Prefabs Get Custom Comforts

SCHWEDT AN DER ODER, Germany — For the 16 million Germans caught on the wrong side of the Cold War divide, man’s home was never intended to be his castle.

Home, during the Communist era, was the human toolbox. It was the space where workers were stored overnight, the containers that held them until their brains or brawn were needed in the morning.

The architects of the classless society perfected the art of cutting construction corners. They adapted home-building to the conveyor belt, mass-producing prefabricated concrete panels that were cobbled together like Legos into high-rise tenements. The identical three-room units were owned by the state and issued to workers--just another labor cost, like uniforms or hard hats.

“We were happy to get this apartment. It was considered almost elite at the time,” Karin Bellmann, a 51-year-old bookkeeper, recalls of the day in 1973 that she moved into her 637-square-foot apartment with her husband and 4-year-old daughter after years of living with in-laws.

That was another world ago, before the Berlin Wall fell and the mirage of a proletarian utopia disappeared with it.

Today, like most eastern Germans, the Bellmanns are still renters but they have higher expectations of their living space--and, after 10 years of waiting, are about to fulfill them.

Bellmann and her husband, Manfred, are the last residents of the 300-apartment Friedrich Engels Strasse complex that awaits the wrecking ball in this down-at-the-heels refinery town on the Polish border. They will move to a bigger, more modern apartment elsewhere in the city this fall so that their 11-story building can be torn down. The demolition is one of hundreds at the lower end of the housing scale, because eastern Germans have largely been lifted out of residential squalor.

A decade after reunification, the victims of misguided central planning have acquired relative parity with their western German compatriots in the crucial commodity of dignified housing.

Unemployment still idles nearly 20% of the eastern population, but a glaring gap between eastern and western housing has all but closed after a costly and herculean government effort to demolish some buildings and bestow the comforts of home to other prefabricated units built en masse during the Communist era.

Schwedt, which was leveled by Allied bombing during World War II, was arguably the nadir of prefab misery. After the Communist authorities decided to locate a refinery here in 1959, construction brigades threw up thousands of the cheap, identical units over the next two decades to house workers and their families from the ever-expanding industrial complex. By the time of reunification, 92% of Schwedt’s 52,000 residents were living in the monotonously grim prefabs owned by the state factories that employed them.

When the refinery was sold to private investors in 1991, its 8,500 jobs quickly shrank to 1,500, driving the jobless westward in search of a living and leaving the ugly prefabs without a prayer of attracting new tenants.

“Now we have more housing than residents,” Mayor Peter Schauer says of Schwedt, where the population has dropped below 40,000 since reunification. “We’ve already razed 750 prefab units, but we still have a huge surplus and there is absolutely no market for them.”

The apartments were produced in the Communist era under model numbers, much as auto makers annually issue their products with modest style revisions. But the tinkering on housing components usually decreased their quality, architect Hartmut Kalleja says, because the aim of the state manufacturers was to further cut costs and increase production.

Couple’s Home Is Standard-Issue Rental

The Bellmanns’ tiny rental is a Q3-A standard issue: three rooms with one window each, a cramped kitchen and bath without windows and an entryway just big enough for the front door to swing open. The elevator has been out of service since November, when the rest of the tenants began to move out, but the couple say they were long accustomed to taking the stairs to their sixth-floor apartment because maintenance was never a priority and the lift often broke down.

Paint, wallpaper, plants and light fixtures were hard to come by in the Communist era, when home improvement was the government’s job and residents seldom regarded their rentals as an asset deserving of investment. The Bellmanns got around to fixing up their interior only three years ago--just before learning that their building would be torn down.

As they prepare to move, the Bellmanns are able to laugh at the shortcomings of their home of the last 27 years. For instance, the radiator in the living room rises halfway up one wall, clearly designed for a much larger space.

“It must have been the only one the builders could find when they were finishing,” Bellmann says, shaking his head in disbelief. “The one that came in the bedroom had to be torn out altogether because it covered the only wall on which you could put a wardrobe. But we never missed it. The heat was always on too high to these buildings anyway, and you had to regulate it by opening windows.”

Perhaps the most dehumanizing aspect of the prefabs was their construction around a common entrance--a design borrowed from Moscow to allow easier secret-police surveillance of residents’ comings and goings. Ground-floor entries housed just mailboxes and garbage chutes, and vandals and animals answering the call of nature routinely befouled the stairwells.

Across eastern Germany, more than 3 million people live in these prefabricated housing blocks known as plattenbau, or panel construction, named for their flat, standardized shape intended for easy transport and assembly.

“In East Germany, the objective of solving the housing shortage was combined with the industrial program. Mass production served both to create jobs and deter the individualism that the authorities opposed,” says Kalleja, whose Berlin architectural firm conducted a massive study of the east’s prefab housing in 1991 and drafted an array of upgrading solutions.

