Struggling to find an affordable place to live in the city? Temporary living solutions in unused office spaces and urban gaps might be the answer. Transforming vacant city spaces into homes could ease the housing crunch.
Urban areas face an unprecedented housing crisis. Demand for living spaces in cities like Berlin rises; meanwhile, offices and commercial buildings stand empty. The initiative Transiträume offers a smart solution, catering to SDG11: transforming vacant business spaces into temporary living spaces.
Why temporary living? The real estate market is kaputt
The real estate sector faces a perfect storm: rising home office culture, increasing online shopping, and exploding building costs.
Berlin alone has over a million square meters of unused office space, with more expected soon. Additional projects will add another 1.5 million square meters while shopping mall owners struggle to find tenants. This crisis leaves many urban gaps and undeveloped plots idle. The imbalance between empty business spaces and housing demand creates a unique opportunity for innovative housing solutions.
Transiträume’s Approach: Temporary living
Transiträume is a Berlin-based initiative dedicated to making temporary use of vacant spaces a standard practice. They work with property owners, city officials, and the creative community to repurpose empty buildings and plots into living spaces – for a limited time frame. This not only helps ease the housing shortage but also promotes cultural and social engagement in the city.
This approach will immediately reduce pressure on the housing market, offering thousands of people a place to live – unconventional, innovative, and perfectly tailored for a younger urban community.
How It Works: Combine flexible thinking with innovative building techniques
- Identify Vacant Spaces: Transiträume helps identify vacant office buildings and urban gaps that can be converted into temporary homes.
- Create Flexible Living Solutions: Using modular designs and tiny house concepts, they transform these spaces quickly and cost-effectively into livable units.
- Simplify Approval Processes: They advocate for streamlined approval processes, making it easier to convert commercial spaces for temporary residential use.
Benefits of Temporary Living: Fast, easy
- Immediate Relief: Quickly provides housing for young people and families who are struggling to find affordable homes.
- Efficient Use of Space: Makes use of existing buildings, reducing the need for new construction and promoting sustainability.
- Social Impact: Fosters a sense of community and supports local culture by involving creatives in the process.
- Why nobody does it yet: a yesterday mindset won’t solve tomorrow’s problems
Temporary Living: The Conversion of Offices to Homes
Despite the clear benefits, several barriers have hindered the adoption of temporary living solutions:
- Regulatory and Bureaucratic Hurdles: Complex approval processes and strict zoning laws make it difficult to convert commercial spaces into residential use.
- Financial Constraints: Upfront renovation costs and limited funding deter property owners.
- Social Acceptance and Awareness: Public concerns about quality and safety hinder innovative projects.
- Logistical Challenges: Ensuring utilities, amenities, and building code compliance can be daunting and time-consuming.
- Resistance from Property Owners: Owners often prefer long-term tenants over temporary uses, viewing the latter as less reliable.
Conclusion: Let’s do it!
Temporary living in vacant offices and urban gaps is a promising strategy to address housing shortages in cities.
Thanks to initiatives like Transiträume, this innovative approach not only provides immediate housing solutions but also enhances the social and cultural fabric of urban communities.
Message to our politicians: Recommendations and Action Steps
To facilitate the implementation of temporary housing solutions, several policy recommendations are essential:
- Streamlining Approval Processes: Simplifying the approval procedures for repurposing commercial spaces for residential use, akin to the “conversion notice” model from North Rhine-Westphalia, can expedite the creation of temporary living spaces.
- Identifying Public Vacancies: Establishing a centralized database of publicly-owned vacant properties that can be repurposed for temporary housing.
- Temporary Housing Standards: Developing contemporary minimum housing standards tailored to modern “room-in-room” concepts and ensuring legal safeguards for the temporary nature of these conversions.
- Promoting Innovative Housing Concepts: Offering financial incentives and support for innovative housing solutions that utilize existing building stock, fostering a culture of adaptive reuse and temporary utilization in urban planning.
- Pilot Projects and Evaluation: Launching pilot projects in central urban areas, such as Berlin-Mitte, to demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of temporary housing solutions. These projects should be thoroughly documented and evaluated to inform future scalability.
Want a contact to Transiträume? Here!
