Gelsenkirchen

Gelsenkirchen's cooperatives are rental cooperatives. Members buy a Genossenschaftsanteil (the refundable share that makes a tenant a co-owner of the cooperative) and in return gain a lifelong right to stay. There is no deposit, no agency fee and no eviction for the owner's own use, as the GWG puts it to prospective members. Rents follow costs rather than the market, and surpluses go back into the buildings. Members elect the supervisory board at a general meeting, one member, one vote, whatever the size of their holding.

The tradition is older than the city's present borders, which date from 1928. The Bauverein has let flats in the southern districts for more than 120 years. The GWG began on 18 January 1926, when workers met in the trade-union house to found the Baugenossenschaft Vorwärts, and its first 12 flats rose at Markgrafenhof in Ückendorf that year. Its own history records a merger with a Wattenscheid building society in 1938 and 125 flats destroyed in the war. Most miners, though, never lived in a cooperative. They rented from their employer, and that dependence produced the city's most famous act of housing self-help. In 1974 the owner of the 1868 Flöz Dickebank settlement planned to replace it with blocks of up to 12 storeys. Residents fought for two years and won a careful renovation instead, a story told in full by the Citego housing archive.

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The struggle of the tenants of Gelsenkirchen in Germany (Flöz Dickebank)

How Flöz Dickebank’s miners’ families saved their settlement in the 1970s.

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Today the sector falls into two clusters with different problems. The traditional cooperatives, the Bauverein with flats across nine districts and the GWG with homes in Gelsenkirchen and Wattenscheid, are modernising ageing stock and adding small new buildings. The GWG is building barrier-free flats of 40 to 80 square metres on sites such as Hirschweg and Am Hottenborn, aimed at older members and larger families. Their constraint is money. Retrofit costs are the same as anywhere in Germany, but rents are among the lowest in the country, so every heat pump must be paid for out of very thin margins. The second cluster is self-organised but owns nothing. The tenants' association Mieterhaus Flöz Dickebank, founded in 1979, still runs the Heini-Wettig-Haus, a former wash house its members rebuilt by hand as a neighbourhood centre. As a tenants' association rather than a cooperative, it can organise and advise but does not own the houses. There is little sign here of the newer project cooperatives and collectively owned houses found in Cologne or Leipzig.

The city's own strategy does not yet give cooperatives a named role. Its renewal programme works through the municipal ggw and the urban-renewal company SEG, and its new income-independent housing subsidy is open to any owner willing to modernise. Cooperatives therefore compete for that support like everyone else, in a market where the city is busy buying buildings rather than handing out land.

Gelsenkirchen's answer to its housing problem is to take homes off the market. In November 2022 the city and North Rhine-Westphalia signed the Zukunftspartnerschaft Wohnen (the Future Partnership for Housing), a ten-year pact backed by a special state grant of about €10 million a year until 2032. Its targets are explicit. The city will deal with about 500 problem properties and demolish some 3,000 of its roughly 9,000 empty flats. A special funding area covers most of the city south of the Rhine-Herne Canal, plus Horst and parts of Scholven.

In April 2026 the pact grew into the Stadtperspektive Gelsenkirchen 2032 (the City Perspective 2032), with FC Schalke 04, the chambers of commerce and crafts and the regional employers' association as partners. The launch announcement reported €30 million spent since 2022, 73 buildings with 380 homes bought and 14 buildings demolished, including a notorious row at Ahlmannshof. Freed land is now meant for firms and craft businesses as well as for housing, and a digital register of development sites is being built to market it.

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Anstoß für die Stadtperspektive Gelsenkirchen 2032

City Perspective 2032: buying and clearing problem properties with business partners.

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Each level of government holds a different lever. The federal government writes the planning code and the benefit rules; Bärbel Bas, the federal labour minister, has made benefit fraud in derelict houses a priority. The state holds the money and the building code. Ina Scharrenbach runs the MHKBD (the state ministry for home affairs, local government, building and digitalisation), which funds the partnership. The state building code also lets a city order the demolition of empty, decaying buildings. On 21 April 2026 the administrative court in Gelsenkirchen upheld such an order against the owner of two century-old houses. The city itself does the buying. A dedicated unit in the planning department steers the work, the SEG acquires, manages and clears buildings, and ggw builds on the freed sites. Formal renewal areas on Bochumer Straße and in Schalke-Nord give the city extra control over sales, and the municipal right of first refusal lets it step into private deals.

