Berlin’s housing crisis: what should be done?

This is the second debate of a two-part event. Tickets are €5, available on the door. Students and apprentices can attend free of charge.

Berlin, like other big German cities, has a housing crisis. According to one report, the city needs 100,000 additional flats. With the slump in construction, the problem is set to become worse. According to one study, the market for affordable housing in municipal areas has collapsed by a third. Of the planned flats in social housing, 21 per cent will no longer be feasible in the next year due to rising construction costs.

Berlin is not alone. Elsewhere in Europe – and especially in major cities such as Amsterdam, Barcelona and London – affordable housing is also proving a major challenge that leads to homelessness, financial insecurity and prevents younger people from leaving their family homes and becoming independent.

How can and should we react? One idea which has been gaining momentum in Berlin is the expropriation of large housing companies. Two years ago, more than a million Berliners – in a non-legally binding referendum – supported a campaign called ‘Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co’. The aim of the campaign is to stabilise rents by bringing flats owned by large corporate private landlords back into state ownership. Legal concerns, such as the protection of private property, have thwarted the demands for now. But they are by no means off the table.

Some critics of the expropriation campaign have pointed out that the problem is really one of regional imbalances. Where the population is declining, or stagnating, flats and houses are still available. Existing building structures are unused or even decaying. This, they say, is an enormous waste of infrastructure. Is using state funds in favour of the urban centres justified? Is the affordable housing crisis a mobility crisis? And what about the environmental impact of building ever more and new houses in already densely populated areas?

For a city like Berlin, where most citizens are rent-paying tenants, keeping rents low through state control seems like an attractive solution. In addition to the demand for expropriation, there have been proposal to impose stricter rent caps. Yet would these measures really solve the problem of too few houses being built?

Is there a right to affordable housing? And if so, who should decide on the level of rents and the amount of space per person? Are the demands for expropriation or rent caps the bold new step we need? Or do they end up confirming low expectations, accepting as given the existing limits of the housing markets? What could a truly bold proposal look like?

Speakers:

Alastair Donald, co-convenor, Battle of Ideas festival; convenor, Living Freedom; author, Letter on Liberty: The Scottish Question
Lysia Leal, student of City & Regional Planning, Technische Universität Berlin
Max Leonard Remke, co-founder, Liberty Rising
Dr Tim Wihl, fellow, The New Institute, Hamburg