All photos courtesy of Jan Ickx / Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen.

Over the last few decades, housing in cities around the world has undergone unprecedented financialization and artificial speculation. Investors have never been richer. The worldwide value of the current real estate market is $217 trillion, 36 times worth the value of all the gold ever mined.

Profits from the commodification of the housing market have skyrocketed in step with the enclosure of spaces and the fixing of financial value to them. Living spaces are now complex financial products that can be packaged up into investment funds and swapped by companies across the world.

As Raquel Rolnik, former special rapporteur to the UN on adequate housing, attests, “In the new political economy, centered around housing as a means of access to wealth, the home becomes a fixed capital asset whose value resides in its expectation of generating more value in the future, depending on the oscillations of the (always assumed) rise of real-estate prices.”

Berlin has been the epicenter of the emerging struggle against capital, giving birth to a rebellious housing movement. A city-wide referendum is underway to expropriate “mega-landlords” with 3,000 apartments or more. If successful, the campaign could tip the scales away from speculation and essentially decommodify 250,000 apartments. In Berlin, tenants and housing activists are building upon shared struggle to break capital’s control over the home and democratize how and where we live.

Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co!

Berlin’s rents have doubled since 2009. A recent study sponsored by the German government shows the harrowing results of this increase: for the average single renter, only 5 percent of apartments are affordable. Within the inner city, that number plummets to less than 1 percent. Skyrocketing prices are displacing thousands across the city and destroying working-class neighborhoods as their residents make way for more affluent residents.

During the same period, the number of apartments held by massive investor groups in the city has more than doubled to 250,000, almost on a par with the city’s public housing stock. These trends go together — investor groups acquire a greater share of the market, pushing up the value of land as speculators buy just to resell rather than build.

Activists working on the campaign (including me) to expropriate these landlords are not just pushing for public housing; we are creating a renters’ commons of a sort, democratically managed by the people who live in the apartments. It represents a clear break from housing dominated by finance, speculation, and alienation.

This is no pipe dream, either. Just a few months ago, we collected almost four times the required number of signatures to move the referendum to the next round. Berliners are rallying behind a call that would have seemed unthinkable just a decade ago.

We are banking on a broad base of support to force the issue — despite pushback from establishment politicians. If we are successful in two rounds of collecting signatures, the referendum will go up for a vote regardless of political objections. Next year Berliners could be asked to decide whether the city should directly expropriate all apartments from companies that have 3,000 apartments or more.

Berlin’s referendum law has become one of activist’s most powerful tools, with six referenda already having gone up for a vote. In 2014, activists prevented the construction of luxury apartments around Berlin’s former Tempelhof airfield, one of Berlin’s most popular parks.

Direct democracy is a major tool for renters to fight back against monied interests, forcing the issue without having to break through tried-and-true triangulation strategies of politicians. After years of protesting, renters are finally getting somewhere. And they are discovering what kind of power they have.

Cities around Germany and the world are echoing these demands. Renters are finally dreaming big about winning a whole city for themselves.

Bankruptcy and tales of privatization

If you take a stroll through Potsdamer Platz, you’ll see a microcosm of what Berlin’s politicians had in mind for the city in the 1990s: everything gleaming, new, and full of money; glass-sheathed high-rises occupied by big German companies; an open-air forum stuffed with a big movie theater; touristy restaurants and tall hotels.

Potsdamer Platz was supposed to be a reflection of Berlin’s future as a bustling metropolis, a place of wonder and exploration. It’s anything but. Much derided for its distinctly “dead” mood, it has instead become a metaphor for the short-sighted priorities of establishment politics in the city and their delusions of grandeur. Berlin became establishment politicians’ vanity project as they tried to transform the city into a global service provider metropole which could attract the headquarters of international corporations and producers. Eberhard Diepgen, the mayor of a reunited Berlin from 1990 until 2001, characteristically baptized the city as “Corporate Berlin.”

But these plans were removed from reality: Berlin’s structural weaknesses were no basis for a global production and service hub. Instead of investing in the population’s endogenous strengths, the government tried everything to attract these companies and even made a bid for the 2000 Olympics. Politicians were so desperate to draw companies to the city that they sold the development land for Potsdamer Platz for such a low price that the EU competition commission intervened and demanded further compensation.

This neoliberal supply-side strategy ushered in a real estate boom that ultimately doomed the new city to bankruptcy and downward mobility. Much of it was pure speculation, based on the “belief that office building sites are a sign of economic progress and a promising future of the respective city,” as economist Stephan Krätke writes. Within eight years, the city built 7 million square meters of new office space, giving Berlin the largest surplus of office space in the country. The companies didn’t come and the plan collapsed.

