REFIRE
Charles Kingston - REFIRE
One thing looks sure. The rise of the Greens, and the accompanying pressure on their political opponents to match their voter-friendly social outlook, will require more and more political lobbying from the array of real estate interests to ensure a fair hearing and the overdue reform of the constipated planning and regulatory structures that are in danger of strangling future growth. Not an easy path ahead.
We’re glad to see that listed housing company Deutsche Wohnen is still on the acquisition trail, having just this month bagged a further 2,840 German apartments from Swedish group Akelius for €685m.
Notable, of course, is that the properties are all located in the Rhine-Ruhr region, around Cologne and Düsseldorf, and in the Rhine-Main area around Frankfurt, Wiesbaden and Mainz. Far away from that hotbed of radical socialism, Berlin, where Deutsche Wohnen can’t seem to keep itself out of the headlines.
Not a day goes by now without the listed Deutsche Wohnen – and ten further companies in Berlin – featuring in press articles and television talk shows. They’ve all committed the crime of being brutal exploitative landlords, hell-bent on gentrification and driving oppressed residents out of their apartments by unfairly hiking up their rents. And by owning more than 3,000 housing units, they’re on the hit-list – led by arch-bogeyman Deutsche Wohnen – to have their surplus residential holdings expropriated by the state, and handed back to communal ownership.
Altogether about 200,000 homes in Berlin could be potentially expropriated from private owners, and turned back into social housing. It’s already scared off Germany’s biggest landlord Vonovia from further new building activity in the city, while ratings agency Moody has warned it would downgrade Berlin’s credit status should the current sabre-rattling turn into official city policy.
Now, in any other city, such a threat from left-wing activists would be laughed off as a throw-back to another era – and in Berlin’s case, to the old East German regime where ALL property was owned by the state. But a survey carried out by Der Tagesspiegel earlier this year showed that 55% of respondents would support the state – in this case, the city – grabbing back properties which some feel should never have been given away (that is, bought for hard cash by capitalists) in the first place. It’s a legitimate act of self-defense, they argue.
Berlin, it is true, does seem to have brought these troubles on itself. Caught up in a wave of privatization after 2000, the city sold off these 200,000 apartments to cash-rich bidders, fully underestimating likely population trends in the city, and giving them away for as little as €30,000 apiece, in the process offloading a big chunk of its municipal debt to those private investors.
From a low base, Germany’s capital city has seen the largest proportional rise in residential rents among the country’s bigger cities. Given the popularity of the city and the inward surge of new residents over the past ten years, the escalation in living costs has hurt many long-term residents and led to a groundswell of support for anyone proposing to stem the tide of gentrification, imposed rent rises, and construction of more housing that seems targeted only at the higher-earning population.
Deutsche Wohnen, founded by Deutsche Bank more than 20 years ago, has 110,000 apartments in Berlin. The company’s association with such big asset managers, including its current largest shareholder BlackRock, along with a somewhat tawdry historical reputation for squeezing its tenants and skimping on maintenance, means it’s going to take most of the flak thrown at the sector. Its healthy (and rising) profit figures (it cleared nearly €2bn last year), along with its share price which has doubled over the past four years, offer an easy target and plenty of grist to the mill of its accusers, who are convinced this is proof that only large-scale communalisation in the entire housing sector will provide the required supply of social housing.
And here’s the thing. All it takes to make this referendum possible is 170,000 signatures, with the drive scheduled to start this month. So this referendum is as good as on the table. Cities throughout Germany and wider afield are paying close attention to how those protest-meisters in Berlin are going about their campaign. They’ll not be far behind.
There are, of course, plenty of practical hurdles to overcome. The city itself estimates the cost of buying back these apartments at up to €36bn – an impossible sum for the city to finance – while the activists would offer only half the market price, and to hell with objections from the capitalist running dogs.
Then there’ll be plenty of legal objections. Lawyers are already popping up daily saying protesters have no legal leg to stand on. Others say that Article 15 of Germany’s Grundgesetz, or Basic Law, makes it clear that expropriation of “land, natural resources, and means of production” may indeed by transferred to public ownership in certain circumstances.
Could the severity of Berlin’s housing crisis cause the first invocation of Article 15 in 70 years? A well-known TV moderator of a political talk show found himself looking into the camera with amazement last week, noting that his show had now been talking seriously “for the last 11 minutes, about the expropriation of a corporation in Germany, which I wouldn’t have though possible at all.” It was a telling moment, which made a lot of us swallow hard.
Lenin used to mock German revolutionaries, saying they would dutifully buy and punch their train tickets on the way to the demo to overthrow their oppressors. These days they can avail of the courts. Given the chaotic history of housing management in both East and West Berlin going back decades, the lawyers will be licking their chops at the prospects of the contorted disputes that lie ahead. While rents and prices just continue to rise.
