20,000 for a radical change of course: protesters call for rents to be stopped in Berlin

[TexasTowelie]

Living in Berlin is expensive. Low wage earners cannot afford an address in the city center. The organizers count 20,000 demonstrators at a demonstration against the “rent madness”. The Berlin SPD top candidate Giffey rejects expropriation claims.

According to the organizers, around 20,000 people took to the streets in Berlin in the afternoon demanding affordable rents. “The huge housing problem in our country must finally be solved,” demanded the Berlin Tenants’ Association, which coordinated the event together with the “Berlin Alliance against Displacement and Rent Insanity”. The motto of the demonstration was “Living for everyone”.

It all started with a kick-off rally at Alexanderplatz, from where the demonstration started towards the final rally on Straße des 17. Juni. According to the organizers, hundreds of house communities and initiatives from all over Germany as well as large organizations such as the German Tenants’ Association, the Paritätische Gesamtverband, the Federal Association of Homeless People and the German Trade Union Confederation took part in the demonstration.

A “radical change of course in rent and housing policy” was called for. In the run-up to the Bundestag election and the House of Representatives elections in Berlin, an “urgent request to the parties” must finally be taken to finally take comprehensive measures to protect tenants. Specific demands included a nationwide rent freeze, a nationwide rent cap and the socialization of large housing groups.

Read more: https://news.in-24.com/news/162352.html

[I_UndergroundPanther]

1. Wish we could do that over here

But america hasen't fell out of love with billionaires and capitalism enough yet to dare demand something like this..

[DFW]

2. Ironically, until fairly recently, Berlin was one of the more reasonable cities to live in here

In their drive to bring in investment money, the Social Democrats, who have ruled Berlin for the last 20 years, opened the doors to unlimited real estate speculators from outside Germany (mostly rich Russians), who have driven up the prices of living space in the center of Berlin to the point where Berliners can't afford to live there. They brought in the investment money, alright--to the detriment of the people who elected them. Russians can afford to live in central Berlin. Berliners can't. To get to the apartments of friends of ours there, we need to take an expensive taxi ride, or a long combination of Bus and U-Bahn, about 45 minutes either way, to get there from the city center. Friends who live in the south (Steglitz or Neukölln, e.g.) have it even worse, although U-Bahn lines alleviate that depending on how far they live from an U-Bahnhof.

I don't know if there was any legal way to stem the flow of non-resident real estate speculation, but the city government's cozy relations with rich Russians made it so that even if there was some protective regulation, it was never enforced. The genie is now out of the bottle, of course. Apartment houses, due to the high prices paid for them, cost so much to finance and maintain that the owners have to charge sky high rent just to get their purchase price back. Either that, or they cheat on maintenance that they can no longer afford if they want to keep the rent low. Sooner or later, this will lead to empty apartments (either because too few people can afford them, or because the rich owners are only there 6 weeks out of the year), and some illegal squatting that will result in some violence to get the squatters out of there. The Russians don't care. Awash in oil money, they paid in full when they bought, so they don't have any debts to service, and the property tax, they can pay out of petty cash. But they will not sell at a loss, and so they now have a wide stretch of the choicest apartments and houses in Berlin that too few people can afford to live in, least of all the Berliners themselves.

Giffey is right, the government can't just start appropriating property from private people because they want to. They used to do that to a certain ethnic group a little over 80 years ago here, and Germany, especially the German left, doesn't even want a hint of a comparison to that era or that governemnt, when the NSDAP government did exactly that, albeit with a different motive.

The problem long plaguing choice areas in Germany's smaller "big" cities, such as Hamburg, Bremen, Düsseldorf, Köln, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and München is now finally coming home to roost in Berlin. The only thing that I find surprising is that it comes as a surprise. Did the SPD governments of Wowereit and Müller think that Berlin was somehow immune? If they did, they are getting a few reminders to the contrary, and they will not go away. The apartments will not get cheaper, and the people demonstrating will not be any more able to afford them than they are now.

Much like a lot of Hawai'i is unaffordable to Hawai'ians due to real estate bidding wars from rich U.S. mainlanders bidding against rich Chinese, Japanese and Russians, some of the choicest property in Berlin--already unaffordable to all but embassies and the ultra rich--is now in the hands of foreigners who couldn't give a rat's ass about Berliners.