Best living qualities in Frankfurt

If you ever wondered what it takes to make a place the most wanted residential area, let me share with you from my current experience what such a place looks like and what it offers to its inhabitants.








1) Extensive transportation system - extended and quick multi-system public transport (bus, regional trains) and a good car connection to a high interest economic center (distance: 20-30 km).
2) Strict building regulation - to ensure that the houses being built follow a certain pattern and don't disturb one another.
3) Having woods and meadows in the area - to be used for practicing different sports: running, nordic walking, cycling. Apparently, having large green areas in the neighborhood is one of the main points of difference between equally attractive areas.
4) Comprehensive housing solutions - which makes the area not only dedicated to the high net worth individuals (personal income > 1 mio. EUR), but also to the middle class. This includes: different housing options (individual housing, houses in rows, houses with an inner yard, 3 story common housing), as well as affordable financing options.

Comparing these criteria to what we have in Romania, the logic leads to noticing that:

- the deficient transportation system makes the residential areas crowd in small spaces. Thus, even new, relative expensive residential areas offer: 14 story blocks, or in the best case unaffordable expensive individual houses with 3m concrete fences and with little or no green space for a yard. What is more, current residential areas around Bucharest (e.g. Pipera) have no or a very weak public transportation connection to downtown.

- no building regulations- make residential areas show striking unbalances: views of 3 story velvet colored houses next to a 1 story house, or individual houses next to industrial firms.

- limited woods, trees, or other public spaces where one can practice sports. Even if this exists in restricted areas, such a "feature" makes the price of the land unaffordable for the upper mid class. Thus, only the "newly enriched people" have access to these facilities and they use them not for enjoying themselves, but more for public promotion.

- housing solutions - Currently, the housing prices in Romania have no connection what so ever with the personal income that inhabitants possess. This makes housing highly unaffordable even to the middle class, who then has to live in the old communist apartments. Some of these people fall into the real estate firms' trap and engage in highly leveraged credits to pay the sky rocketing, low facility, questionable quality houses.







Just for comparison: a 58 square meter apartment in a newly built central area in Frankfurt am Main costs about EUR 170.000, whereas in Bucharest a similar size apartment, but localized in an area with limited access to public transport and far from the downtown costs more than EUR 200.000. To make this comparison even more striking, bear in mind that the annual gross salary of a graduate is in Romania at best EUR 12.000, whereas in Frankfurt it is about EUR 36.000. Make the calculations yourself how long it takes an university graduate to afford a decent house at a yearly salary increase of 10%.