Berlin: Voters Approve Taking Back Property Owned by Corporate Landlords!

Referendum would seize properties of corporate landlords that own more than 3,000 apartments – and convert these to social housing.

In Berlin, Germany, a city of over 3.6 million people, most residents are renters. In recent years, a vibrant tenant movement has been growing, taking direct action against evictions and corporate control of housing.

Over a million voters in Berlin passed a historic referendum on September 26, 2021. The resolution urges their city government to seize the properties of corporate landlords that own more than 3,000 apartment units to convert these into permanently affordable housing under democratic community control.

**Voices from the ground**

We spoke with Rabea Berfelde, a volunteer organizer with the referendum campaign. The following is a lightly edited summary of our conversation.

***What Does the Referendum Call For?***

The referendum urges the city government to “expropriate” and “socialize” the assets of all landlords that own more than 3,000 flats in Berlin – about 240,000 units total (which is 11 percent of all apartments in the city).

“Socializing” these properties means their ownership would be transferred to public or community control and they would be converted into permanently affordable “social housing.” (“Social housing” means homes that are permanently affordable, protected from the private market, and publicly owned or under democratic community control, rather than for-profit ownership.)

Our referendum calls for expropriated properties to be managed in a participatory way, through a democratically controlled public and not-for-profit institution, as social housing. It supports mechanisms for democratic participation by residents and the public to govern the housing, and it calls for the housing never to be reprivatized or sold to for-profit landlords. The resolution urges the city to compensate landlords at below-market rates. For instance, advocates propose compensation could be set according to the highest possible loan the city could take out for this and repay, using income from rents kept at affordable levels.

Why Do Residents Think This is Important to Do?

In Berlin, 85 percent of households are renters. Our asking rents doubled between 2009 and 2020. Historically, our rents have been quite low, but they’ve kept rising in the last 10 years. After the reunification of East and West Germany in 1989, the government sold off public land – such as land in East Berlin that had been publicly owned under the East German government – and massively privatized our public housing stock. Since the 1990s, the city has sold off over 200,000 public housing units to private equity and hedge funds!1 This is where the massive concentration of rental housing under corporate landlords came from.

Today, we have a new type of corporate landlord who prioritizes shareholders, not tenants. They acquire existing housing stock to speculate with these assets on financial markets. More than 10 companies in Berlin own more than 3,000 units each. My house was bought by a Swedish investor2 that, after only a year of operating in Berlin, now already owns 6,000 flats in the city and is still expanding. When we tenants learned about the sale, we started organizing in our building, district, and Berlin-wide, to put pressure on the company.

Today, Germany has a system where the government subsidizes corporate landlords to build and acquire housing. The landlords commit to temporary rent regulations, for instance, of around 20 years. But after that timeline ends, the flats no longer have to be affordable and can be rented at market rate. We lack a proper system of social housing.

The referendum really tackles the root causes of the housing crisis: ownership by corporate landlords, as well as speculation on housing as an asset by for-profit investors through financial markets. In other words, the privatization and “financialization” of rental housing.

Berlin residents support the campaign to convert corporate-owned properties to social housing.

Erdoğan, Bus Driver (at BVG)

I support the referendum petition because housing and displacement should not be used to make profit!

I don’t want to be afraid of the future, I want to make it myself! It bothers me that real estate companies decide how my neighborhood changes. That’s why I’m voting for socialization in September, to actively shape the housing situation in Berlin! - Gisèle

Yağmur, Human Rights Activist

The housing crisis mainly affects foreigners. We have worse access to housing or legal aid because of various barriers like racism, language or bureaucracy. That’s why companies like Deutsche Wohnen exploit us the most, because they know we can't find anything else anyway.

Petra Grober-Unfug, Gas-Water Installer

LGBTIQ and queers also need affordable housing! Therefore vote Yes! For the referendum on 26 September!

Constanze, Self-Employed

I would like to become a mother, but the apartments are so expensive that I can’t afford it here. I would like to live near my family and friends in the future. Rising rents are pushing us all in different directions. That’s why I’m voting yes in September!

Ian, Computer Scientist Student

Berlin still has a great social mix, it should stay that way! I don’t want to live in a city like Londor or something, where people with little money are marginalized. I want to keep the Kiezkultur in Berlin; it's so lively and so diverse! It’s also good that we have different cityscapes and I want to stand up for that!

Ingeborg, Retired Nurse: "I am a social person and want my fellow human beings to be well off. And that means that everyone can afford a roof over their head and not have no money left at the end of the month because the rent is so high. Socialization would make for a fairer world."

How Did Your Campaign Organize to Win This?

Our campaign builds on a longer history of tenants' self-organization. In the past decade, renters have increasingly organized in their homes and neighborhoods against rent increases, lack of maintenance, and the sale of buildings to real estate speculators. Renters organizing across the city have been coming together for mutual learning, and we recognized we’ve been engaging in defensive struggles. More homes were sold to investors, and new struggles against landlords were coming up every month. Around 2017, we started to unite around the slogan to expropriate corporate properties.

The German Constitution has an article, Article 15, which allows the state to take over land, natural resources, and means of production under public ownership “for the purpose of socialization.” (Our Constitution was drafted after WWII when even conservative forces agreed with limiting economic power because of how capitalists had supported the rise of the Nazis.) We use this legal framework to argue that the housing stock can be socialized with compensation to the companies below market value. We realized that Article 15 of our Constitution provides a legal basis, leading us to call for a local referendum.

To get the referendum on the ballot, we first had to collect 20,000 signatures in 2019, and then in 2020, during the pandemic, we collected 175,000 signatures in four months. We did this in-person as required by law, door-to-door or talking to people, with [COVID] hygiene measures. Conversations at the door were really critical for our win at the end. We reached people we wouldn’t normally by social media with better quality conversations. We built structures in local neighborhoods to collect signatures and mobilize. The campaign was completely volunteer – maybe 2,000 people volunteered. We had many ways to get involved, some with low thresholds.

Because so many people mobilized to support expropriating corporate landlords, in 2020, the Berlin city government implemented a rent cap. But after a year, our highest court overturned the rent cap.

In September 2022, we had the referendum vote and won: 59% voted for socialization.

What are Next Steps and Lessons?

This successful referendum is a non-binding resolution. The city government is now mandated to implement it but can decide not to. On the day of the referendum, there were also elections for mayor and the German government. Although the referendum passed, that same day voters elected a new mayor who opposes socialization. People tend to vote more progressively on particular issues than in elections [overall]. Parts of the ruling coalition do not support carrying out expropriation. The city government currently has created a commission to study for a year if and how socialization can be carried out. This is a strategy to delay implementation. It’s a problem to ignore the democratic vote. We have to keep the pressure up.

We’ve set a radical agenda but made clear it’s possible legally. We’ve charted out how socialization can be implemented. So many people became active because we had a decentralized structure. We reached people in every district through door-to-door organizing. We only partially integrated existing tenants’ organizations into the campaign’s structure. But nevertheless, the campaign has grown into a movement. I was continuously impressed by the sheer amount of people who became active.

We have to ask ourselves how to transform our campaign structures into a long-term project that will shake up Berlin’s political landscape in the future.