Essen

Essen's cooperatives are rental cooperatives. A household buys a Genossenschaftsanteil (the share that makes it a member and gives it a right to a flat), then pays a cost-based user charge instead of a market rent. The share is repaid on leaving, so nobody profits from rising values. Each member has one vote and a lifelong right of residence. Since 2022, KfW (the German state development bank) has lent members money to buy such shares, writing off 15% of the loan.

The movement grew beside the mines and mills. While Krupp and the collieries built company housing, workers and clerks formed their own building societies. Wohnbau eG has let flats in Essen since 1903. GEWOBAU, now the city's largest cooperative, celebrated its centenary in 2006. Wohnungsgenossenschaft Essen-Nord was formed in 1942 by merging five older cooperatives, the oldest founded in 1914. A parallel foundation tradition began in 1906, when the Margarethe Krupp-Stiftung was set up for housing welfare.

Organisation in focus

Wohnbau eG Essen

A cooperative active in Essen since 1903, with about 4,560 flats.

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Organisation in focus

GEWOBAU Wohnungsgenossenschaft Essen eG

Provides affordable housing and runs charitable foundation for community and youth projects.

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Today the sector falls into three clusters. The century-old cooperatives are the heavyweights. Wohnbau eG alone has 4,560 flats and 6,400 members, and Essen-Nord manages 3,600 flats across Essen, Düsseldorf, Ratingen, Dortmund and Dülmen. Their challenge is the stock: post-war blocks that need deep energy retrofits and lifts for ageing members, paid from rents they promise to keep low. Theresia Theurl of the University of Münster lists the same national pressures in her analysis of housing cooperatives in challenging times: construction costs, slow permits, scarce cheap land and demanding climate standards. The second cluster is small and new. Raumteiler eG is planning a multi-generational house where every adult resident is a member with a vote, mixing freely financed and subsidised flats. Its hurdle is land and start-up equity, not maintenance. A BBSR (the federal institute for building, urban and spatial research) survey of communal living in cooperatives found such project cooperatives multiplying across Germany. The third form is the foundation landlord, which holds land for residents but has no members at all.

City policy treats cooperatives as partners, not as a programme of their own. Essen lets plots on Erbbaurecht (a ground lease: the city keeps the land and charges an annual fee), and cooperatives can draw state subsidy like any landlord. A BBSR study of cooperatives as partners of municipalities, built on ten case studies, shows how much further that partnership can go when land, subsidy and planning are bundled.

From our library

Bündnis für bezahlbares Wohnen und Bauen – Wohnungsgenossenschaften als Partner der Kommunen

Explores German housing cooperatives’ pivotal role, detailed case studies, and innovative municipal partnerships.

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Essen answers the crisis with building, not rent control. Thomas Kufen of the CDU, mayor since 2015, won a run-off on 28 September 2025 with 57.07% of the vote. His administration works from the council's 2016 housebuilding strategy, the Essener Konzept zur Förderung des Wohnungsbaus, which leans on land supply. A 2022 action plan adds barrier-free homes for older residents. The new demand analysis to 2035 now names the targets: cheaper flats for low and moderate incomes, small homes for single people, and family flats at moderate rents.

The money comes from Düsseldorf and Berlin. North Rhine-Westphalia's MHKBD (the state ministry for home affairs, local government, building and digitalisation) runs the öffentliche Wohnraumförderung, the state's subsidised-housing programme. In December 2025 it raised the 2023-2027 budget to €12 billion, helped by larger federal transfers. In 2025 it approved €2.4 billion for 13,356 homes, including 8,037 new rental flats. The state also draws the rent-brake map, and it left Essen off. The city holds the remaining levers: land, planning permission and its own company. Allbau invests over €40 million a year in its stock. It also builds small subsidised schemes, such as 20 subsidised flats on Hanielstraße in the north.

