A ban on mega-landlords
The movement began in earnest at the beginning of the year with a fight over apartments on one of East Berlin’s most famous avenues. That case has since snowballed into a wider campaign to rein in major landlord companies.
The spark came in autumn 2018, when rental tenants of 680 apartments on East Berlin’s Karl Marx Allee discovered that their homes were to be sold to a major rental company called Deutsche Wohnen. The street in question is a grand, mainly 1950s avenue built up with elaborately decorated Stalinist baroque tenements. It’s considered a highly desirable place to live, so many residents dreaded what was sure to come.
Remarkably, the city’s government has agreed. This month, Berlin’s senate said it would step in and buy three buildings, amounting to 316 apartments. Meanwhile, the local borough of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg would buy a fourth building containing 80 apartments, meaning the majority of flats for sale will be converted to public ownership.
The authorities could do this through an existing law that allows them a right of first refusal over buildings for sale in areas that are undergoing steep rent rises. The law hasn’t yet been applied on this scale, and even though the city and borough will ultimately recoup the costs from rent, the buyout will require an investment of up to €100 million.
That’s already a major investment—but why stop there? The overwhelming majority of units that Deutsche Wohnen owns today in Berlin used to be public housing, and were sold off by the state over the past few decades. As galloping rents make daily life increasingly difficult, many Berliners are starting to regret such a shift. Sure enough, Berlin Mayor Michael Müller promised last month to buy back 50,000 of Deutsche Wohnen’s units for the city, along lines not yet fully clarified. Renters’ associations want to extend this proposal to all landlords with more than 3,000 apartments in the city, a wish that led to their referendum plan.
Planning a referendum—let alone winning one—is a major process in its own right. Anyone seeking a city-wide vote in Berlin must get verifiable signatures in favor from at least 7 percent of the electorate (currently roughly 170,000 people) over a four-month period. This is a high bar, but it has been reached for housing issues in the past. In 2014, citizens voted in a referendum against the ceding of public parkland at the former Tempelhof Airport for (largely unaffordable) housing development.

Boroughs take back control
It’s not just mega-landlords who are facing a challenge. Some Berlin boroughs have been buying buildings at risk of sharp rent hikes for a few years now, many of which belong to smaller companies and individuals.
The system used—called Vorverkaufsrecht or “pre-buying right”—works as follows. To prevent displacement of lower-income residents, German cities are allowed to place protection orders on neighborhoods where rents are rising at an unusually fast rate. These orders give local authorities the right to step in to buy any building within the order’s limits and convert them to public ownership, if the borough thinks a new landlord will greatly increase rents.
Buying every building at risk might prove expensive, but it isn’t always necessary. The borough can also agree to hold back from buying, provided the new landlord signs an agreement promising not to raise rents above inflation, or to sell individual flats on for owner-occupation, for the next 20 years.
A rental freeze
For many in Berlin, measures currently in play simply aren’t enough to stop displacement and living costs from galloping out of control. Accordingly, the Center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), which governs Berlin in coalition, has proposed the most radical idea yet: In areas where rents are rising especially fast, the SPD wants to introduce what they call a “rental lid” that would ban any rent rises whatsoever, both for new and existing rental contracts, in the five years following its implementation.
It may come slowly, but it seems likely that a total overhaul of how the Berlin housing market works is underway.