Dortmund

Dortmund's cooperatives are rental cooperatives of the classic German kind. A household joins by buying Genossenschaftsanteile, member shares that are repaid at face value on leaving. In return it gains a lifelong right to rent at cost-covering prices, and no member can sell a flat on. Spar- und Bauverein eG is the largest society. It managed 11,849 flats in 2025 at an average rent of €5.67 per square metre, with vacancy of just 0.1%.

Organisation in focus

Spar- und Bauverein eG Dortmund

Dortmund's largest housing cooperative, founded by miners and railway workers in 1893.

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The tradition was born in a pub. On 4 March 1893 miners, railway workers and postal staff met in the inn Zum Schwarzen Raben and founded Spar- und Bauverein as self-help against the housing shortage. GWG Hombruch-Barop followed in 1896 and the Hörder Spar- und Bauverein, today gws-Wohnen Dortmund-Süd, in 1897. Pit owners built alongside them. The Alte Kolonie Eving of 1898 housed recruited miners in 270 flats, and in the 1970s a tenant initiative stopped its half-begun demolition. Most company housing took another road. Colliery estates passed to Ruhrkohle, and Hoesch's steelworks flats followed when Krupp took over Hoesch, a chain that ends in today's listed portfolios. A history of German housing co-operatives shows how such member-owned societies came through Nazi suppression, division and reunification.

Today the sector falls into two clusters with different problems. The century-old societies, Spar- und Bauverein, gws, GWG Hombruch-Barop and the Gemeinnützige Wohnungsgenossenschaft Dortmund, own most of the city's cooperative flats, as the tenant association's overview notes. Their bind is money. Franz-Bernd Große-Wilde ran Spar- und Bauverein until 2025. He told a trade journal that Dortmund's 'comparatively low rent level' makes even €13 to €14 per square metre too little for new build to pay. Decarbonising his society's stock by 2045 would cost €900 million to €1 billion, against €300 million to €350 million it could finance. The second cluster is small and young. Resident groups such as FörderturmWohn eG, which took its terraced houses into ownership on an Erbbaurecht (a long ground lease), are listed in the city's register of community housing projects. Their bottleneck is land. The Syndikat-style group Buntes Wohnen, modelled on the Mietshäuser Syndikat federation that takes houses permanently off the market, lost a former vocational school on Sckellstraße to an investor.

Lighthouse project

WIR aufm Revier

A former police station converted by a resident cooperative.

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The city treats cooperatives as partners rather than as a programme. It passes on state subsidy, occasionally sells or leases a plot to a group with a strong concept, and works with the societies on inclusive projects. A federal study of cooperatives as partners of municipalities maps the wider German toolkit of land, guarantees and alliances. Lessons from Germany's shared-housing models show what cities add when they go further, with cheap land and incubator support. Dortmund has so far done this case by case, and the question of how far to go is now political.

Dortmund's politics shifted in autumn 2025. Alexander Kalouti of the CDU won the mayoral run-off with 52.92% and became the first Oberbürgermeister (lord mayor) from outside the SPD since 1946. The council has no coalition, so housing measures pass on shifting majorities. On his first day Kalouti called growth a sign of an attractive city, adding that 'of course we must also create the housing for these people'. His administration's headline instrument is the Bau-Turbo, a federal fast-track for permits. The council wrote it into local rules on 27 March 2026, asking for agreements that replace a full land-use plan within three months. Early projects already account for 350 homes.

Each level of government holds a different key. Berlin sets the tenancy framework and most of the money. The Bundestag extended the Mietpreisbremse to the end of 2029 and on 9 October 2025 added the Bau-Turbo to the Baugesetzbuch, the federal building code. The BMWSB, the federal ministry for housing, urban development and building, is committing a record €23.5 billion to social housing up to 2029. North Rhine-Westphalia decides where caps apply. Its Mieterschutzverordnung, the state tenant-protection ordinance, has covered Dortmund since March 2025 and limits in-tenancy rises to 15% in three years. The city then turns state money into buildings. Its housing office started 2025 with a €40 million allocation and secured €109.5 million for 604 subsidised homes.

Help aimed at cooperatives is modest but concrete. In 2020 the city offered two municipal plots, including the former Hörde fire station, to housing-project initiatives, project cooperatives and Baugemeinschaften, groups that build together for their own use. Buyers could choose purchase or Erbpacht, a ground lease that keeps the land in public hands. For larger developments the city proposed in 2021 to raise the share of subsidised homes from 25% to 30%. The 2026 housing report shows why that matters. Without new subsidy, the price-bound stock could fall to about 11,700 flats by 2035, and holding it steady would take about 800 new subsidised homes a year.

