Left-wing politicians are largely to blame for Berlin’s housing crisis

Anyone searching for an apartment in Berlin right now knows it’s very difficult – if not impossible – to find anything suitable. Sifting through the small number of listings, almost all of the properties available for rent are tiny, run-down apartments, offered at exorbitant prices. Young people, in particular, are becoming increasingly desperate. It is by no means unusual for apartment viewings to attract hundreds of prospective tenants. And very few renters dare to move, even if they need a new place to live, for example, after starting a family. They know there is next to no chance of finding a new apartment – and if they do find one, it will almost certainly cost them a lot more. But who is to blame, and what can be done to improve the situation?

Who has governed Berlin over the last 20 years?
The city’s three largest left-wing parties – Die Linke, the SPD, and the Greens – all blame the real estate companies. Die Linke, in particular, has boosted its share of the vote by campaigning with aggressive slogans such as “Let’s turn rentiers into mincemeat” (note: before an animal is turned into mincemeat, it has to be killed). Unsurprisingly, Die Linke has enjoyed the greatest success in exploiting the housing crisis to win potential votes. According to the most recent polls, Die Linke has increased its support from six to 19 per cent, making it the strongest left-wing party in Berlin.

The latest polls are hard to believe. After all, who has been governing Berlin over the past two decades? The SPD has been in power almost continuously for the past 20 years! And Die Linke has been a coalition partner for most of that time – 12 of those 20 years. No one has done more damage to the construction of new housing in Berlin than Katrin Lompscher (Die Linke), who served as Senator for Urban Development and Housing in Berlin’s SPD-Linke-Green coalition government from December 2016 to August 2020. It was as if every day, immediately after brushing her teeth, she asked herself: “What can I do today to make life more difficult for housing developers in my city?”

Now her party is pointing accusing fingers at everyone but themselves. And that’s despite the fact that Die Linke bear the primary responsibility for the housing crisis in Berlin:

• While they were in office, they sold more than 60,000 publicly owned apartments and now they want to expropriate the buyers. And Die Linke don’t even intend to pay fair market value. What they are planning is somewhere between expropriation and confiscation.
• The Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the “rent cap” implemented by Die Linke violated the German constitution, known as the Basic Law. This unconstitutional “rent cap” and Die Linke’s constant harassment of businesses drove investors and developers out of Berlin. Many developers left and have been busy investing elsewhere, including in Brandenburg, where the left-wing parties can be less ideological than in the capital. This is a key reason for Berlin’s dire housing crisis.
•  Incidentally, the same parties in Berlin also advocate giving immigrants either complete or almost completely unrestricted access to Germany’s social welfare system, deploying the slogan “We have space”. If little new housing is built, but many more people arrive, housing will become ever scarcer and rents will rise. It’s not exactly rocket science.

“Suddenly a communist?”
Die Linke currently stands a good chance of supplying Berlin’s next mayor if there is another SPD-Linke-Green coalition – with Ferat Ali Koçak the likely candidate. Koçak is a regular organiser of anti-Israel demonstrations and a Marxist. He was elected to the German parliament, the Bundestag, in 2025, as the winner of the parliamentary seat for Berlin-Neukölln.

The SPD is already courting Die Linke and has prepared a “socialisation law”, the “Berlin Socialisation Act”. The left-wing newspaper taz reported on Raed Saleh, the SPD parliamentary group leader in Berlin since 2011 and a vocal proponent of “socialisation”, under the headline: “Suddenly a communist”.

The SPD’s draft socialisation bill is 27 pages long and reflects the results of the 2021 expropriation referendum. Back then, more than 56 per cent of Berlin’s 1.8 million voters supported the expropriation of large real estate companies such as Deutsche Wohnen and Vonovia.

Die Linke, which is legally identical to the SED (Socialist Unity Party of East Germany), now hopes to implement policies that were the foundation of housing policy in communist East Germany. But what were the practical consequences of the East German philosophy that “the only good apartments are state-owned apartments” and that all rents should be capped? Unfortunately, very few Berliners are aware of this!

In 1989, 65 per cent of all apartments – including 3.2 million post-war buildings – were still heated with coal stoves.

• 24 per cent had no toilet.
• 18 per cent lacked a bathroom.
• As many as 40 per cent of apartment buildings were severely damaged, and 11 per cent were completely uninhabitable.
• 200 historic town centres in the GDR were on the verge of collapse.

At a cost of 80 billion euros of taxpayers’ money, the evil capitalist West was forced to step in and restore eastern Germany’s run-down apartments and construct entirely new homes. Many more facts and figures on the subject are available here:

https://hubertus-knabe.de/auferstanden-in-ruinen/

Real estate companies are unfortunately also partly to blame, as they have done too little to raise awareness of this issue. They have the resources to plaster the entire city of Berlin with posters of dilapidated buildings from East Germany, along with details on the truth of socialised housing. Were they too delicate or too stingy to do so?

The fact is: a vote for Die Linke is a vote for the continuation of the housing crisis. Especially in Berlin. Die Linke is responsible for the immense housing shortage they created when they ruled East Germany as the SED. And they are also responsible for Berlin’s current housing crisis.

If you want to find out even more about the East German economy, including housing policy in Berlin, you can watch this film, which has subtitles in numerous languages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZNSL9fT74Q