SPIEGEL ONLINE INTERNATIONAL: While home prices in Germany's urban areas are skyrocketing, the opposite trend can be seen in less densely settled regions. There, shrinking populations are creating housing surpluses and vacant homes in a trend that experts say will soon spread across the country as its population grows grayer.
For now, things in the Altenwalde district of Cuxhaven, a port city of 52,000 residents in northeastern Germany located near the mouth of the Elbe River, still look prim and proper in that sort of Playmobil tidiness that Germans love. The little houses are packed in close together into the kind of orderly settlement one can find in thousands of places across Germany.
One-third of all of the residential structures in western Germany are single- or two-family homes built between 1950 and 1978. These were the dream houses meant to offer their owners peace, quiet and financial security. But now Germany is undergoing a generational change. There are fewer young people and more old ones, and grandma's little house has gone from being a wise investment to a money loser.
One can already see the signs of this tectonic shift in Altenwalde. It isn't everywhere, but it still can't be missed. There are houses with empty window panes, closed shutters, empty driveways and overgrown gardens. These are symptoms of being vacant or of only being inhabited by a single, usually elderly person who cannot afford to, doesn't have the energy to or simply doesn't care to keep things up. Indeed, demographic change has arrived in Germany's famously idyllic suburbs. » | Christian Tröster | Friday, November 09, 2012
