CITY: Issue 25.5-6

founding editor: bob caterrall

editor: city editors

editorial: Ja! Damit Berlin unser Zuhause bleibt! That Berlin will remain our home! حتى تظل برلين بيتنا Berlin evimiz kalsın diye! чтобы берлин оставался нашим домом Aby Berlin pozostał naszym domem!, by anna richter and debbie humphry

Berliners won a major victory and precedent for housing justice on 26 September 2021. There was a clear majority of 57.6% in the referendum initiated by the campaign group Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen (Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co) (2021). Together with the national and local elections, voters in Berlin were asked whether they supported the drafting of a bill to expropriate and socialise housing stock owned by corporate landlords with more than 3000 properties, such as Deutsche Wohnen or Akelius. In 2020, Leilani Farha, the UN’s Special Rapporteur for the Right to Housing, had already accused corporate landlord Akelius of creating a hostile environment for its tenants ‘through severe deterioration of housing conditions, higher rents and increased risk of threat of eviction’ (UNHRC 29 April 2020; see also Gertten 2019). Akelius also explicitly support the deliberate displacement of lower-income households from the city, with Roger Akelius advising Berlin to build a sister city outside the existing perimeter for people with lower incomes as increases in inner city housing prices will be unaffordable for the majority (Tagesspiegel 15 April 2021; see also dwenteignen.de 2021). The demand for expropriation rests on the German constitution’s article 15, which states: ‘Land […] may be transferred to common ownership […] for the purpose of socialisation’. The housing stock in question in the referendum is approximately 240,000 flats, the size of a large city in its own right, so the demanded bill presents a meaningful alternative vision for a more equitable and inclusive kind of housing provision in Berlin. In this editorial, our corresponding editor Anna Richter recounts the morning after the election, and reflects with Debbie Humphry on its implications (see Figure 1).