Passive house requirements of the city are not included in the development plan

au contraire

If you buy from the city of Ulm, please take a look at the sample purchase contract. There is a contractual agreement, especially § 2 no. 5.

If the city now requires you to build a PH when awarding because you cannot be connected, then you have a problem. In this respect, either you build PH or you do not get the property. But only the city can answer that for you. Whether that holds up legally is a completely different question. However, until that is decided, you could be old and gray...

Isn't the binding document for the building application to be submitted the development plan?

Yes. Nothing more and nothing less.

The answer surprises me, because special local requirements arise alongside the development plan from the various municipal statutes.
Statutes, according to my knowledge, specify a development plan and are also legally binding.

If you buy from the city of Ulm, please take a look at the sample purchase contract. There is a contractual agreement, especially § 2 No. 5.

Yep. Seen it. But where is the regulation regarding the passive house? I didn’t find it there. That is the clause about district heating.

If the city presents the OP with a different purchase contract, of course other regulations can be agreed upon. But the purchase contract also does not provide for a passive house (in the sample purchase contract).

alongside the development plan from the various municipal statutes.

By the way, the development plan is also a municipal statute ;)

Above all are the Building Code and the state building regulations. The development plan as a statute takes precedence for the type and extent of structural use, etc.
In addition — neither primary nor secondary — are municipal statutes such as design statutes, parking space statutes, and of course connection statutes. These are supplementary statutes.
As an example: The development plan says what may be built — single-family house, 2 residential units, floor area ratio X. In addition, the design statute says how the house must look — facade material and color, roof pitch, etc. And the next supplementary statute — the parking space statute — says that you need two parking spaces.

It becomes interesting when there are two statutes with different requirements. But that becomes too specific...

However, these do not exist in Ulm. Hence my statement.

we are brand new here since we recently have the chance to buy a plot of land in a new development area. We have one of the 5 plots which cannot be connected to the local heating network.

How nice that reality occasionally contradicts hyper-greenism. In what way does this non-connectability (legal jargon: "objective impossibility") manifest itself?

please take a look at the sample purchase contract. There is a contractual agreement, specifically § 2 no. 5.
If the city now requires a passive house to be built in the allocation process because you cannot be connected, then you have a problem. Either you build a passive house or you do not get the plot. But only the city can answer that for you. Whether that holds up in court is a completely different question. However, it could be that you’re old and grey by the time that is decided...

Well, time machines do not exist yet, technically construction only takes place after the purchase. What does the contract say in case of non-fulfillment (setting aside the reason): rescission, penalty, ...?

When inquiring at various city offices to find the appropriate contact person, we encountered a lot of ignorance on this topic. When we were finally able to locate the planner of the development area, he gave us a very brief response regarding passive houses and referred us to a page of a 100-page PDF (IG Passive House Germany) with the applicable requirements for our plots: Passive House Classic, heating demand 15 kWh/m²a as well as a max renewable primary energy use of 60 kWh/m²a. With these specifications we obtained initial offers from various prefabricated house providers, many of whom cannot meet this very low heating demand and therefore could not submit a concrete offer.

“Suitable” contact persons are only available to a limited extent at “various offices.” Regarding practical suitability (subject-matter competence), it may be necessary to be connected from Pontius to Pilate kind of like the Asterix-style “pass permit” or “application for issuance ...”. The legal suitability of a contact person in an authority, however, is linked to their responsibility, for which there are legal bases and organizational charts. Responsibilities are at most divided into higher and lower levels but are mutually exclusive, thus never duplicated. And the planner may be commissioned with the planning but will not be vested with decision-making powers. Nor can they be sued for performing the activity. It is also common for the building authority at the municipality to serve as the delivery and preliminary examination instance, but the decision on the application is under the responsibility of the district office, which can overrule the vote of the municipal building authority. So the municipality may act as the seller of the plot, your contractual opponent here (and may potentially try to make things difficult for you with the building application) – but if the district decides on the building application, establishing good relations with the responsible person there is significantly more helpful.

From a legal perspective, two things should be examined here: the attitude of the relevant decision-maker (Team Paragraph or Team Reason) regarding the building application (better handled by a construction law lawyer) on one hand, and the enforceability or toothlessness of the passive house provision in the purchase contract (better handled by a contract lawyer) on the other. A law firm with specialists in both areas may be recommended here.

There are indeed quite a few passive house providers, although not every prefabricated house builder offers such concepts. Fundamentally, they are more common among timber constructions than among masonry. What reasons do you have for limiting the provider field to prefabricated house builders?
By the way, who are the neighbors building with (both of these five and those plots that can be connected to the local heating network)?

Ceterum censeo, for me the terms “passive house” and “local heating” only fit together with a lot of friction. Incidentally, one can only scratch one’s head at the political nonsense that on one hand landlords are no longer allowed to conclude a radio cable contract for all tenants, but on the other hand a municipality should patronize the heat energy consumers of an entire development area instead of free consumers burning Meier’s coal from Telekom and Müller’s gas from Vodafone. There are developments that increasingly make me understand non-voters and protest voters :-(
Hoho ho hoho ho, ho hoho hoho hohoho. This dog cannot speak!

Thank you very much for your explanations 11ant. I cannot say why the FW connection is not possible on 5 properties (possibly miscalculated). A good point about the final decision being made by the district. The most important question for me remains which document or applicable law the city could refer to in order to reject a submitted building application on the grounds that limit values are not met, which are not cited in any official document of the city/Baupilot (except in the PDF cited by the city planner). In my opinion, such a "decisive" clause should be visible to everyone before purchasing the property (e.g. in the justification for the development plan) without having to laboriously obtain this information from the only contact person at the city who knows these limit values. I am curious what legal experts will advise on this.