KIEZ – Täuscht die Stadt Hamburg mit dem Paloma-Viertel?

#EssoHäuser #stpauli #reeperbahn

3:46 Das tragische Ende der Esso-Häuser
7:02 Das Prozess und der erste Entwurf
13:39 Warum ist die Planbude ausgestiegen?
17:30 Die Änderungen bei den neuen Plänen
20:22 Hat der Investor Geld verloren/Profit gemacht?
22:00 Wie fandest du die Art und Weise wie die neuen Pläne angekündigt wurden?
24:06 Warum wurde der Kaufpreis nicht öffentlich gemacht?

Das Esso-Grundstück auf der Hamburger Reeperbahn steht seit über einem Jahrzehnt leer und prägt als Schandfleck das Bild des Kiezes – dem pulsierenden Herzen St. Paulis. In diesem Video beleuchten wir die lange Geschichte des Geländes, von den beliebten 60er-Jahre-Esso-Häusern über die Zwangsräumungen 2013 bis hin zu den geplanten Neubauprojekten der Stadt Hamburg.

Trotz großer Hoffnungen auf bezahlbaren Wohnraum, lebendige Kulturflächen und ein neues Hotel, sorgt die aktuelle Planung für erheblichen Streit. Die Planbude, ein lokales Planungsbüro, kritisiert die jüngsten Entwürfe scharf: Weniger Wohnungen, mehr Hotelzimmer, der Verlust von Grünflächen und die Entstehung eines großmaßstäblichen Baublocks, der den Kiezcharakter bedroht.

Wir werfen einen Blick hinter die Kulissen und zeigen, wie die Stadt mit Investoren verhandelt, warum die Öffentlichkeit oft nur bruchstückhaft informiert wird und welche Auswirkungen das auf die Nachbarschaft hat. Christoph Schäfer von der Planbude erzählt von der langen Beteiligung der Bewohner:innen und erklärt, warum das aktuelle Projekt von den ursprünglichen Ideen abweicht.

Dieses Video ist ein Muss für alle, die sich für Hamburger Stadtentwicklung, soziale Gerechtigkeit im Wohnungsbau, Kulturförderung und die Zukunft von St. Pauli interessieren.

