Weimar Estates: What 1920s Germany Teaches Us About The Eternal Housing Crisis

BERLIN — The sight is dazzling. Not even the sky can outshine the bright blue of the facade on this sunny morning on the southwest outskirts of Berlin — it practically glows amid the white and yellow walls. Small gardens, expansive meadows, pine and birch trees scattered in between, open buildings, clear shapes, bold colors.

Yes, housing can feel joyful, even if you’re not a millionaire.

Visitors walk through the Zehlendorf forest settlement, better known as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” after a nearby tourist restaurant whose owner was fond of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel. The settlement, almost 100 years old, still has something incredibly fresh about it with its 800 terraced houses and 1,100 apartments. Yet if you were hoping to get your hands on one of these little homes, forget about it. No one is moving out of here voluntarily.

Germany needs new housing. The Chancellor has declared that a minimum of 400,000 units per year are needed, and the nation is falling far short. What little is being built is often expensive or luxurious, while affordable housing remains desperately in short supply.

Digging into the past, Germany was once a global model for progressive housing construction. During the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), ambition met social purpose, and the housing developments of that era remain highly sought after — especially now, with many restored to their original splendor and granted heritage status.

Back then, housing was built on a grand scale, but with meticulous attention to detail. It worked so well that in 2008, UNESCO declared six Berlin housing estates from the period as World Heritage Sites — the first and only such housing projects recognized. These include the Falkenberg Garden City in Treptow-Köpenick, the Schillerpark Estate in Wedding, the Britz Estate in Neukölln (known as the Horseshoe Estate), the Carl Legien Estate, the White City in Reinickendorf, and the Siemensstadt Estate..

Bruno Taut, the visionary architect and planner who also masterminded the Zehlendorf Forest Settlement, was largely responsible for four of these estates. Taut designed over 10,000 apartments in Berlin alone. Even before World War I, he conceived the Falkenberg Garden City, also called the Tuschkastensiedlung (Paintbox Estate), one of the UNESCO-listed districts.

He had a passion for color — not only because it was expressive but also because it was inexpensive. His use of vibrant hues breathed life into simple buildings, giving them distinct personalities.

Berlin wasn’t the only city investing in progressive housing during the 1920s. Magdeburg, Celle, Breslau, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, and Stuttgart all created exemplary projects, drawing inspiration from international models. They borrowed from English garden city architecture, the Dutch artist group De Stijl (which included Piet Mondrian), and Vienna’s social housing innovations under its social-democratic “Red Vienna” leadership.

Yet Berlin held a special place. In 1920, through the incorporation of independent towns like Charlottenburg and numerous rural communities, the city swelled almost overnight to become the world’s third-largest metropolis, with nearly four million residents (a number still unmatched today). Only New York and London had larger populations, and Berlin’s sheer land area was second only to Los Angeles.

This transformation into “Greater Berlin” made comprehensive urban planning both possible and essential. The initial housing situation had been disastrous.

Construction freeze

Before World War I, private developers dominated urban expansion, prioritizing profits over people. They built middle-class neighborhoods alongside overcrowded working-class tenements, where families were crammed into dark, often damp, unheated apartments — many of them in basements. While Berlin had 723 people packed into each hectare of built-up area, Cologne had less than half that density.

Hygiene conditions were catastrophic. Many families shared one toilet, often halfway up a staircase. Six residents to a single room wasn’t uncommon. Escaping tuberculosis was considered lucky. The grim saying “You can kill a person with an apartment just as easily as with an axe,” attributed to Heinrich Zille, emerged from this era of misery, which he immortalized in his photographs and drawings.

Architecture is the art of proportion.

This crisis worsened during World War I’s construction freeze. After the war, returning soldiers and refugees swelled the population, while galloping inflation pushed housing out of reach for many.

Maximizing daylight

Despite these challenges, the post-war era brought a spirit of optimism. “New” became a defining term: New Building, New Frankfurt, New Berlin! With the Kaiser’s rule over, the future was envisioned as democratic and equitable. The 1919 constitution enshrined the goal of “a healthy home for every German,” and architects championed “light, air and sun” for all.

Row housing, typically aligned north-south to maximize daylight, replaced the traditional block-perimeter layout with its dark courtyards. Apartments were designed for ventilation, with street-facing bathrooms and living rooms overlooking greenery. Despite their modest size, these layouts were carefully planned.

The Frankfurt Kitchen, developed in 1926 by Viennese architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky as part of Ernst May’s New Frankfurt project, became an icon of efficiency. The smallest version measured just four square meters yet was a marvel of functionality.

A kitchen, bathroom, heating, and hot water — this was nothing short of revolutionary. Many units also featured balconies or loggias. Standardization and industrial prefabrication helped keep costs down.

One of the reasons why the quarters are still so popular today is their human scale, which radically distinguishes them from their successors in the 1960s and 1970s. As a rule, the houses are no more than four or five stories high and are generously distributed over the site. “Architecture is the art of proportion,” says the inscription on the Bruno Taut monument in the Waldsiedlung Zehlendorf.

