It’s quite literally everywhere: the words “housing” and “crisis”.
Across Europe’s major cities housing costs have risen beyond the reach of many working people. The people who give neighbourhoods their character are being pushed out of their homes, their communities and, in the worst cases, their cities altogether.
Berlin has undergone that transformation at remarkable speed. Until relatively recently, it was seen as a city where working-class people and artists could still afford to live. Now, rents have soared and increasing amounts of housing are concentrated in the hands of real estate giants such as Vonovia, Deutsche Wohnen and Heimstaden.
That is the backdrop against which our grassroots campaign, Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen (DWE), began organising across Berlin. Our demand is simple: housing owned by corporate landlords with more than 3,000 properties should be expropriated, socialised and brought under the control of the people who live in it. We believe that gets to the heart of Berlin’s housing crisis.
In September 2021, Berliners were given the chance to vote on that idea. A citizen-led referendum asked whether the state government should expropriate corporate landlords owning more than 3,000 properties in the city. Some 59.1% voted in favour.
For Berlin’s political establishment, that result was difficult to absorb. Rather than implement the referendum, successive governments have delayed action, while the campaign has accused politicians of using a series of diversionary tactics to avoid acting on the vote.
By 2023, DWE had decided to change strategy. The campaign announced that it would begin the legal process of bringing forward a second, legally binding referendum – one that could not simply be ignored.
One of the more striking manoeuvres came from the CDU-SPD government itself. It appointed an independent commission to assess whether socialisation was legally and economically viable. The commission ultimately concluded that socialisation under Article 15 of Germany’s constitution was legally possible.
For housing activists and tenant organisers, the logic is straightforward: decommodifying housing removes homes from the private market and places them within what DWE calls the Gemeinwirtschaft – an economy organised around the common good. In practical terms, that means lower rents and money being reinvested in buildings rather than extracted as profit.
But affordability is only half the argument. Housing is not simply an asset class or a line on a balance sheet; it is where people live their lives. That is why DWE talks not only about expropriation, but about socialisation. For us, socialisation means putting housing under democratic administration through structures such as tenants’ councils. In other words, it means giving people meaningful control over one of the most important parts of their lives: their homes.
What might that look like in practice? Tenants could vote to install infrastructure to support elderly residents or people with limited mobility. They might decide collectively to switch a building to renewable heating. In a city where many people live in blocks housing dozens or even hundreds of residents, decisions about how buildings are run affect everyone.
That would be a radical departure from the current model, in which landlords and shareholders retain the decisive say over buildings they do not live in. Tenants, meanwhile, can be left dealing with the often illegal actions of their landlords, including poor maintenance, excessive rents and decisions over their homes in which they have little or no voice. Germany has relatively strong legal protections for tenants, but landlords can still breach those rules in the knowledge that many tenants will not pursue legal action against them.
Further, across much of Berlin, businesses are attached to the ground floors of many residential buildings and typically have the same landlord as the residents living above.
However, commercial tenants have far fewer rental protections and can therefore be pushed out more easily, further accelerating the process of gentrification in our neighbourhoods. Socialisation of these spaces would also mean that the same democratic structure administering the residential housing above would effectively become their new “landlord”.
These spaces – bars, cafes, community centres and so on – are where we socialise and build our lives together. They play an integral part in the city and provide the backdrop against which our lives play out. Socialisation in this context means protecting the social character of our boroughs and communities because, at the end of the day, who really wants to live in a district where all our spaces are replaced with boutique stores selling €1,000 plain black T-shirts?
Of course, this type of reasoning is lost on status quo politicians who oppose socialisation because that would mean the wrong type of people benefiting economically from it. Their played-to-death objection – “how can we afford it financially?” – conveniently overlooks not only the findings of the independent expert commission, but also the fact that the campaign has clearly outlined how 100-year bonds would be provided to expropriated landlords as a form of compensation.
The political party of Germany’s current chancellor, Friedrich Merz – himself a former BlackRock supervisory board chairman – is currently scrambling to try to ban the possibility of the expropriation and socialisation of housing, specifically in the wake of the recent Berlin state elections, where Die Linke won the most votes after making implementation of the democratic mandate from the 2021 referendum a central campaign promise.
It appears that those who gained the most through the last 40 to 50 years of neoliberal policies are starting to get scared at the prospect of people bringing their destructive political project to an end.
At the time of writing, it is still unclear how the current political situation and the election results will play out. The intricacies of the German political system fall outside the purview of this article. However, the prevailing story being told at the moment is that the results further reinforce an unavoidable political reality: housing and affordability are key issues that left-wing parties need to campaign on to win elections.
This is absolutely true, and should Die Linke form a progressive coalition, its mandate to implement the democratic wishes of Berliners through the large-scale socialisation of the city’s housing stock could not be any clearer. It needs to fulfil its campaign promise that any governing coalition must be formed on the condition that socialisation is carried out.
But again, the dust from the recent elections is still settling and what happens next remains up in the air.
What should be clear to all those engaged in the same struggle is that any vision for housing needs to be not just comprehensive and democratic, but also – in one word – social.