Sozialmedien:
https://www.instagram.com/reeperbahntv/
https://reeperbahntv.com/

#reeperbahn
#hamburger
#stpauli
#hamburg
#kiez

This is the Reeperbahn, the pulsating heart of Hamburg. These were the Esso houses, the beating heart of the Reeperbahn. But like an open, untreated heart condition in the middle of the city, the property has stood as an eyesore for over 10 years. To ensure that the Reeperbahn retains what makes it so special, a lively entertainment venue that attracts millions of visitors, what happens to such a symbolic place is crucial. After more than a decade of standstill, Hamburg now wants to redevelop the site. But the way these plans are being communicated, or rather, concealed, raises questions: Is the city being honest with the public, or are we witnessing deliberate deception behind closed doors? In this video, we reveal what Hamburg is hiding, with exclusive insights from Christoph Schäfer of Planbude. And that’s pretty cheeky, you have to say. Well, that’s really cheeky, actually an outrage. At first glance, it looks as if nothing much has changed. Investors who are a bit exploitative at the moment are saying that they’re blackmailing the city a bit, aren’t they? Last November, there was a press release: Breakthrough at Paloma. 100% affordable housing, creative spaces, and a hotel are planned, with the intention of transferring the site this year and starting construction by 2026 at the latest. On top of that, the city is investing five million euros to make a live music club possible again in the neighborhood. Just as promised. With such significant news for the district, one would have expected a large, pompous press event: the main players proudly on a stage, the new designs in the spotlight, journalists with questions, corporate CEOs with quick-witted answers, and maybe even a brass band with extra trombones. Instead, there was an invitation with less than two hours’ notice to a quick photo opportunity in a bar on Spielbudenplatz, where only a single rendering of the five square kilometers was shown. Why the reticence? Yes, the Planbude, which was not involved in the planning, issued a quick criticism on Instagram. They say: Major changes and a loss of quality are being hidden behind the official presentation. The buildings on Spielbudenplatz have been raised by one to three stories, the number of apartments has been reduced from 200 to 160, the hotel rooms have increased from 180 to 350, the green roof gardens, the city balcony, retail spaces, and even the climbing wall have disappeared. And instead of diversity, all the buildings now look the same. The Planbude summarizes: It went from quality to quantity. A huge, brutal block with no connection to the neighborhood, designed by ChatGPT based on an Excel spreadsheet, they say. Now we hear from Christoph Schäfer from the Planbude what’s going on. Yes, hello, I’m Christoph Schäfer. I’ve lived in St. Pauli since around 1985 or 86, yes, and I’m a founding member, one of four founding members still working at the Planbude (a design studio) that did the planning for the buildings and, above all, the preparation of the planning, the participation process, and the desired production for the buildings, the new buildings. If you’re not, the younger ones among you, probably don’t know the Esso houses anymore: They stood here. They were 1960s buildings, but you could say they were actually very popular, especially towards the end because they housed so many original and original shops. There was the Molotow, or Planet Pauli, a curious car hotel, and the very legendary gas station, which so many people still miss to this day. Then a tremor went through the buildings. That was in December 2013, just before Christmas, and all the buildings had to be evacuated that same night. It was tragic, you have to say. I was here at the time, too. I live in the neighborhood. Everyone had to move directly into a nearby gymnasium. They were n’t allowed back into their houses, except with an escort, so to speak, to get the most necessary things. It was pretty terrible, to be honest, and quite a shock. And the houses belonged to Bayerische Hausbau at the time, which was very protective of the tenants . had behaved badly. And that’s why the city was in such a situation here that they said: “Hey, we can’t let an investor like that get away with letting his building fall into disrepair and then getting a new development plan and kicking people out without any guarantees.” Moreover, the city was extremely concerned at the time about where the Reeperbahn was developing, whether it would still be the cool place that people would come to Hamburg for, or whether it would slowly wear out and simply be replaced by office buildings, by these large masses of buildings. So, the interests of the people who live here and those of politicians ultimately converged. The overarching, so to speak, interest in Hamburg is also tourism. You can think what you will about that, but the Reeperbahn is important for this, and if it becomes a place of office buildings or simply loses its charm, then that’s bad for Hamburg. Have you managed to get out of this neighborhood? So we held a large neighborhood meeting at the St. Pauli Stadium , and what was so important at the meeting wasn’t just the number—there were a lot of people, and there were even more afterward—but there were a lot of people, but they were very diverse. They really came from across the board. There were people who had businesses here on the Reeperbahn, punks, people with money, people who had lived here for a long time, and people who had recently moved here. And everyone wanted us to do something here, to build something here that wouldn’t destroy St. Pauli, but that would somehow advance St. Pauli into the future. We called it “Crack the St. Pauli Code,” and from this meeting , we essentially founded a planning office. We decided we wanted to take planning into our own hands and develop ideas with all of our neighbors about how St. Pauli could develop into the future. Interestingly, the city agreed to this, and so did the owner, Bayerische Hausbau. Then, in September 2014, we were able to get started. We received a sensational 2,300 entries, and then we stopped counting them. We sorted them, looked through them carefully, filtered out themes, and then created this