Which building regulations make new constructions so expensive?

That is not true, expropriations are very difficult in China. Search for "china refuse to sell"

Sure, legally speaking, yes. But there are enough means of pressure that prevent the Chinese from resisting.

Then there are -100 social points and suddenly the child is no longer allowed to study. Oops.

I don’t agree. Already 2 years ago, with without and hardly any upgrades, but including 70k , additional building costs, , and exterior facilities, we barely stayed below half a million total budget.

But I’m happy to hear a counterexample from you where you can still get an affordable house today

Gladly: Your just under 500,000€ minus 70,000€ land minus 30,000€ additional building costs minus 20,000€ kitchen minus 15,000€ exterior facilities leaves 365,000… for 152sqm (Town & Country is probably classically sized here?!) that makes 2400€/sqm… If you then naturally still need 20sqm for a kids’ bathroom, pantry and space for a 1.40m island in 3 meters length plus rain showers, three of them, plus a Sex in the City dressing room, then house fun gets expensive.

However, floors, painters, and the photovoltaic system (mandatory) are still missing. In addition, the KfW55 is still listed as a special feature on the website, but it is now mandatory as well.

And yes, you can still save a few euros by downsizing the house. Then you end up with floors, painters, and photovoltaics at about half a million. But I see affordable construction more in the range of 350-400k total budget2, the house would then have to be completed well below 250k

We only catch this on the sidelines because we are not the developers ourselves, but the coordination between our developer and the city and railway for our actually quite small residential area (34 housing units mostly in semi-detached houses) has pretty extreme proportions. We have more than 200 pages of attachments to our developer contract with contracts and reports prepared for the city and/or railway (urban development contract, reports on noise protection, traffic, drainage during heavy rainfall events, compensation measures for greening, etc. pp). And that is only the tip of the iceberg since it ultimately only records the results. And then there are sometimes these "funny" waiting times for administrative acts, like (after all the requested documents have arrived) "Development has to be commissioned by the city council, but it is currently on summer break" and then you watch the city council meeting two months later and it is approved within 15 seconds (no joke) because everything has actually already been clarified outside weeks or months before ("on item 23, comments? Objections? Abstentions? Then it is decided.")

It is hard to point to one thing there because with many things it somehow already makes sense to consider them, but the total and the time and personnel effort that was put in before a single stone was laid... phew...

Of course, when closing a gap in an existing plan or something similar, one probably has little to do with it as an individual builder.

Otherwise, it sounds good in itself that as many aspects as possible are examined more closely in advance for newer construction areas (impact on environment, traffic, etc.), but if adjustments are necessary as a result of one of the assessments, this often drags on forever, especially if one of the affected parties starts to oppose it. For our construction area, for example, there has been a development plan for more than ten years, and it is now largely being implemented as is. For example, a noise protection wall towards the railway is already planned. But then, in a newly created noise protection report, it was found that it should be 10 m longer on one side while it can be shortened on the other side. However, this no longer fully fits the plots sold to the BT, so a small strip of land must be purchased from the railway, which then makes further demands. Meanwhile, the city is blocking many other steps because this is supposed to be clarified first...

Another example (same city): after protests and reports, it was found that there are 1-2 protected trees in a planned construction area. The project developer then adjusts the planning so that they can remain. The city rejects the new plan because this reduces the number of residential units below the originally planned amount. Of course, this then affects the entire residential area and not just the block where the protected tree stood. I haven’t checked for a long time how this has developed further, but as far as I know, it is still causing some approval loops even though parts of the plots were already raffled off and assigned years ago, only the potential builders are not allowed to build on them.