Richard/RMW said:
Oliver, what is the gist of the transformation? Good stuff coming or the end of a period in time?
Our town is rapidly transforming, small homes coming down and being replaced with huge rentals, traffic and personal behavior changing, as the residents have fewer connections to the community. Also seeing an explosion in new services, to our benefit.
RMW
Richard, there are several angles to this. One of the main reasons is densification of housing, just like you say, getting rid of large single family homes/ homes with large backyards and replacing them with small/medium size apartment buildings and/or much smaller single family homes with tiny backyards, if any noteworthy backyard at all.
He has also built a - for our city without any precedent - ginormous apartment building complex including grocery store, underground parking.
Another already fairly big commercial building has floors being added for a large cinema and other ventures.
He is building a large outdoor sport facility/"stadium" for soccer & tennis that will house all the city's teams and clubs.
He is building a ginormous sports hall (people say the largest of its kind in Europe) to be used by schools and clubs that need indoor facilities.
Additionally he is building a ginormous event location, that would be fit for much, much larger cities.
All in all we're talking 3 figure millions here.
And if he gets his will, he also wants to build a "marina", and connect a tiny "lake" to the River Rhine. ... I mean including bridge/watergate ... So another, I don't know how many millions it will cost, project. ...
He has completed other, much less controversial, projects and that's all fine and well.
The issue that I take with this is that, in my personal view, he uses legal actions to put some form of hardship on property and business owners to get this, kind of forcibly, done. Not necessarily to get them to sell to the city, but to amend their plans according to fit what he wants.
The problem here is, because this city was literally "dormant" under previous mayors/administrations, he and his party have the absolute majority, because people were tired of nothing moving forward. Again, he did a lot of things that are fantastic and people agree with a lot of that.
But he is also in the very comfortable situation that the three other parties that exist here and are currently opposition, can't do anything because they don't get the votes together. It's actually that bad for them, that they are going to join forces and introduce a single candidate, backed by all three parties, to run for mayor during the next election. That won't do much, but people finally start to see the need to oppose some of his plans because he is stepping on toes more regularly now.
What makes this - all in all - so laughable is, he is trying to get anything from upper middle class up to wealthy people/families to live here with all of this, yet you can't get anything truly high-end/high-end-quality here. Be it groceries, clothing, furniture, (...). All mediocre to cheap, nothing that someone who would appreciate a "marina" would ever want. Because the truth is, the capital/resources needed for such vendors to anchor here, is not available from the majority of people living here. That's why we never shop here. We enjoy the house & property, but all of our every day needs, except for very basic groceries, we cover in the next big city.
Additionally, one of the few large companies that partly fund his endeavors with their taxes is probably going out of business soon, because there's an international law suit that is - quite likely - not going to end well for them.
We are pretty sure that we will see the following actions over the next couple of years:
"He" will make sure that we can't get any building permits for enhancing/amending our house if we wanted to. (It was done in other cases.)
"He" will put a preemption on our, and of course neighboring, properties. (It was done in other cases.)
"His" goal will be getting rid of this, and similar, rather "spaciously inhabited" neighborhoods so he can further densify housing.
And this crane pictured above is the start. As that is also what happened to the owner of that property which will now soon house a new mediocre and a cheap grocery store and a "drug store".
Fun times ahead.
I mean, we have options - lots of them, thats why I'm considering us more of spectators to this. Let's see where it goes.
Kind regards,
Oliver