Upgrades to 300,000 Units in East Berlin

East Berlin’s 300,000 prefab units bequeathed to the reunified city the gargantuan challenge of providing housing equality. Nearly half the Communist-ruled side of the city was in plattenbau, and unlike in Schwedt, the Berlin blocks were of better structural quality and therefore too expensive to pull down.

“There’s also an important psychological consideration in that one of East Germany’s biggest achievements was having solved its housing problem after the war sooner than did West Berlin,” says Monica Schuemer-Strucksberg, an urban development advisor to the Berlin government. “We didn’t want to just run in and tear down something a lot of people were proud of.”

Rather than tear down the prefabs, the capital spent $9 billion on new facades, windows and plumbing to enhance both the quality and appearance of 80% of the buildings. Factory-owned shops and day-care centers that once filled the internal courtyards of the suburban complexes were razed and replaced by playground equipment and landscaping.

The Hohenschoenhausen neighborhood of the capital, where courtyards used to be flooded and swarmed with mosquitoes because of poor drainage, has been outfitted with a canal that now hosts sidewalk cafes in a cheery ambience reminiscent of Venice.

“The concept of home has changed a lot. Social activities are no longer centered around the workplace, so people are spending more time in their apartments,” says Schuemer-Strucksberg. “Most of those who lost their jobs in the transition were women, and a lot of them are home all day now.”

Some buildings were gutted, and everything from the floors to the ceilings replaced, while others needed only cosmetic improvements such as tiled kitchens and bathrooms. To get around the unattractive size of the prefab apartments, which were almost all less than 750 square feet, units have been combined in some buildings to secure a niche in the huge market of buyers and renters seeking more space.

“In East German times, people lived in their workplaces and really only went to the apartment for sleeping,” recalls Erika Kroeber, an eastern Berliner who now markets renovated prefabs in the Marzahn neighborhood, which, with 150,000 residents, is the biggest apartment complex in Europe. “You shopped at stores and went to sports or social clubs that were all provided at work.”

One important influence in the housing improvement equation is pride of ownership, say the urban planners. Berlin remains a city of renters, with only about 8% of its 3.5 million residents living in houses they own. That compares with 41% private homeownership nationwide.

The share of private property is better in cities like Schwedt, where those with steady income fled the cramped prefabs as soon as they could, usually buying a lot in the surrounding countryside and building a house step by step.

Because virtually all of the unwanted housing here belongs to the city government that inherited it from the vanished Communist state, the share of private ownership in occupied housing in Schwedt is far higher than the official 10% statistic, says the city’s urban development chief, Frank Hein.

“We plan to tear down 2,700 apartments over the next 15 years. There are more than that currently empty, but we don’t want to exclude the possibility of a change in economic outlook,” Hein says.

Most of the prefabs not destined for destruction have been spruced up at public expense over the past decade, transforming the boxy, colorless structures into more attractive dwellings with the addition of penthouses, atriums, terraces and new exterior panels where the old ones were found to be insulated with asbestos.

Salvageable Parts From Buildings

Even some of the buildings due for razing have parts that can be salvaged, and Schwedt housing authorities have plucked everything from door handles and light fixtures out of the condemned buildings if they are deemed to have any conceivable use in the future.

“We can even get more use out of the panels if they aren’t filled with asbestos-tainted insulation,” says Friedhelm Werner, a demolition engineer preparing a block on Rosa Luxembourg Strasse for razing. “Cement recycling has become a very developed science in this part of Germany.”

Across the eastern states, more than 20% of the housing stock consisted of prefabs at the time of reunification, and even most of the prewar homes fell into disrepair during the Communist era, says Achim Grossmann, a deputy director of the federal Ministry of Transport, Construction and Housing.

Two-thirds of the eastern German housing stock has been upgraded so far, he says, but the remainder is proceeding slowly because of the vacancy problem. Tenants have fled shabby rentals for bigger homes built by private contractors, leaving Berlin and the five eastern German states with more than 1 million empty apartments, Grossmann says.

“At a certain point, a lot of the blocks still awaiting renovation may have to be razed,” the official says. “We just need to decide which specific buildings will never be needed.”

To spur private investment in the improvements, the government has offered home-renovation loans at cut-rate interest. That has cost the state an additional $45 million to make up the borrowing difference to the banks, but the move has also lured billions in owners’ and renters’ money into the housing market.

Prefabs afflict all of the ex-Communist world, because central planners throughout Eastern Europe favored the mass production of components for the low costs and purported speed of construction. In reality, the uninspired builders of the workers’ paradise tended to take even more time assembling the prefabs than it took the more motivated Western contractors to complete higher-quality buildings.

Having largely resolved the housing inequities in Germany, Berlin authorities are now collaborating with officials in the former Soviet republics and Eastern Europe to renovate or replace their prefabs, says Kalleja, the chief architect of the nationwide housing upgrade.

“There were two big needs at the time of reunification: housing and employment,” Kalleja says. “I think we can fairly say we have taken care of the first one. Hopefully, one day we can say the same about jobs.”