Braunschweig

Braunschweig's cooperatives are rental cooperatives. A household joins by buying Genossenschaftsanteile (cooperative shares, repaid at face value when a member leaves). At Baugenossenschaft Wiederaufbau a single share costs €150, and further shares stand in for a deposit. In return, members hold open-ended tenancies at a cost-based usage fee and elect the assembly that oversees the board. Nobody owns an individual flat. The one exception proves the rule. The BBG sells worn terraced houses in the Siegfriedviertel only to its own members, who must then stay members for at least ten years.

Organisation in focus

Baugenossenschaft Wiederaufbau eG

Post‑war housing cooperative managing 9,000 homes in southeast Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt.

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The tradition began as philanthropy. On 4 June 1887 a group of wealthy citizens, among them the industrialists Max Jüdel and Albert Natalis, founded the BBG in the old town hall. By 1900 it had its own savings bank, still run for members today. From 1909 it kept its own masons, carpenters and roofers, and between 1919 and 1934 even a brickworks. By the First World War it had built 100 houses for about 2,000 members. A second wave came out of need. The Vereinigte Wohnungsgenossenschaft (VWG) grew from a 1923 house society and a 1926 cooperative for the war-disabled, veterans and bereaved families, which merged in 1941. After the air raid of October 1944 destroyed most of the old town, the city's craft guilds founded HaWo in 1949 to take part in rebuilding. Werder eG followed in 1950 and Wiederaufbau, literally 'reconstruction', in 1951. The BBG alone built 1,894 homes between 1948 and 1962. With 18,095 members in 1962 it was briefly the largest housing cooperative in West Germany.

Today the sector falls into three groups. Two large societies own most of it. The BBG counts 23,023 members and 6,652 homes. Wiederaufbau manages more than 9,000 homes across south-east Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. A middle tier of post-war societies is far smaller: the VWG with 1,363 homes, Bauen + Wohnen with more than 800 in the city, Werder with about 600 and HaWo with fewer than 200. The third group barely exists yet. It is made up of Wohngruppen (community-housing groups that want to build and live together), which the city now seeds with land. Their problems differ. The large societies face retrofit bills and the price of new building. The BBG spent €13.2 million on its stock in 2025 and aims to be climate-neutral by 2045. The small ones have largely stopped building. HaWo has limited its investment to upkeep and modernisation for years. The groups lack land and start-up equity. A BBSR (federal institute for building, urban and spatial research) study of cohousing inside cooperatives found that about half such projects nest inside established cooperatives rather than founding their own. The big two do not always agree either. The BBG recognised the city's 2025 rent index, while Wiederaufbau and the landlords' association Haus + Grund declined to recognise it.

Organisation in focus

Bauen + Wohnen eG

Provides cooperative housing, managing about 1,200 homes, primarily in Braunschweig and neighboring areas.

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Organisation in focus

Werder eG Baugenossenschaft

Provides cooperative housing, managing ~600 homes for 750 members since 1950 in Braunschweig.

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The city treats cooperatives as partners in subsidised building rather than as a programme of their own. In its largest new district, the council says, the city's building cooperatives play an essential role in meeting the social quota. A BBSR study of housing cooperatives as partners of municipalities describes that kind of alliance across Germany. It works where land, subsidy and a quota arrive together, and Braunschweig has begun to write all three into its land policy.

Thorsten Kornblum of the SPD has been Oberbürgermeister (lord mayor) since 2021. On 27 September 2026 he won a second term with 75.6% of the runoff vote against the CDU's Maximilian Pohler. His main housing instrument predates the campaign. The wohnvision – Baulandmodell Braunschweig (the city's land model) was adopted in 2022. It applies wherever new building rights are created for 12 homes or more. Developers must build 30% of the permitted floor space as subsidised housing. The city also buys at least 50% of the land in each new area, at a price net of development costs. It then sells plots by Konzeptvergabe (concept-led tenders, scored on quality and social criteria rather than price). Landowners keep at least a third of the rise in land value. Up to two-thirds pays for roads, nurseries and green space.

Each level of government holds a different lever. The federal parliament writes tenancy law, and it extended the rent brake until 2029. It also created the Bau-Turbo (construction turbo), which lets councils approve homes without first drawing up a new zoning plan, as Deutsche Welle's report on the federal building push explains. Lower Saxony decides where the rent brake applies and pays the main housing subsidy. Its Niedersächsisches Wohnraumfördergesetz (the state housing subsidy act) has governed that money since 2010. The city then tops up state grants by up to €310/m² for rental homes with occupancy bindings. It controls land, zoning, the quota and its own company, Nibelungen.

For cooperatives and groups, the land model holds two concrete promises. City plots can go to new or existing housing cooperatives, building groups and common-good projects. And under the council's land-policy resolution of 23 February 2021, every new city development area must include at least one plot for community housing. Tenders for such plots have already run at the Trakehnenstraße and at Stöckheim-Süd. A federal study of common-good housing policy sees concept tenders like these as a way to keep land out of speculation. The cooperatives' own leaders remain wary of the cost of building on it.