Empty offices are the first place the Bau-Turbo is being used. The pilot case is an investor's plan for about 200 homes in a 1970s office block beside the Westfalenpark, the former VEW energy headquarters. A first register of vacant building plots lists 640 gaps with room for 3,300 homes. A 2012 ban on Zweckentfremdung, the misuse of homes for other purposes, makes long vacancy and demolition subject to permission, and short-term lets have needed a Wohnraum-Identitätsnummer (a registration number) since 2022. The Nordstadt, the dense district north of the station, is the hard case. The city counted 130 neglected 'problem properties' there in May 2026 and wants a purchase fund seeded with €865,000; the council decides in November. A federal study of reusing post-war office blocks for housing argued years ago that such conversions are cheap and save embodied carbon.

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REDEVELOPMENT - Reusing unprofitable and functionally deficient 1950s to 1970s inner-city office buildings for residential purposes – possibilities and chances

Converting post-war office blocks into housing.

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Climate targets run through the same buildings. The council has set climate neutrality for 2035 and is drawing up its kommunale Wärmeplanung, the municipal heat plan, in a city where about 76% of heat still comes from natural gas. Germany's reshaping of its housing and heating rules pushes owners towards renewable heat. Non-market landlords are the vehicle. DOGEWO21 spent €20.1 million on energy measures in 2025, and in neighbouring Hagen the Wohnungsverein has shown how a cooperative can renovate serially across its stock.

The argument over how far the city should go is loud. The Mieterverein Dortmund, the city's tenant association, and the local trade unions want 50% of homes on municipal land to be social housing, and they oppose any sale of DOGEWO21 stock.

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Mieterverein Dortmund und Umgebung e.V.

The tenant association driving the 50% social-housing demand.

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Property owners read the same figures the other way. Thomas Bach is chief executive of the landlords' association Haus & Grund Dortmund. When the rent brake arrived, he argued that it 'prevents urgently needed investment in the housing stock and worsens the housing shortage in the long run'. The city's own planning chief, Stefan Szuggat, locates the bottleneck in the balance sheet instead. Presenting the 2026 housing-market report, he said simply that 'financing is a problem for building'.

Spar- und Bauverein still builds the way the miners intended, for members rather than buyers. Its Klimaschutzsiedlung Ewige Teufe in Hombruch, named after the miners' word for depth, was planned with 37 new flats and €7.8 million of public subsidy, for completion by summer 2024. In 2025 the society turned a former evening school in the Unionviertel into 22 flats. A new chief executive, Christian Jaeger, formerly a board member of Bremen's GEWOBA, took over on 1 October 2025.

Lighthouse project

Klimaschutzsiedlung Ewige Teufe

Spar- und Bauverein's climate-protection estate in Hombruch.

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DOGEWO21 is the municipal counterweight, founded in 1918. New tenants pay €7.47 per square metre, against a city average for re-lets of €8.97, and 3,061 of its homes are subsidised. Its own pipeline is thin, with 12 subsidised flats at Am Sattel in Huckarde due in 2026. Tenant groups want the city's company to build far more.

PHOENIX See is the city's most visible reinvention. The Hermannshütte steelworks in Hörde became a 24-hectare lake, opened in 2011, and around 2,000 homes now line its shores. Social housing was written into the development plan only in 2013. On the lake's edge, the multigenerational group WIR auf Phoenix rents 20 flats from gws-Wohnen under a cooperation agreement, proof that the new waterfront has room for cooperative living.

Organisation in focus

gws-Wohnen Dortmund-Süd eG

Hörde's century-old cooperative and partner of the WIR auf Phoenix project.

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WIR aufm Revier shows what a small cooperative can do with a building nobody wanted. Hörde's old police station, rebuilt in the 1960s and later a refugee shelter, has belonged to the Ko-Operativ eG since 2019. It opened 23 flats, 11 of them subsidised, in 2023. MOSAIK eG, from the same register, is creating 17 flats for residents with and without support needs. These are the project cooperatives that the 2020 plot tender was designed to attract.

The Karlsquartier on the Westfalenhütte, which the city calls Europe's largest industrial brownfield, is the next test of scale. It plans 800 homes, 200 of them subsidised, around a new green ring on former steelworks land. Whether any go to cooperatives is still open.

Dortmund, then, has pieces that many cities lack: century-old societies with low rents, a municipal landlord of its own, land still in the plan and a steelworks turned into a lake. What the miners of 1893 built by pooling savings now needs pooling on a larger scale, because a society's balance sheet alone no longer pays for new homes at Dortmund rents.