Tenant groups say subsidy cannot outrun expiring covenants. The Deutscher Mieterbund NRW (the state tenants' association) warns that around 110,000 subsidised rental flats in the state will lose their covenant by 2030. Its chair, Hans-Jochem Witzke, wants a Landeswohnungsgesellschaft (a state-owned housing company) that builds and keeps homes affordable for good, as Lower Saxony and Bavaria have done. Support aimed squarely at cooperatives is modest by comparison: KfW share loans for members, ground leases on city land, and the same state subsidy any landlord can claim.

The empty floor space is starting to get a policy answer. Since 2025 the city has paid part of the cost when owners convert empty shops on the edge of the city centre. Two city-appointed quarter architects advise owners free of charge, and flats are among the eligible uses. The Zukunft.Essen.Innenstadt plan for the centre commissions a study on turning former offices, shops and commercial units into homes. Private owners are moving too. The 1970s Ruhrturm, once the headquarters of Ruhrgas, is being replanned with flats and micro-apartments. The ifo Institute's work on home working and the future of offices expects office demand to shrink, which would free more floors.

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Homeoffice und die Zukunft der Büros: Flexibilisierung, Reduzierung und Umnutzungspotenzial

Hybrid work leaves 5.8m m² excess offices; only 30% convertible, yielding ~60k urban apartments.

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Climate policy runs through the same buildings. Heating accounts for over 50% of Essen's final energy use, and more than 75% of that heat still comes from fossil fuels. The heat plan targets climate-neutral heat by 2045, with district heating in the dense centre and north and mine water, industrial waste heat and geothermal energy among the sources. Allbau's and the cooperatives' contiguous blocks are exactly where district heating connections pay off. Each resident already has 0.0 m² of living space. A study from Europa-Universität Flensburg, TU Dortmund and the Wuppertal Institute, Housing for millions without new buildings?, argues that better use of under-occupied homes can house people without sealing new land.

Margarethenhöhe is Essen's founding lesson in patient land. Margarethe Krupp gave about 50 hectares and 1 million marks in 1906, and Georg Metzendorf designed what the foundation calls probably Germany's first garden suburb from 1909. Its two-storey houses had central heating and bathrooms when most miners had neither. More than 40 per cent of its buildings were badly damaged in the Second World War. It was rebuilt, and much of it has been a listed monument since 1987. The foundation still lets the homes today, proof that land held outside the market can keep a neighbourhood stable for over a century.

Lighthouse project

Margarethenhöhe

Germany's first garden suburb, still let by the Margarethe Krupp-Stiftung after more than a century.

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Allbau is the municipal version of the same idea. Founded in 1919 as the Allgemeiner Bauverein, it houses more than 40,000 people and has sat in the city's property holding since 2020. Its PIER 78 building of 78 flats was the first new build in the Universitätsviertel grüne Mitte, a quarter on former railway land between the centre and the university. The green-and-blue corridors of that quarter helped Essen become European Green Capital 2017, the first mining city to hold the title.

ESSEN 51. is the next test at scale. On former Krupp industrial land in the Krupp-Gürtel, the Thelen-Gruppe plans about 1,700 homes around a new water and green belt, served by a new Citybahn tram line. "We are creating a green district and largely doing without car traffic," says its managing director, Wolfgang Thelen. The first homes are due in 2027. The city's announcement does not say how many will be subsidised or cooperative, and that is the open question.

GEWOBAU shows what a century-old cooperative does beyond the flat. Its Ganz nah dran new build in Schönebeck houses 24 people living with dementia in two shared households of 12. The cooperative also runs neighbourhood centres in Huttrop and Bergerhausen, and in 2006 it founded the WohnLeben foundation for youth and neighbourhood projects. Wohnbau eG and Essen-Nord carry the same member model across thousands of retrofitted post-war flats.

Organisation in focus

Wohnungsgenossenschaft Essen-Nord eG

Provides affordable housing to members across NRW cities with thousands of flats.

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Raumteiler eG represents the newest layer: a self-organised cooperative planning one multi-generational house, with ecological construction and a vote for every adult resident. A national study from TUM and the German Youth Institute on collaborative activation and re-use of existing buildings shows groups like this turning old farmsteads, schools and industrial halls into shared homes. Essen has plenty of such buildings. The city once let a family foundation hold its land for the long term. Now its members could do the same.