A sixty-something Berlin real estate agent with ashy slicked-back hair and a thick German accent awkwardly cracks poor jokes while he gives a tour to two colleagues from London. The Londoners are on the hunt for their clients. One of them, the one with the permanent rehearsed smile, explains: “the typical clients we manage are international investors from the Middle East, Russia and Europe, and also celebrities. Lately, they have started to ask for Berlin because they see a lot of potential and it is the new artistic pole of Europe. They look for buy-to-let investments.” A little later he explains that most of their buyers actually look for two apartments, one to live in and one to rent out. Then he laughs and almost rips his face when he says it’s better to be an agent in London than in Berlin with property prices still three times as high, and so too the middleman’s commissions. The display feels very much like a scene from a badly cast comedy. Yet in fact, this embodiment of global residential competition is just one of the many simultaneously funny and toe-curlingly revealing parts of the documentary film City for Sale (Die Stadt als Beute) about Berlin’s housing market.

Just as the documentary was released, the strikingly matching book In Defense of Housing by David Madden and Peter Marcuse was published. The book and the film are the perfect companions for anyone who wants to get a grasp of the housing crisis that currently exists in all big cities worldwide.

In Defense of Housing outlines the contemporary attack on housing. That is, if your idea of housing is that it should provide a home for people in need of a place to live, the solution to the basic human need of shelter. Housing has instead become one of the primary drivers of global capitalism, through commodification and financialisation, making its function as real estate more important than its use as lived space. It is the result of spatial developments being market-driven. Madden and Marcuse: “housing is not produced and distributed for dwelling at all,” but “as a commodity to enrich the few.” The result, for millions of households, is anxiety, chaos, disempowerment, discrimination and oppression. For them – and this goes for people well into the middle classes – shelter, personal safety, and a sense of identity, order and continuity that derive from the personal ownership of property are at risk.

The book provides an exhaustive analysis laced with examples from both sides of the story. On the one hand, the authors trace housing as a source of wealth and income for the lucky few. The most extreme cases being super-prime luxury homes, developed and bought as offshore investments, that are easily converted into money through loans, mortgages and complex financial transactions, with developers, investors and banks profiting. The heavily subsidised homeownership fetish of many countries is also criticised, just as far-reaching deregulation, the idea that rising housing prices are good, and the abstract financialisation of living space (“no doubt some canny financial innovators are already working on the securitisation of rent-to-rent housing or the pooling of income streams from subletting”). On the other hand, showing figures of numerous cities and countries, detailing destructive housing policies and describing chilling stories of people on the losing end of the game, Madden and Marcuse demonstrate how the growing perception and functioning of housing as real estate exacerbates both inequality and individual personal crisis.

For people dismissing In Defense of Housing as anti-capitalist pessimism, for those who prefer a visual story, or for anyone interested in the urban housing game and its players, City for Sale is the documentary to watch. For four years, filmmaker Andreas Wilcke observed Berlin’s real estate market, following and interviewing key actors in the housing drama. The result is an astonishing mosaic story that has the power to amuse viewers and make them grimace, often simultaneously.