Finding a place to live in Germany’s booming capital city tests even the hardiest soul
consultant, is an unlikely radical. But finding a place to live in Germany’s booming capital tests the hardiest soul. Since moving to Berlin last year Ms Knust has twice struggled to find affordable housing. The last flat-viewing she attended attracted 30 rivals. The place she eventually found will suck up nearly half her income. “I knew it would be hard,” she sighs. “But I didn’t think it would be like this.
Such tales are familiar in a city where the days of paying next to nothing for cavernous apartments are long gone. That is why tens of thousands of Berliners, including Ms Knust, have lent their names to a radical proposal: to expropriate private housing. The campaign, launched at a “rent insanity” protest in Berlin on April 6th, is gathering signatures to force a citywide vote on whether to oblige companies that own over 3,000 properties to sell them to the city.
Construction has speeded up, but it can still take between eight and ten years from zoning decisions to completion. Nimbyism is one problem; in 2014 Berliners voted against a proposed housing scheme on the Tempelhof Feld, a former airport now used for sunbathing and skating. In some cities land sits idle as investors wait for its value to appreciate. Labour shortages in the construction sector add to the problem, and rent brakes also discourage new building.
Helge Peters, a spokesman for the expropriation campaign, says that supply and demand mismatches do not capture the story. In 2004, after a banking crash, Berlin sold off much of its public housing at fire-sale prices. These properties were acquired by listed companies like, which channelled funds from institutional investors fleeing lacklustre bond markets. Such firms squeeze poor tenants so they can pay higher dividends, claims Mr Peters, resulting in “targeted social displacement”.
For all that, sceptics wonder if the cost of expropriation—which the city’s Senate puts at between €26bn and €36bn , and campaigners say could be as low as €7bn—is justified in debt-laden Berlin. The plan would not lower rents or increase housing supply, says Philip Grosse,of Deutsche Wohnen. He wants politicians to show some backbone. But Berlin’s Senate, a coalition of Social Democrats , Greens and the hard left, is split.
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