Overview
- The Greens, led by Spitzenkandidat Werner Graf, published a detailed package that pairs immediate pilot models with institutional and regulatory reforms to repurpose vacant office space for housing.
- Developer Communits has opened a Sarotti‑Höfe showroom that demonstrates six‑square‑metre private 'Wohnboxen' combined with large communal areas and a headline rent cap of €500 as a low‑cost interim model.
- Key policy proposals include creating an Umbau‑ and Umnutzungsagentur to match owners and providers, opening housing subsidies to conversion projects, and rewriting building rules into an 'Umbau‑Ordnung' to relax retrofit requirements.
- Legal and technical barriers remain: full reclassification to residential use is slow, current rules limit most temporary stays to six months, and the Greens suggest extending allowable tenancy through a Rechtsverordnung and a new usage category to permit longer stays.
- The effort targets roughly two million square metres of vacant office stock as a way to reuse sealed urban land, but retrofit costs, fire safety, sound insulation and accessibility rules will determine how widely the idea can scale and how many people actually gain longer, affordable tenancies.