From our library

Gemeinwohlorientierte Wohnungspolitik - eine Studie

Explores how foundations, syndicates and trusts lock affordability via leases, endowments, and concept land allocation.

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On empty space, the city has bought its way in. In April 2024 its development company, Struktur-Förderung Braunschweig, agreed to buy the empty Burgpassage. The site is to hold a school extension, a hotel and barrier-free flats, with completion planned for the end of 2028. The former Karstadt store is to become a Haus der Musik (a music centre). Neither will add social housing, because the Burgpassage flats are to be sold to pay for the school. Office conversions are rare across Germany, as a Gensler analysis of office-to-residential conversion shows. With so little empty office space here, Braunschweig's reserve lies in old retail and in under-used buildings of the kind the Obsolete Stadt research project mapped in Hannover and Hamburg.

Climate targets add a second deadline. In October 2021 the council resolved to make the city greenhouse-gas neutral, if possible by 2030. Its Klimaschutzkonzept 2.0 (climate protection plan), adopted in September 2022, lists 38 measures. They include energy retrofits for almost 30,000 homes and businesses and a 23% cut in final energy demand. Nationally, the reform of Germany's heating law pushes new heating towards renewables. The non-market landlords are where the plan meets real buildings. Nibelungen builds to the KfW Efficiency House 55 EE standard (KfW is the German state development bank) and has begun fitting heat pumps into existing blocks. The serial retrofit at the Wohnungsverein Hagen cooperative shows how a member-owned landlord can renovate whole estates at once.

Nibelungen-Wohnbau is where the city's own housing story starts. The city and the Free State of Braunschweig founded it on 22 July 1926 to fight a shortage of homes. Its first 150 flats went up in the Siegfriedstraße, and by 1929 the Siegfriedviertel held 500. After the war it rebuilt at speed, finishing 4,859 homes by 1956. In 1979 its Frankfurter Straße complex was among the first to plan homes for older and disabled residents into an ordinary block. Its tenants paid an average of €6.24/m² at the end of 2023.

The Nördliches Ringgebiet is the city's largest new district in decades. About 1,300 homes are going up in three phases on under-used land north of the ring road. The Braunschweig practice Ackers Partner Städtebau won the 2013 Europe-wide design competition. The first phase brought about 485 homes. The second added about 500 more from six builders, among them the BBG and Wiederaufbau. In the Lichtwerk-Höfe 2, Nibelungen completed 69 subsidised homes and 18 apartments for supported shared living in 2023. The care association ambet and the disability charity Lebenshilfe provide the support. In June 2024 the council approved the third phase, Jütenring, for about 340 homes.

The Zukunftsquartier Sackring is the BBG's bid to renew its own heartland. The Sackringviertel holds more than 1,200 of the cooperative's homes, many of them no longer barrier-free or efficient. With TU Braunschweig's Institute for Urban Design (Institut für Städtebau und Entwurfsmethodik) and the city, the BBG has drawn up a plan. Small comb-shaped blocks would give way to a continuous street front along the Sackring. Unsealed, park-like green space would cool the quarter in heatwaves and absorb heavy rain. The cooperative has promised members two years' notice before any move, offers to stay in the quarter and subsidised homes in the new buildings. It is a rare case of a cooperative planning its own densification with the people who live there.

Stöckheim-Süd shows the land model at work in the south of the city. Nibelungen finished 73 subsidised homes in the Hillenwiese at the end of 2024. WBS holders there pay €6.40 to €7.80/m², and demand far outstripped supply. The company built them with a shared 3D model and a modular flat kit to save time. Nineteen more, fully funded by Lower Saxony, are due in Berghey 3 in November 2026, with a shared roof garden. The same district also offered a plot reserved for a community-housing group.

Wiederaufbau works at a smaller, quieter scale. In 2007 it turned a listed old building on the Humboldtstraße, beside the TU campus, into student and apprentice apartments with high ceilings and a shared laundry. Its Wohnen mit Zukunft (living with a future) schemes pair ordinary tenancies with care services for older members. At the Helene-Künne-Allee in Broitzem, 44 flats share common rooms and a care partner on site.

The BBG's post-war estates pose the harder question. In the 1960s the Weststadt was the fifth-largest new-build area in West Germany. A TU Dortmund study of large housing estates calls such estates a last bastion of affordable rent. Keeping them affordable while retrofitting them is the work of the next 20 years. Andrej Holm and Christoph Laimer's volume on community living and self-organised building argues that the groups the city now seeds with land are social infrastructure too. Put together, these projects answer the opening question. Europe's most research-intensive region has already built most of a non-market housing system: century-old cooperatives with their own savings banks, a municipal builder and a land model that reserves plots for groups. What it still lacks are new cooperative founders and the patient money to let them build.