Feeding and care of Germans: housing space

Recent posts in our series Feeding and Care of Germans have included such gems as "Ice-cold cheaters" on hidden food price hikes and "Food without balls" on the difficulty of finding food without soccer ball labels during the latest installment of Bread & Games.

Today, we answer the question: how big are houses and apartments in the K-Land?

You may have seen the castles, which are pretty big but - they generally won't tell you - were rather cramped, dirty, and noisy in medieval times. Later on, the feudal lords got themselves more space, and that's what you are shown on tours.

Today's average German house or apartment has about 90 square meters (just under 1000 square feet). That's homeowners and renters combined.

That doesn't tell you much?

Okay, then. Household sizes have dropped, which means that 75% of households consist of no more than two people, so about 500 square feet per person.
If you say to yourself, I could not live on 500 SqF, note that this is still almost 20 times the space for a fully grown pig (less then 2.5 sqm) on an organic farm around here, according to this website.

We blame today's attempt to mess with your head on the weather, an inch of rain in an hour is quite something.

Back to the numbers. We write about them because of their presentation, not because of absolutes -- the latter are interesting to developers and the property tax assessors.

The 90 sqm average hides a few things. First, it is an average, not a median, which means that MacMansions skew the figure, making it appear the "average" German has more space.

Second, this is the national average. Remember, there was a second Germany for almost fifty years? Those guys did not have as much money, Socialists, right.

So, the statistics say that in the former East Germany, the average is about 73 sqm, or about 730 sqf, almost one third less than in the old West.

Home owners have a national average of 118 sqm, while folks who rent have some 47 sqm less than that.

Are you confused yet?

We were.

We did some approximate calculations to clear things up: someone who rents has about 60% of the space as someone who owns a house or apartment.

Keep in mind that this category contains both houses and apartments, and houses here in the hills are bigger than the 118 sqm mentioned in the statistics.