ABSTRACT
Social housing organisations pre-dated both the emergence of the German state and the advent of the Industrial Revolution. As the Industrial Revolution gathered speed, co-operatives became a practical vehicle for housing improvements among workers and the main foundation stone of social housing development. Until the Industrial Revolution, which began in the 1860s, German housing had been provided largely on a self-build basis by the rural population. The development of early housing provision in the Ruhr towns and cities showed a strong and preference for small buildings, with two to four units per house being common. The dominant housing form in the Rhineland was low-rise, three-storey flats in small buildings, often called Dreifensterhaus. In the more eastern cities, such as Hamburg, Hanover, Berlin, and Leipzig, Mietkasernen tended to dominate. According to German official statistics, only traced from 1927 and missing in some of the Nazi period, German limited dividend companies built in the region of 580,000 units in the years 1927-1939.
