Waves of socialization: Berlin and the expropriation campaign against large corporate housing owners
Germany is a country of renters. So is Berlin, it's capital. More than 50 % of the population don't own the space they are living in. This means people depend on landlords. And this is a problem once housing has been turned into an asset class like all others, allowed to generate as much private profit as owners like.
But Berlin has a history of housing combativeness. The city grew explosively from half a million inhabitants in 1850 to nearly 4 million in 1920. The growth in population, industrialization and the lack of housing led to waves of renters' mobilization. In the early 20th century, these worked in tandem with the radical workers movement and social democracy.
Thanks to this mobilization, the constitution of the inter-war Weimar Republic already contained a socialization provision to be used by the state in case of threats to social order. Massive housing scarcity after Berlin was destroyed during Nazi rule and the Second World War led to the state managing the housing market by decree for some time after the Second World War. It also meant that at the federal level, the new 1949 Basic Law (Germany's de facto constitution) carried over the socialization paragraph as Article 15. It stipulates:
“Land, natural resources and means of production may be transferred to public ownership or other forms of public enterprise for the purpose of socialisation by means of a law that regulates the nature and extent of compensation.”
This is the paragraph the most recent wave of housing mobilizations in Berlin since 2008 used to push for the corporate giants Deutsche Wohnen and Vonovia to be expropriated.
The campaign, launched by a group of housing activists that had been active on the left for years already, had the idea to bring back thousands of units of housing into the public realm and to reverse the privatization spree that had decimated the public housing stock in Berlin since German re-unification in 1990.
To do so, the movement used organizing strategies, facilitated renters meetings in different neighborhoods and helped spread a feeling of power among those hardest hit by rising rents and evictions. This ground work was essential for the success of some of the strategies used until today.
At the same time, the question of housing had already been taken up by the Berlin coalition government between the Social Democrats, the Left and the Greens since 2016. Housing senator Karin Lompscher had named Andrej Holm, one of the most prominent housing scholars and activists of the years prior, to become state secretary for housing. Corporate owners had come under pressure both from below, from the parties left of the center and from the executive.
In this particular constellation, the Deutsche Wohnen Enteignen campaign decided to use another legal provision, this time at the state level. The Berlin constitution allows for direct democratic elements such as referenda, which force the government to engage and issue or can even directly implement a particular law. To be launched the referendum required at least 7% of all Berlin voters to provide a signature for it. More than twice as many, i.e. more than 300.000 people did. The referendum that ensued was won handsomely and “asked” the government to work out a socialization of all private owners of more than 3000 housing units and to compensate them at prices much lower than current market prices.
This was a big success because in 10 out of 12 Berlin neighborhoods a majority of participating voters (total participation rate was more than 70%) had voted for the socialization and expropriation of private housing corporations. However, the government dragged its feet, the social democrats decided to join a coalition with the center-right Christian Democrats and to disregard the referendum result.
The campaign and its activists, however, had anticipated this strategy and had been quietly preparing the next step. With legal professionals they have now been hard at work over the last few years to draft an expropriation law, which they will use for the next referendum. This time, if agreed, the government will be forced to implement the law directly. Resistance by the corporate sector and the Right will be vicious and they will do all they can to kill the referendum in prior legal cases. The permissibility of expropriation will be at the heart of these attempts. The constitutional article 15, however, will make it extremely difficult to dismiss the referendum outright.
What does this case teach us for Worlds of Liberation:
1. Organizing
Organizing and political strategies build on historical waves of mobilization and the successes they have had. In this case, the workers movement and its legacy that has left Art. 15 in the German Basic Law.
2. Mobilizing
Mobilizing successes come in waves and come with long-lasting slumps that need to be endured. The most recent work has started in around 2008 and may only be temporarily over, if at all, in 2028 with the implementation of the housing socialization law.
3. Alliances
Smart interaction between organizing groundwork, party and government alliances is necessary to achieve anything at all. Without a clear sense of a strategic division of labor and lasting channels of communication, there will be no success.
