Concrete from bureaucracy – how the state smothers building and makes living a luxury

When talking about high construction costs, the public debate likes to point to steel, cement and craftsmen’s wages. The problem, it is said, is the inflation of raw materials. But the actual price explosion does not arise in the concrete mixer, but on the administration desks. It is not the bricklayer who makes living priceless, but the form. The state has from oneSimple basic need – the roof over your head – an impenetrable set of rules that costs more than any building material.

Before the groundbreaking ceremony takes place, a whole apparatus of permits, tests and verifications is already active around the construction project. Each authority requires its own opinion, each office has its own confirmation, and every regulation further improvements. These conditions are piling up to a financial rubble field and devour sums, which of course the buyer pays in the end.

The price of the permit

The time when you could build, plan, calculate and build is over. Today is being built by waiting. Anyone who applies for a construction project is not only facing a flood of paragraphs, but also in front of a system that considers its own slowness to be careful. Each regulation entails an examination, and each examination a re-examination. documents disappear into office hallways,Deadlines are running, interest rates rise.

Any delay by the administration means that the financing is going longer, that loans become more expensive, that investors have to demand higher returns to justify the effort. This spiral excludes all those who want to create living space for normal income. Building for broad layers has become economically unattractive because the bureaucracy is calculable inhas transformed incalculable risks.

The flood of standards as a mousetrap

While the politicians are talking about affordable housing, their ministries produce endless sets of rules that do the opposite. Technical standards change faster than builders can react, and the obligations to provide evidence of energy, sound and fire protection multiply like parasites in a host that cannot defend themselves. Every new standard is a pretext for control, every proof of aNew cost driver.

What started as a standard of quality has turned into a machinery that stops every progress. The builder is obliged not only to build, but to document, to document, to justify. The building act is no longer a craft, but an exam. Bureaucrats measure values that nobody sees and nobody understands, but without their perfect proof no one is allowedstone to be moved.

The dictation of the form

There is a sea of paper between design and completion. Energy certificates, soundproofing certificates, fire protection concepts, environmental reports, drainage plans – all are to be submitted, checked, corrected and resubmitted. What was originally supposed to create trust creates distrust. Each signature is a potential dispute, every missing seal is a reason, the projectto stop.

The process eats up the substance. Planners, engineers and architects are losing their time in committees while construction sites are at a standstill. If you can no longer or will not meet the requirements, give up. Especially smaller developers and cooperatives are suffocating in this form swamp. You have neither the legal resources nor the capital to wait for years for a permit orto respond to subsequent requests.

The triumph of the major investors

On the other hand, those who are big enough, who has lawyers, test teams and project financiers, will get the upper hand. Bureaucracy has optimized the market for itself – it rewards those who understand it and can afford to oil their mills. Large investors simply roll test costs, fees and delays into the final price. And because they know that building for ordinary earners no longer builds a profitbring, you are prepared for what is worthwhile: luxury.

Instead of apartments, investment properties are created. Instead of quarters for families, glass towers for the wealthy are created. And the state watches as if he had never seen it coming. In truth, he is the architect of the problem: his apparatus produces the scarcity, which he then laments politically.

The artificial shortage

Building is no longer a free market, but an authorized project. Land use plans, development requirements, environmental reports – all of this artificially restricts the usable area. Land that could be built on remains unused because they are either too expensive or legally blocked. Every hurdle increases the price, every period increases the uncertainty. This is how land becomes ground and groundA cost factor that no longer can capture building policy.

The more the state regulates, the smaller the number of projects, the greater the shortage and the higher the rents. This simple equation is ignored because it contradicts the political self-image. Instead of wondering whether your own regulatory frenzy is the problem, you call for subsidies – and pour more money into a system that inflates itself.

The expensive self-deception

In the administration, each new checkpoint is considered progress. What politically acts as an increase in quality is economically a fire accelerator. The costs for expert opinions and tests go directly to the price lists of the developers and from there to the invoices of the buyers. The dream of owning a home is no longer a question of interest, but of administrative effort.

Even those who do everything right lose: The smallest formal error, the missing protocol, the incomplete signature can paralyze building applications for months. Sometimes a wrong file format is enough. Behind every technical absurdity is a civil servant who invokes compliance while practiced the opposite of efficiency.

The collapsing of the common good idea

The original sense of state regulations – protection of people, environment and safety – is devalued. He has turned into an ideology of control in which every single case is considered a potential danger that has to be eliminated administratively. This insanity destroys what it is supposed to protect: the common good.

Affordable housing is not a market disruption, but the victim of a planned economy presumption. The state wants to regulate everything and thus produces exactly the catastrophe it claims to prevent. He speaks of social justice, but creates social division because bureaucracy only rewards those who control it – and that’s not the tenants, but the investors.

The inertia of responsibility

Even if politicians occasionally promise bureaucracy reduction, everything remains a rhetorical exercise. The apparatus defends their existence with reference to security, traceability or energy efficiency. The reforms are so sluggish that they produce more commissions, test bodies and expert committees – more from what they should abolish. The state administersHis self-created inefficiency like a sacred relic.

The citizen as the paymaster

In the end, the bill always hits the same thing: the citizen. The one who does not pay any experts, does not commission an appraiser and has no patience for five years of approval. He pays excessive rents, excessive purchase prices and excessive additional costs. The bureaucracy not only robs him of money, but also the hope of a home. When the building becomes a high-risk business, housing loses itssocial sense.

Concrete self-destruction

German building policy is like an architectural suicide in slow motion. The country that could build efficiently fails due to its own regulations. The rules that should protect have paralyzed any initiative. The authorities who should control keep their own power. And the policy that should bear responsibility endlessly discusses solutions that would not be possible without them.would be necessary.

Prices are growing in the cities, and mountains of files are growing in the countryside. The building will suffocate between approval and delivery. While ministries talk about sustainability, they build the opposite – a wall of paper that will not be built behind. Anyone who builds in Germany is not fighting with material shortages, but with state failure. and the price of this fight is visible inevery rental agreement, in every building ruin, in every statistical number about the lack of living space.

The concrete of the future is not cast, it is managed – layer by layer, in file folders and digital forms that make living an exception and the bureaucracy the actual client.