It was probably the last ten years. My architect friend Matt must have reminded me that we had plenty of space a dozen times. But I’m human, you know? I forget. That is, until yesterday.
Yesterday, Matt showed me the numbers. The numbers are simple to grasp: Since 1950, the number of flats in Germany has tripled. In that same time frame, the population has grown by 20%. Technically, that’s all you need to know. Why can’t we fit 20% more people into 200% more flats?
That’s where the debate opens the door to nuance. And more numbers, of course. Like the average square meters of housing per person going up by 37% in the last 30 years alone. Or the share of one- and two-person households going from 45% to 75%. Or the fact that most people live in or near big cities, whereas the countryside has space but not enough job opportunities. And so on.
Still, the original two items on the scale remain: 43 million flats and houses, 83.5 million people. If we put at least two folks in each home, we’d be set. Renovations pending, of course…
This isn’t to say that housing in Germany is an easy problem to solve. It’s to show that the problem looks differently than I had originally imagined. I was looking at it like a graph in a two-dimensional plane: Build more houses, cover more people. Every time I saw an article about Germany failing yet again to meet its annual construction target of 400,000 units—we built only 251,000 in 2024—I nodded and said, “Look, there’s the problem.” But actually, the graph leading us to the solution of this challenge lives in an eight-, nine-, who-knows-how-many-dimensional space. There are different arrows pointing in all kinds of directions—and the first two, number of people and number of apartments, are the least relevant in helping us find the target.
Now that I’ve admitted this, I can have a better conversation about the subject. Not a perfect one, by any means, but hey, better is what counts.
You won’t always think twice of your own accord. But when life and friends point you to a new view, try not to knock away their hand. Do it on your own time, but go there. Find one extra angle. It might be the one you’ll end up living in—and who knew there were so many spaces ready to house our minds?
