Germany Finds Fast Way to House a Flood of Refugees

Germany has taken in more than one million migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia who need affordable places to live, without being forced into segregated spaces that can breed isolation and violence.

Now urban planners in Germany’s financial hub are offering a solution: the homie.

Starting in 2016, low-rise, modular homes—sponsored by the city of Frankfurt—have begun to pop up in unused building plots around the city. They can be put up much more quickly and cheaply than regular housing, and offer a more comfortable, appealing experience than the shipping-container homes often used to house refugees and asylum seekers. Homies—a nickname for a wide range of pop-up buildings—have an open design, use solar panels to produce enough energy to be self-sufficient, and residents are encouraged to grow herbs and vegetables in the adjoining patios.

Marion Schmitz-Stadtfeld, a senior official at NH, a large public housing corporation in the Frankfurt region, says pop-up housing can help refugees get out of mass accommodation on the town fringes and join existing neighborhoods in the city center, where there are schools, shops, and workplaces.

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