Berlin tackles housing crisis with a “faster construction” law

The piece of legislation aims to lessen the administrative burden on developers

On Tuesday, 20 August, the Berlin Senate passed a draft bill dubbed the “faster construction law”. Its aim is to speed up housing construction in the German capital by reducing the administrative work involved when private developers seek to build new structures.

What this means is that things like planning and approval procedures are to be streamlined and standardized, review and processing deadlines are to be introduced, and responsibilities between the state and district levels are to be more clearly regulated. 

One important improvement that has been touted by the authorities is the acceleration of granting building permits. Up until now, developers have had to wait several years before getting such a permit. This naturally represented a great hindrance in their work because it complicated their planning processes for projects.

There is some criticism levied at the bill

Berlin has been famously struggling with adequate housing provision in the past two decades.

The draft law seeks to tackle the administrative side of things so that it could free up the bottleneck caused by the excessive bureaucracy that developers have to contend with.

Opposition politicians, however, claim that the proposed legislation will not fix these problems at all.

For example, the district mayor of Pankow, Cordelia Koch (Alliance 90/The Greens), told rbb on Tuesday that the law "completely ignores the problems". Up to now, it was mainly the lack of staff in the offices that had slowed down construction projects and not the amount of paperwork per se.

District mayors are also unhappy about the concentration of powers that the law grants to the Berlin Senate to decide on housing planning.

The legislative package will now be discussed further in the House of Representatives and will then be finally adopted there. It should come into force by December.