The funding pot for the program for climate-friendly new buildings is empty. As the Federal Ministry of Construction in Berlin announced, no new applications for the program can be submitted to the state development bank KfW because funds have been exhausted. So far, more than 18,000 funding commitments have been made and around 46,000 climate-friendly residential units have been funded.
Building Minister Klara Geywitz (SPD) said: “The demand for our new building funding exceeded our expectations. After just three months, the funding pot for the climate-friendly new building was almost empty, so we had to increase it to almost two billion euros.” New applications could be submitted as soon as the 2024 federal budget comes into force.
The leaders of the coalition had reached a fundamental agreement on how billions in holes in the 2024 budget should be plugged. The budget is expected to be passed in the Bundestag in January.
Harsh criticism from the construction industry and the opposition
The construction industry criticized that the “funding disaster” was continuing. Peter Hübner, President of the Main Association of the German Construction Industry, said that by suspending new construction funding, the federal government was proving that it had learned nothing from the mistakes of last year’s funding freeze. “A run for funding at the end of a year is not a success. It shows the great uncertainty in the market. Nobody knows what will happen next and everyone is trying to secure the last leftovers.” It is already a reality that every second company in the housing construction sector is suffering from a lack of orders and the housing shortage in Germany is growing from week to week, said Hübner.
The construction policy spokesman for the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, Jan-Marco Luczak, spoke of the biggest housing construction crisis in Germany in decades. “But instead of taking decisive countermeasures and breaking the downward spiral, the traffic lights argue and delay important decisions in order to make construction faster and more cost-effective. Now the funding for climate-friendly new buildings is also being reversed.” This is a slap in the face to companies and private developers.
