Wood Construction Prize Lower Saxony 2020 launched
Published
For the third time, the Wood Construction Award Lower Saxony competition. The aim of the state-wide competition is to strengthen the use of wood as a climate-friendly and sustainable building material, to present the current state of timber construction and to inspire future builders to build with this unique raw material. The Lower Saxony Timber Construction Award 2020 honours structures and buildings that are predominantly made of wood and wood-based materials and stand out for their high design and timber construction quality, as well as taking particular account of ecological and resource-saving aspects in the interests of sustainability.
The prize is endowed with a total of 12,000 euros and is jointly offered by the Landesmarketingfonds Holz of the 3N Kompetenzzentrum Niedersachsen Netzwerk Nachwachsende Rohstoffe und Bioökonomie e.V. and the Landesbeirat Holz Niedersachsen e.V.. An independent jury of experts will award the Lower Saxony Timber Construction Prize 2020 and present recognitions in November.
To be eligible, the projects submitted must have been completed between January 2018 and June 2020 and the structure must be located in Lower Saxony. The call for entries runs until 30 June 2020.
"How do we want to live in our city and in our neighbourhood? We asked ourselves these questions at the planning workshop "Viva Werkstatt". The aim was to collect ideas for the careful development of the Viktoriaviertel. The neighbourhood is to become lively again and the urban areas are to be converted for the common good.
Among the more than 20 participants were architects, urban planners, residents, representatives of the local retail trade and gastronomy, and interested citizens of Bonn."
The BUND and the ifeu - Institute for Energy and Environmental Research have produced various studies on building issues in the last 10 years, including "13 measures against energy waste in the boiler room".
This study now deals with the core issue of cost allocation for energy modernisation in rented buildings. As early as 2012, BUND, the German Tenants' Association (Deutscher Mieterbund) and the German League for Nature Conservation (Deutscher Naturschutzring) presented the basic idea of the so-called "one-third model". Costs and benefits should be shared between tenants, landlords and the state in as balanced a way as possible. This was and is linked to the premise of achieving a rent-neutral apportionment. In addition, disputes about the amount of the apportionment and the division according to maintenance and modernisation costs should be avoided or circumvented.
This study presents the basic features of the one-third model, but includes other factors that play a role in the modernisation levy, such as rent losses, property taxes or residual values in a specially developed calculation model. The calculations also take into account the different situations of private landlords and housing associations as well as different housing market situations such as growing, shrinking and constant housing markets.
Based on the model calculations, the following changes in tenancy law are proposed to implement the ideas of the one-third model:
Targeted support measures
Increase the subsidy for efficiency houses 55 to 40 %.
Increase the grant for individual measures to 30 %.
Elimination of the EH 85, 100 and 115 efficiency house incentives.
Abolition of subsidies for fossil heating systems.
hardship interception
If an energy modernisation causes unreasonable hardship for tenants, the resulting rent increase is paid from public funds.
Amount of the modernisation levy
Subsidies no longer have to be deducted from the investment sum to be apportioned, but benefit the landlords directly.
The modernisation levy will fall from 8 % to up to 1.5 %. Since the reference value is changed, this corresponds to approx. 3 % in the current system.
The changes can only be introduced as a package. This is the only way to achieve the desired effect, namely to meet the climate protection targets and to balance the costs between the actors.
The basic idea of the one-third model, a fairer distribution of costs for all parties, can be applied to all cases examined. The desired result, the resolution of the apparent contradiction between climate protection and social security, is achieved for the various actors. Although public budgets share more than one third of the modernisation costs, they benefit to a greater extent from the economic advantages of energy efficiency.
BUND expects that an amendment to the tenancy law will implement the one-third model and that this can be supported by all participating agencies and associations. It would be a concrete contribution to integrate and implement the much-vaunted social component in climate protection measures. In this way, a higher level of acceptance for the urgently needed energy modernisation will be achieved - the rental housing stock will thus make its indispensable contribution to climate protection. The preservation of the building fabric will benefit just as much as the quality of living, if the living comfort is increased through proper energy modernisation.
