German Construction Minister Clara Givets has urged people to move from big cities to suburbs or to smaller towns due to a housing shortage. “The potential is particularly great in small and medium-sized cities, because there are also day care centres for children, schools, shops and doctors there,” Givets told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung.
“There are almost two million empty homes in Germany, but the demand is very high in our big cities or urban areas,” she said, announcing her intention to present a strategy by the end of this year to push for the use of empty homes to fill the demand. The minister noted that in the past many people left their hometowns to look for work in big cities, and said: “Now working from home and digitalization are creating completely new opportunities to live and work in rural areas. We want to promote this.”
In Germany, the pace of new housing construction is not meeting the demand for housing. When the current German government took office three years ago, it pledged to build 400,000 homes annually.
Last year, only 295,000 homes were completed in Germany.
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