The ensuing debt crisis was triggered by subsidies for real estate, massive speculation in real estate bonds by the city’s own public financial corporation (the Bankgesellschaft Berlin), and the dirt-cheap loans granted to developers — factors that shrank tax revenue. Unsurprisingly, the crisis brought with it massive cuts to public services and social expenditure. Tellingly, and in keeping with Berlin’s insidious culture of nepotism, a significant proportion of Berlin’s current debt servicing goes to paying back these real estate bonds, many of which are still owned by local elites.

The debt crisis was a watershed for communal housing policies in the city. During the scandal, the city sold off the entire stock of one of its own housing companies, 66,700 apartments, to Cerberus and Goldman Sachs. This investor amalgamation would eventually become the stock-market listed company Deutsche Wohnen, the namesake for our expropriation campaign. The majority of Deutsche Wohnen’s 110,000 apartments were once public housing owned by the city.

Berlin’s 500,000 public housing units shrank to just 260,000 in 2009. Taken together with the abolition of rent control in West Berlin in 1988, the halting of building social housing, and the feverish speculative real estate boom, Berlin’s rental politics have become tragic. From 1993 until 2014, the socially regulated apartment stock in Berlin shrank from 44 to 20 percent.

Now, some 85 percent of Berliners rent. The city has, until recently, benefited from an essentially decommodified housing sector. This profit-need-for-housing paradox has triggered manifold protests and initiatives across Berlin.

“We had been talking about expropriation for a few years now,” says Sandy Kalternborn a member of Kotti and Co., the neighborhood initiative for the renters of social housing units in Kottbusser Tor and around the city. Some of the members here are also involved in the expropriate Deutsche Wohnen campaign.

Kotti and Co. have been fighting for over eight years to stay in the neighborhood despite the buildings crumbling from lack of maintenance. The majority of the apartments in the area belong to Deutsche Wohnen. The apartments often make headlines for bad mold and the heat mercilessly going out during the winter. “We were involved in some round table discussions with the city government early on, but they didn’t go anywhere. Eventually, we asked ourselves how we could expand the topic and create more pressure. We saw expropriation as the next logical step to provoke and bring more radical solutions into the discussion,” recounts Sandy.

Much of the apartments that the renters of Kotti and Co. live in were built after the war during the city’s robust social housing boom. But because Germany gives subsidized loans for private developers to build social housing in exchange for regulated rents, companies like Deutsche Wohnen have made a habit of purchasing them. Once purchased, they can pay back the subsidized loans and raise the rent. They have been doing so for years now, through debt restructuring and cheap loans.

The renters of Kotti and Co. are thus facing off against global capital channeled through Deutsche Wohnen, trying to displace them from social housing that they have lived in for years. In response, they occupied the courtyard of one of the estates to build a protest hut in 2011, named Gecekondu after the temporary shelters on the outskirts of Istanbul — a nod to the neighborhood’s Turkish population. The hut is a standing protest to their own expropriation by Deutsche Wohnen — they are reclaiming space that should be public and using it to offer legal advice to other renters and organize their initiative.

Kotti and Co. Are not alone in organizing renters. Part of our referendum campaign directly organizes renters in their buildings and estates by helping them start their own renter initiatives. We and other initiatives effectively form a network that is not only democratizing living spaces but laying the groundwork for a sort of housing commons.

Deutsche Wohnen and other corporate landlords are speeding up the mass democratization of renters with package deals, buying up whole blocks of apartments at lower prices. Earlier this year, they attempted to purchase 675 apartments along the Karl Marx boulevard in Friedrichshain, a gentrification hotspot. Built-in the 1950s, the apartments are characteristic for their Stalinist architecture and the Hausmann-esque boulevard they fence. You’d be forgiven for thinking you were in Moscow. Activists from our campaign and coalition offered support immediately, sharing their common experiences and helping to generate media attention.

As a campaign of renters and activists, we can say from our own experiences that Berlin’s exploding housing prices are not a natural development of urbanization or people moving to cities. Rather, the situation is a systemic imperative that financializes the city, mortgaging our homes off and pushing us ever more precariously to its edge.

These experiences have laid the groundwork for our expropriation campaign and helped us create one big network of renters, a type of renters’ commons that works beyond one issue or campaign. We are actively creating the conditions for the socialization. Our campaign is thus the product and continuation of Berlin’s unique spatial dynamic. As Henri Lefebvre explains, “New social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa.”