The debate is about how far public power should reach into private property. Supporters of the programme see buying and demolition as the only way to break a spiral of disinvestment in which one neglected house drags down the street. Business leaders want the cleared land for jobs. Michael Grütering of the employers' associations Emscher-Lippe argues that the fight against problem properties must continue with a sustainable use of the freed sites, including staff and trainee flats. The city's own planners go further and ask for new law, because owners can simply refuse to cooperate. The planning code's strongest tool, the urban development measure, applies only where demand is high, not where buildings rot.

None of these instruments is reserved for cooperatives. There is no concept-led land tender (Konzeptverfahren, where public land goes to the best plan rather than the highest bid) and no ground-lease pact. The most useful tool for member-owned landlords is the special housing subsidy inside the funding area, which is not tied to tenants' incomes.

Vacancy and climate policy meet in the same streets. The heat plan presented in January 2026 found that 74% of non-industrial heat still comes from fossil fuels. 77.6% of buildings predate the first thermal-insulation rules of 1979, and only 34% are fully renovated. The GEG (the federal Buildings Energy Act) will require new heating to run on at least 65% renewable energy once the plan is adopted, and the national target is climate neutrality by 2045. Demolition feeds this agenda too. In Scholven cleared blocks become a green buffer between housing and industry, while new flats are built to efficiency standards the old stock cannot reach.

Siedlung Schüngelberg in Buer shows how a colliery settlement can be renewed rather than razed. Built between 1897 and 1919 at the foot of a spoil heap, it became one of the showpieces of the IBA Emscher Park, the 1989–1999 building exhibition that remade the Emscher valley. From 1993 the Swiss architect Rolf Keller added around 200 new flats for miners around a square with a day-care centre and shops, while 310 older homes were refurbished under heritage rules. Paths now lead from the streets up the Rungenberg heap, so the waste of the mine became the settlement's park.

The Flöz Dickebank settlement in Ückendorf remains the city's reference point for tenant power. Protected as a monument since 2008, it hosted a congress on saving workers' settlements as early as 1976. Its tenants' house still runs breakfasts and advice sessions for neighbours, proof that a residents' movement can outlast the fight that created it.

The Heilig-Kreuz-Kirche is the landmark of the renewal of Bochumer Straße, once the street people avoided. A listed brick-expressionist church of 1927–1929, it closed for worship in 2007. The city bought it and turned the nave into an event hall for around 700 people, kept free of fixed installations, with rooms for the neighbourhood in the side wing. The SEG has meanwhile bought and cleared the worst houses on the street. Nearby, the SEG is reviving the hall behind Bochumer Straße 134 after demolishing the derelict front building, and the street's creative quarter now hosts a festival of the independent arts each September.

Tausche Bildung für Wohnen turns empty flats into a trade. Since February 2019 young volunteers have lived rent-free in a shared flat on Breilstraße, in an SEG building, and in return each mentors up to eight children in the neighbourhood, the city's renewal office explains. The idea started in Duisburg-Marxloh in 2012. It fills a vacant flat, brings young adults into a district many leave, and gives children a steady adult outside school.

The ggw, founded in 1950, is the city's main public builder. It has added 440 new homes since 2010 and in 2025 finished energy retrofits in Feldmark and Erle. In April 2026 it laid the foundation stone for three urban villas with 21 flats in the Waldquartier, an investment of €12.3 million. The buildings meet the Efficiency House 55 standard, with heat pumps and solar panels on green roofs, and are due in autumn 2027.

The Nordstern colliery completes the arc from coal to living. The 1997 federal garden show turned its pithead into the Nordsternpark. Today Vivawest has its head office on the site, so the landlord that inherited much of the miners' housing works from a former pithead. For Gelsenkirchen the lesson of its lighthouses is consistent. Renewal succeeds where someone with a long horizon, a city company, a cooperative or an organised group of tenants, takes responsibility for a whole street rather than a single house.