- Joined
- Dec 6, 2010
- Messages
- 33,423
- Reaction score
- 5,684
Berlin’s fight for expropriation of 200,000 homes
by Lukas Hermsmeier | April 2, 2019
by Lukas Hermsmeier | April 2, 2019
In early March, Germany’s largest tabloid, Bild, proclaimed: “A specter is haunting Germany, the specter of expropriation.”
The exaggeration-prone paper was not entirely wrong: In recent months, few topics have been as fiercely debated in Germany as the question of property seizures. The catalyst? A Berlin-based initiative aiming to seize 200,000 homes from the city’s biggest landlords and turn them into social housing.
If everything goes according to plan, Berlin will hold a referendum next year that could potentially force the government into carrying out these historic expropriations. The “expropriate Deutsche Wohnen and Co” proposal specifically names the city’s largest private-property owner, Deutsche Wohnen, but it has all major landlords in its sights as well.
And while activists see an unprecedented chance of winning their city back from the clutches of finance capital, conservative and liberal commentators, politicians, and investors warn against the return of German Democratic Republic–style state socialism. The ratings agency Moody’s has already threatened to downgrade Berlin’s credit status should the expropriation proposal become policy.
Pundits have reacted with shock that the question is even on the table; Frank Plasberg, host of one of the most popular German political TV shows, interrupted a discussion on the issue during a mid-March program to observe: “We have been talking, and I wouldn’t have thought that this is possible at all, for 11 minutes now about the expropriation of a corporation in Germany.”
The host, it seemed, could not quite believe that a topic he’d chosen himself was being taken quite so seriously. And that’s the most remarkable thing about this initiative. In most other Western capitals, such a proposal would be considered as the naive idea of radical leftists. In Berlin, famous for its protest culture and shaped by its historical ruptures, the campaign has been popular.
The biggest contributor to Berlin’s hyper-gentrification has been the city’s own policies. Not long after the wall came down, the city senate started privatizing major parts of their public infrastructure. In 1997, Berlin sold half of its electricity utilities. Two years later, the same thing happened with its water. The biggest, and perhaps most ill-conceived real estate deal took place in 2004, when the city flogged off 65,000 units for the obscenely cheap price of €405 million and offloaded a sizable amount of municipal debt to private investors. All in all, each apartment was sold for only around €30,000. The majority of these very homes are now owned by Deutsche Wohnen. In total, Berlin sold 200,000 units between 1989 and 2004.
The swath of privatization was enabled in part by supposedly left-wing parties in the city’s leadership. Since 1989, the Social Democrats have been present in every Senate, thrice building a coalition with the Left Party.
Read the rest of this fascinating story at:
https://mondediplo.com/outsidein/berlin-expropriation
Last edited:
