Just two weeks ago, banners and stickers all over the neighborhood read, “Fuck off, Google.” Now, many simply say “Tschüss” (“Bye”).

In November 2016, the tech giant announced plans for a seventh Google Campus in the trendy Kreuzberg district of Berlin, following locations in London, Seoul, Madrid, Sao Paulo, Tel Aviv, and Warsaw. It eyed the Umspannwerk, a large former substation in picturesque brick on the banks of the Landwehr Canal: an epicenter of the hipster wave that’s hit Berlin since the late 1990s.

Local groups mobilized right away, fearing Google would turbocharge gentrification that has already sent rent prices soaring by 75 percent in just five years. GloReiche, a neighborhood collective, pointed at Google’s London Campus, which the collective claimed had sped up social cleansing in its Shoreditch surroundings.

Berlin, whose previous mayor famously called it “poor but sexy” in 2003, has arguably shed the “poor” part of that quote in a wild decade. Global capital has flooded in. Startups, wooed by cheap rent and a frenetic party scene (clubs that open on Friday night often do not close until Monday), have arrived by the dozen. By most metrics, Berlin now ranks second behind London among Europe’s leading tech hubs.

The change has not come easily. Gentrification, particularly in hip districts like Kreuzberg and neighboring Neukölln, has bumped living costs and displaced longterm residents. Berlin, 85 percent of whose 3.5 million residents rent, prevents drastic rent increases on existing tenants. But startups, around three quarters of which fail, come and go quickly, meaning landlords can hike prices again and again. Google, whose privacy infringements and what many perceive as tax avoidance have earned the ire of European Union lawmakers, has become a byword among Europeans for Silicon Valley greed—particularly for Kreuzberg’s electorate, over 75 percent of whom voted for far-left candidates at the most recent poll.