book, which the architects were then supposed to use as a basis for their design. There was a competition, and in the end, this design emerged. And what you can see here, and what’s perhaps much more important, is that people really wanted, in their dream production, to see different buildings built here, just like on the other side of the Reeperbahn, and not such a uniformity, not such a block. You can see how incredibly well the architects implemented it here. Then there was a pretty interesting idea here, namely, that it says “Stadtbalkon” (City Balcony) in bold. It was two floors with shops, because the problem is simply that there’s not enough space on the Reeperbahn. It’s popular, people; cool clubs often go to the second floor or the basement, or even one level below the basement. And that’s exactly what we wanted here too: that a lot would happen in a small space, and that a lot of Reeperbahn-like things could happen here. That’s why there’s a boulevard here, so to speak, which doubles up as a city balcony, where other businesses could come in. So, then there was a certain compromise. This was the hotel here, it’s written here in bold. Bayerische Hausbau wanted that, and it was supposed to have 160 rooms. It got bigger and bigger as the process progressed , but in the end it ended up with 160 rooms. It has to be said that people didn’t really want that, but it was a compromise, because apartments aren’t allowed here on the Reeperbahn anyway, because it’s supposedly too noisy. But that’s the way the rules are at the moment, you’re not allowed to build a new apartment, even though people live right next door and like living there. The only option, so to speak, was to fill it with a hotel , or that was Bayerische Hausbau’s idea of ​​how to make money. Perhaps more important here is that the Molotow should return. It’s the building directly next to the Panoptikum. Perhaps also important is that, in addition to this city balcony, there were other public or communally used or usable roofs. For example, there was supposed to be a skate ramp on the roof next to the Panoptikum. Behind it, the Hotel Korel was supposed to move back in, and this climbing wall is here; there are already users who wanted to do it. The hotel wall was supposed to become a climbing wall. And here, “Park Fiction 2” stands—I didn’t come up with that, the architects came up with it. But the idea was, so to speak, to create a place where you could gaze at the sun in the evening, when the sun sets over the Reeperbahn. Yes, and then perhaps the most important question is the question of housing. So, social housing was supposed to be built here, and it was housed in a small, very small, narrow high-rise. This creates another kind of diversity here. You can also go deeper in places . There should be some kind of housing project here, or a cooperative model or a communal living model. That would also have been subsidized by the state. And on the corner here, so to speak, towards Taubenstraße, there would have been freely financed rental apartments. So, and that was it, the thing with the freely rentable rental apartments, what that was, was also a compromise, you have to say. Bayerische Hausbau wanted that because they wanted to make money from it. They wanted to make a lot of money with this. They put huge commercial spaces in here. Okay, so perhaps the miracle was that something like this came together with a private investor, with the city, with this very rebellious district of St. Pauli, with a district that has a lot of ideas. And what you see here, such a volume that has a lot of volume, it is big and uniform and dense and so on, but it is also different, it is appropriable. Something could be done there; he’s somehow reinventing St. Pauli in a certain way, and that would have been very exciting. That’s why it’s become a widely discussed model, and what’s being discussed far beyond St. Pauli is, “Hey, this is how we could build in cities today,” and this way we could also implement the high density that investors need, so to speak, by doing good things in key locations. Here, for example, in this rear section, the innovation and subculture cluster was supposed to be. There would have been things like an alternative sex shop, counseling centers for sex workers, St. Pauli-specific social services, a neighborhood canteen, the Faplap St. Pauli was supposed to come back, which no longer has a place here, and so on. So that would have been a floor with things that were for the district. And the other things would have been: the investor earns money and rents out normally, i.e., the normal things that they want anyway. Yes, and perhaps also this: How do you get—well, often such a large construction volume, if you look at it the way the big investors do it, then it becomes quite brutal. And here you realize that this is actually a world that is being created here, and it would be interesting. And people can use it, they can climb, they can look around, they can go up, go down. It’s intended for very different people who could spend time there and have fun without getting on each other’s nerves. And that’s exactly what St. Pauli should actually be there for. And that would be like this… We are faced with this important task: What do cities actually have to be able to do in the future so that people go there and so that they remain interesting? That would actually be a good answer to it. Yes, the amazing thing was that it somehow worked for so long and worked so well. And then Corona came, then the Ukraine war came, and then construction prices skyrocketed, and it becomes more difficult to earn money with construction finance. And then there was a change at the top of Bayerische Hausbau. The heir joined the board, and he’s now restructuring the group. And this old company, Bayerische Hausbau, which sounds so solid, has simply been split into a part that develops projects and a part that manages the property. And the part that develops projects, which employed 300 or 400 people, is now only employed by 50, because they don’t do it anymore. They simply sell on their projects. They don’t finish them, and that’s what happened here. So it’s sometimes said, let’s say from certain quarters, that the whole thing failed because of the many requests. There aren’t that many requests; they don’t take up that much