GMUND (dpa-AFX) - According to Minister President Markus Söder, the existing freeze on housing construction funding in Bavaria will be lifted. The cabinet has "decided" that all municipal and student requests for funding this year will once again be eligible for approval, said the CSU leader after a two-day cabinet meeting in Gmund am Tegernsee. "Up to 400 million euros in extra money" would be available for this purpose.
In the fall, when the new budget is drawn up, a decision will be made "for the next few years on how much we can increase this," Soder emphasized. Starting in 2026, there will be an annual program that will collect all construction requests.
"New" funding actually comes from funds earmarked for 2026
When asked, Soder explained that this was not actually "extra" money, but rather that the approval commitments had been booked in the as yet unfinished budget for 2026. This was possible because the funds would not be needed until next year at the earliest. As the state budget for 2026 has not yet been approved by the state parliament, the responsible ministry had not been able to make any commitments to date. However, the next budget cannot be issued until after the November tax assessment, as Soder said. It is unclear when it will be approved by the state parliament and it may well be after the turn of the year.
In recent months, the halt to housing construction funding, which came as a surprise and caused annoyance to many municipalities, had attracted criticism. The construction of affordable housing had increasingly come to a standstill due to a lack of funding. The industry association VdW Bayern recently announced that a maximum of only 3,000 apartments would be completed by its 505 member companies in the current year. This figure had already fallen by more than a fifth to 3,556 last year. /had/DP/mis