Brief golden era

The window of opportunity for this groundbreaking housing construction was short. It only really took off after a currency reform ended the inflation crisis at the end of 1923. In less than ten years, two million apartments were built across Germany. An important instrument in Berlin was the “forward-looking land reserve management”: land was bought en masse by the council to push speculators out of the city market. Vienna still benefits from this today: almost half of the city area belongs to the city council.

And it wasn’t just the buildings that were new, the developers were too: Cooperatives had been founded during the German Empire to combat housing poverty; the Falkenberg Garden City, for example, was built for a cooperative. Now they joined forces with trade unions, social construction companies and non-profit housing associations. In 1924, the trade unionist August Ellinger and the social democratic Berlin city planning officer Martin Wagner — an architect by trade and a jack of all trades of the modern age — jointly founded the nationwide Dewog (German Housing Association) and the Berlin Gehag (non-profit home, savings and construction company).

Both companies received money from the new house interest tax: property owners now had to pay a tax to stimulate housing construction. This gave politicians not only a source of income, but also a control instrument: they could grant cheap construction loans and tie these to certain criteria, such as sufficient light and air for the residents.

Politicians who recognized how crucial affordable construction was to creating a better society joined forces with progressive architects. Frankfurt’s liberal mayor Ludwig Landmann, for example, brought Ernst May to the Main as city planning officer after May had shown what he could do as an architect in Breslau. Magdeburg’s mayor Hermann Beims, SPD, appointed Bruno Taut as city planning officer in 1921, before he moved to Berlin three years later, where Martin Wagner quickly laid the foundation for large-scale social housing and commissioned architects who are now considered stars of modernism.

In Berlin they founded the “Ring”, an association of progressive architects: Hans Scharoun, who later designed the Berlin Philharmonic, was a member, together with the Bauhaus pioneer Walter Gropius, Otto Bartning and Hugo Häring, and of course Bruno Taut.

How it ended

Although the housing estates of the Weimar era remain architecturally impressive, the ambitions of the New Building movement were only partially realized. Most of the apartments under construction, and therefore the rent, ended up being too expensive for the lower classes. Skilled workers, employees and civil servants were the ones who could really afford them. Furthermore, these districts were often too mono-functional, lacking the vibrant mix of infrastructure, schools, shops, and community facilities that create truly livable neighborhoods. But they did not have much time to learn from their mistakes.

The old saying is still true: you can kill people with housing, or the lack thereof.

During the global economic crisis that began in 1929, Chancellor Heinrich Brüning implemented a rigorous austerity program. The income from the house interest tax now had to fill other holes. And as a result of the dramatic unemployment, many people could no longer afford even the cheap rents. The housing shortage grew, and the population grew too: in 1930, Berlin had around 450,000 more inhabitants than 10 years earlier. At least the city’s building inspector Martin Wagner managed to complete the White City and the Siemensstadt ring housing estate in the early 1930s with city funds.

Then the Nazis came.

Even before that, opposition to the New Building movement was fierce. In Zehlendorf, the resistance to the Uncle Tom’s Cabin settlement was hardly less fierce than today’s resistance to the construction of refugee accommodation. The high earners did not want to share the green south of Berlin with the lower classes.

The forest settlement would probably never have been built if the city and the state had not intervened. Many of the modernist architects left Germany as the situation started getting darker at the end of the 1920s, among them Martin Wagner and Bruno Taut, who died in Istanbul in 1938; others, like Hans Scharoun, tried to work under the radar.

Lessons for today

So, what remains of the enthusiasm and progressive values of the 1920s? Not much. The residential quarters from the Weimar era have been restored on the outside, but the ideals behind them are largely history: Klaus Wowereit (ironically, a Social Democrat) was the mayor of Berlin and played a key role in selling off to private buyers the social housing that his party colleagues had once built. Four of the UNESCO World Heritage housing estates in Berlin were sold to the listed real-estate giant Deutsche Wohnen, which now belongs to the equally controversial real estate group Vonovia.

The other two districts were luckier. The Falkenberg Garden City and the Schillerpark housing estate are still owned by the Berlin building and housing cooperative from 1892, which upholds the ethos of the 1920s to this day.

More political will is needed.

Of course, the solution is not to just copy and paste more of these 1920s buildings: times have changed. Space has become scarce in cities, requirements have increased, climate protection must be taken into account. And the list of building regulations is almost endless.

These, together with the consequences of the Ukraine war and inflation, are the reasons that have caused construction costs to explode. But not everything has gotten worse: in the housing estates of the 1920s, three-room apartments with 47 square meters for a family of four were nothing unusual. According to the Federal Statistical Office, the living space in 2022 was 47.4 square meters, per capita.

Another sign of how much the times have changed: today, more than half of Berlin’s households consist of a single person.

But more political will is needed to work with architects — and now also female architects — to promote a fair, humane and sophisticated building culture. That requires the development of targeted instruments such as promoting cooperatives, maintaining land reserves or special taxes.

Unfortunately, the old saying is still true: you can kill people with housing, or the lack thereof.