space here, so to speak. They just make this volume intelligent and interesting. But that’s not why it failed. It actually failed because the owner changed his strategy and no longer does things like that. They have all the people who can develop something like that, you need skills for such a huge construction project, and they’re all gone. In this situation, they apparently started negotiations with the city to get rid of it. You also have to say that investors are taking advantage of this at the moment, they’re blackmailing the city a bit, right? Because in various places the big investors initially got the city to sell them these great pieces of land, like the Elbtower, for example, or at Gänsemarkt or here, and these are all incredibly important pieces of land for the development of the city, right? And interestingly enough, they’re now blackmailing the city, which is then forced to buy things like this. It’s not a bad thing, of course, when Saga comes along and says, okay, we’ll buy this for the city, and then they’ve brought a second entrepreneur on board , Quantum Immobilien. But we noticed that something was going totally wrong. All of these negotiations, which worked well, were at the district level with the investor, and this sales level is now taking place at a higher level, namely at the Senate level. And since then, you have to say, communication has broken down completely, even though we ‘ve worked together on a really trusting basis for seven or eight years. In the end, it’s actually been the case that for the last four or five years, we’ve essentially been out of these discussions. We’ve learned about things through the press, not directly. And that was the point for us when we said: Something’s brewing now, they have a solution that we ‘re not involved in at all. All the ideas and this entire process that the city financed and undertook no longer play any role at all. We can’t pretend it’s still the same idea. We’re pulling out now, and we’re making it public. We did that two months before Christmas, simply to show people: we’re no longer on board with this. And yes, and then shortly after that, Dad and Saga and Bayerische Hausbau came around the corner with a suddenly scheduled pre-Christmas press conference. Somehow it seems to be such a popular date to announce things like that just before Christmas . Then they think that after Christmas, everyone will have forgotten about it. And then they presented this. So, it was presented at this conference. And you can see, it’s a view from what feels like 5 km away. At first glance it might look that way, because it’s also been drawn from above, as if not much has changed. And I’ll go through that quickly now. So, you can see back here, uh, the positive thing is back here, Saga can do all of that. That means this will be social housing, right? This whole part back here. The bad thing is: there was an interesting house here that was taller, this one was a bit lower, and here there was one that stuck out really high. The one on the corner was lower, though, and was nicer to the neighborhood. Saga isn’t really interested in all that anymore. And they’re also building fewer apartments than the original plan envisaged. Where the real volume has been added is here at the front, and that’s considerable, right? So, this house here, for example, was supposed to be a small, small building that this house could still see over. It’s now taller, two floors have been added. And on top of it is no longer the so-called Park Fictions 2, but you can see enclosures for various cooling units and ventilation machines and so on. You were kind enough to print it out even larger, so here you can see it a bit more clearly and you can basically see how many floors there are: there are now 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 floors up there, whereas there were eight before. So it’s considerably higher. That’s where the light comes from onto the Reeperbahn, so it will cast shadows all the way to the other side of the Reeperbahn. Unfortunately not shown. This building, that was this beautiful one, where you could climb on the side, has become considerably higher. There’s no question of climbing here anymore. The building is also one story higher. So, they’ve really added a lot of volume everywhere . This is also reflected in the figures that were communicated: the 160 hotel rooms are now supposed to have become, I think, 320 – almost doubled. Don’t kill me, I’m not quite remembering the numbers right now. But what was supposed to be the compromise here, and where people always said, “Help, we can’t get another hotel financed,” is now becoming the main use of this complex and will drastically overshadow the Reeperbahn. I have one or two things. Yes, yes, um. What would you say if they said that Bayerische Hausbau lost money on the sale of the property due to the demolition? Well, I can’t say that because we don’t even know the amounts. I can’t say whether they lost money, to be honest. I met one of their former project managers 10 years ago, and he told me they could have just left it as it was. They were already making money from it, just as it was. So, if they had restored it, that might have been the best solution in retrospect , right? Then the same people would still be living there, the same shops would still be there, they would have built a few more things, and it would have been a profitable project for years, yes. So they had to gamble on the price increase. But what is striking, of course, is that the sales began the moment the zoning plan was approved. And the zoning plan is what gives the developers – whoever they are – the right to build a certain amount of stuff here. And that is the crucial point. They used to be able to do 8,000 m² here, which is what the four above ground would have meant, and now there’s at least 28,000 m² of gross floor area, if not 29,000 m². And this multiplication multiplies the value, that’s how you calculate it. That’s how they calculate it. That means they made money at that moment. They apparently had very expensive, very high planning costs. What did you think of the way it was announced? The new design? Yes. I thought it was pretty bad, to be honest. Well, that’s actually incredibly bad news for all kinds of participation processes in Hamburg. This was one of the