You know a problem is serious in Berlin politics when it gets its own QR code. And so it is with housing in advance of state elections for Berlin on September 20th.
Getting in early, the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) has plastered the capital with a party promise to “check your rent”.
Scan the code and you land on an SPD page declaring housing “the most critical social issue of our time”, and promoting the party’s pre-election vote-winner: a new online register to control spiralling rents.
About 80 per cent of Berliners – or 1.8 million people – are tenants. Berlin has the highest rental rate in the country and, for many, this is an increasingly precarious position to be in. Average Berlin rents have exploded by at least 125 per cent since 2010. Anyone signing a lease for a 100 square metre apartment today counts themselves lucky to get change from €2,000 a month.
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And Berlin’s SPD has embraced the housing crisis as a golden election opportunity. As junior partner in Berlin’s city-state government, or senate, it controls the ministry for housing and is pushing the plan for a so-called rental register. This would oblige all landlords to log their rents in a city database, which will then scan the numbers and flag any leases with extortionate rents.
It is not clear, though, whether this new register will be any more effective than the existing framework, the so-called rental atlas, which sets maximum rents based on apartment address and facilities such as lifts or PVC windows.
Rents more than 20 per cent above the rental atlas guideline are considered “exorbitant”. Last month an official survey flagged 46 per cent of the 4,539 advertisements as exceeding rental atlas limits.
SPD state building and housing minister Christian Gaebler concedes the legal difficulty of acting against rogue landlords, but has promised to write to all landlords flagged, warning them of potential fines of up to €20,000 for overcharging.
“Berlin is using all possibilities to enforce tenant protection in the city,” said Gaebler.
His next step is what is promised in the SPD poster: a statutory rent register with database access limited to city officials.
After last month’s launch, Berlin officials admitted on Friday that the promised 2027 launch date is optimistic given they have yet to find the right software, technical platform, or even money in the budget.
A second election battle on housing surrounds a controversial 2021 referendum.
Back then, 58 per cent of Berliners backed a grassroots proposal to force landlords with more than 3,000 flats to sell their holdings to the city. The main focus of the vote was Deutsche Wohnen, a listed company with 110,000 flats in Berlin, though other companies would also be affected.
Berlin’s then city-state government campaigned against a proposal it said would cost the taxpayer billions without creating much-needed new housing.
Then, after the motion passed, city politicians flagged legal concerns and set up a commission to explore these. In its final report, the commission found no legal concerns. Such a drastic step could only be justified, the expert commission said, in a city with a housing crisis of tight supply and spiralling rents – a description that fits the German capital.
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A year ago, Berlin’s city government finally presented a legal framework to make the referendum result reality but failed to progress the legislation before the end of the electoral term.
Then, last month, chancellor Friedrich Merz surprised everyone when he appeared to pull the rug out from under the long-running proposal.
The 70-year-old said Germany’s federal states were free to act as they wished on housing, but not “if it creates problems for all of us”. “In the whole world people are asking: ‘What is up in Germany, do we have to expect disappropriation?’” he said. “Our answer will say clearly: ‘No.’”
The Merz plan to ban forced apartment sales was a red rag to the hard-left Linke or Left Party, which is leading polls in Berlin in advance of the September election.
Linke national leader Luigi Pantisano described the Merz intervention as a gift to his “friends” in investment fund BlackRock. During a break from politics, Merz worked for the US firm – which holds an eight per cent stake in property Vonovia, owner of 130,000 apartments in Berlin alone.
“That announcement to ban nationalisation saw Vonovia shares rise six per cent,” said Pantisano to the Tagesspiegel daily. “I’ve asked Merz how many Vonovia shares he owns. Naturally I got no answer but people sense that the chancellor is not doing politics for them but his rich, share-owning friends.”
With seven weeks to go, opposition party Linke is leading polls with 18 per cent support. If they repeat that result on election night, the most critical social issue in the German capital could trigger a historic election upset.
