berlin.
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