model participation processes with a great result, with a really interesting result. And if you can’t rely on the city adhering to something like that and then somehow trying to stay in touch and develop it further, no, we’ve made that clear to them at all levels: public, non-public, confidential, everything. It’s nothing. They didn’t do anything, made no effort to incorporate this knowledge in any way, not even with those incredibly good architects who had originally planned this, who were still planning this. They’re all out of the game, and no one talked to them. And I find that unacceptable. That’s really bad. for the democratic planning culture here, but it’s also bad for architects, because it was a competition result, that you can overlook it and say: “We don’t care, the city financed it.” That’s another point. Why? No, it was all down the drain, all the money, all the knowledge. And then you have to say: 2,300 entries, that’s a lot of people, right. They all put a lot of thought into it. This is all work that was done for the city for free, right. And to throw all that in the trash I think is pretty heavy stuff. And although the city has a transparency portal, the purchase price was not made public. Yes, they talk their way out of it, they talk their way out of it… so transparency? Yes, yes, yes. Well, that’s tricky, right, because they’re now acting like Saga is a wholly owned subsidiary of the City of Hamburg, so it belongs to the city, and it also has the authority to give instructions, so to speak. And the city is making excuses by saying it’s a company, and then transparency is no longer necessary. Yes, and that’s pretty cheeky, you have to say. It’s really cheeky, actually an outrage. And that’s such a central question and what really annoys me: This new model here, the wrong model, yes, this one. It’s already in the urban development authority, in this big model from the city of Hamburg. There’s such a huge model of the city of Hamburg, they’ve already put the model in there. There’s no legal basis for it yet, actually they don’t officially know it yet. I also find it pretty strange how they’re working there without any democratic decision having been made. Can anything be changed now? It’s too late, um. Well, it’s hard to say, because we know that at some point they’ll have to go public, say what they’re really planning. If I see it correctly, they’ll have to make changes to the development plan. I think that everything would have to be resubmitted, and then it would have to be published. But you have to say that right now, who would want to get involved in a process like that? No, trust has been lost. They somehow had, how should I put it, the golden ball in front of the goal. And now they get the ball played back into the penalty area, into their own penalty area, and then they have to start again. No, I don’t think that’s a good situation right now. Of course, with Saga there might be one or two opportunities. Knowing them, they’re well established in the district, they own a lot here in the district. Actually, you could do something with them, right? Actually, it would be great to work with the city on this. Instead, why can’t they do it? Why can’t they do a joint plan with an investor, and if Saga is included, which belongs to the city, why ca n’t they do it? That would also be an opportunity to do some interesting urban development with these people. I really think that’s a missed opportunity. And there’s a lot of criticism, right. I don’t know, maybe you’ve heard: the Chamber of Architects, the Association of German Landscape Architects, the Association of Urban Planners, the Association of German Architects – they ‘ve all issued a joint statement against it. And yes, it’s not over yet. Wasn’t it the case that the only solution was actually a takeover by the city? Yes, because there’s a standstill here, right. That’s always the argument. I have two things to say about that: Well, it’s great that the city is buying it, but they would have to negotiate it in such a way that something sensible comes out of it. And we’re being told right now, yes, we only had this one option and they’re letting themselves be completely blackmailed, in my opinion. The other is, um, when you see this here, of course you think on the Reeperbahn: a construction fence like that, how stupid. But we knew from the start that it would be stupid. And we suggested to the city, we suggested it back in 2014: People, we ‘re going to put containers all around this wall, and we’re going to make play booths here, so to speak, for Spielbudenplatz. And I mean, St. Pauli is somehow made up of show and fake architecture, yes. And , um, for the people who walk along here, it would have been really interesting to have interesting cultural things in between that are never rented out cheaply, something for Planet Pauli so they can keep making money, maybe the Molotow merchandising store. You could do all that here. And, um, then this Reeperbahn mile wouldn’t have been so boring. We told them straight away: Do it like this! We recorded it for them. So, then the city, I’d say stupid as it is, thought: Uh, uh, we don’t have to, or it will all get better, or it will all happen very quickly, I don’t know, um. But then you wouldn’t have been so vulnerable to blackmail, because, I honestly think, the housing issue is of course extremely serious, but everything else, right, it’s also about people’s right to return, right, um, uh, uh, but everything else, what does that do to the Reeperbahn? We could have made it much, much cooler with temporary solutions. And that would probably have been more interesting than what’s happening right across the street with the constant things on the Reeperbahn. So, you could have simply tested out what you needed, and, um, a custom production like the one we did could have been refined, yes. Well, if only, if only, a bicycle chain. But it is public space, that would have been good, right, would have worked too. And, um, that would be something where you as a city wouldn’t be so vulnerable to blackmail. And I think they let it go unnecessarily, simply because they’re a bit boring or think, uh, uh, they have to curry favor with the big investors and not with the people who develop ideas here. And, uh, that’s a shame, also a hindrance to innovation in this city.