Dr. Kirsten David, a researcher at HafenCity University (HCU) Hamburg, has developed an innovative method for determining rent increases after energy efficiency measures: By means of functional cost splitting, rent increases become appropriate and comprehensible. The planning of the energetic measures is also ecologically optimized. For her dissertation entitled "Functional Cost Splitting for the Determination of Rent Increases after Energy Efficiency Measures", the scientist today receives the "BUND Research Award 2020". With the research award, the Bund für Umwelt- und Naturschutz (BUND) honors scientific work on sustainable development.
Rent increases due to energy-efficient building modernisation are legally permissible and politically desired as an investment incentive. After all, according to the German Energy Agency (dena), around 35% of Germany's total energy consumption is attributable to the building sector. An increase in the renovation rate is therefore necessary from a climate policy perspective.
However, while the legislators assume that such measures can be implemented economically and without affecting the rent, the experience of many tenants is different: Often the rent increases exceed the saved heating and energy costs many times over. In extreme cases, tenants can no longer afford their apartments. "To this day, energy-efficient building refurbishment has a reputation as a gentrification tool," says David. With the method she developed to determine appropriate rent increases, the 45-year-old scientist also wants to contribute to an increased social acceptance of corresponding measures.
"The basis of the politically expected increase amounts is the so-called coupling principle," explains the architect. "Like the Energy Saving Ordinance, it assumes that energy efficiency measures will always be implemented when a comprehensive refurbishment is due anyway. The sticking point: only the modernization costs entitle landlords* to rent increases, but not the costs for the renovation. The latter must be deducted from the total investment sum as "anyway costs". Eight percent of the remaining costs can be passed on to the tenants as a modernisation charge.
"The current regulation is insufficient. In practice, there are manifold demarcation problems between modernisation costs relevant to rent increases and maintenance costs not relevant to rent increases," says David. The method she developed, on the other hand, focuses on the climate-relevant improvement of each individual building component compared to its condition before the construction measure. "Functional cost splitting thus corresponds to the actual basic idea of the legislators, is practicable and enables an appropriate and comprehensible allocation to modernisation or refurbishment costs," says David.
According to the scientist, her approach leads to the omission of measures that are nonsensical from a structural engineering point of view and do not bring about any climate-relevant improvement of the building components: "With my method, such measures are not relevant for rent increases and are therefore uneconomical for landlords. In addition, your calculation method ensures that the modernization levy actually approaches the level of the ancillary cost savings as a rule. The award winner is therefore particularly pleased that the sustainability aspect of her work has been recognised with the BUND Research Award: "Rental housing stock can only be developed sustainably if ecological, economic and social aspects are given equal consideration. Functional cost splitting makes a significant contribution to this."
This year, the BUND Research Award will be presented at a virtual conference. Among other things, keynote speaker and environmental scientist Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker will discuss with the three award winners how science can develop more relevance and effectiveness for sustainability goals. The transfer into practice is also an important concern for David. Her next goal is to further develop functional cost splitting into an instrument that can also be understood by laypersons - preferably as an online tool.
Personal details:
Kirsten David is a guest researcher at HCU in the subject areas "Design and Analysis of Structures" with Prof. Dr.-Ing. Annette Bögle and "Construction Economics" with Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Reinhold Johrendt as well as a lecturer in the interdisciplinary study programmes. Her doctoral thesis was supervised by Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Reinhold Johrendt and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Thomas Krüger, (subject area "Project Management and Project Development in Urban Planning") and is freely available: https://edoc.sub.uni-hamburg.de//hcu/volltexte/2019/508/.
With the switch to WordPress and the update of the individual project representations, there were many innovations. In detail these are:
- there were 55 new settlement projects listed in the web directory
- significantly expanded and updated the area for settlement projects the "In the Making" are
- the previous "Bundesländervergleich" (the last one was from 2009) has been updated due to the newly added settlement projects and has been updated with a chronological and size allocation as further statistical analysis facility adds
The database-supported siedlungen.eu offers new technical possibilities:
- Filtering of projects by keywords and categories
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– Photo galleries
- most photos are displayed much larger and in higher resolution than in the previous html version of oekosiedlungen.de
- many new photos can be seen in the photo galleries, which were previously in offline archives
Furthermore, the data connection was changed to the secure and certified "https://" in August and the database was moved to a faster server.
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