Berliners vote this Sunday in a referendum if they expropriate 240,000 homes

The roughly 2.5 million people with the right to vote in Sunday’s elections to the Berlin regional chamber will also be able to participate in the referendum called by a citizens’ initiative to expropriate large real estate companies after collecting 349,658 signatures, double the number necessary. This consultation is taking place at the same time that German voters are called to the general elections, elections which put an end to the 16 years of government of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The aim of the “Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co” initiative is to get the Senate (Berlin Executive) to draft a bill to “socialize more than 240,000 properties” belonging to “large for-profit real estate companies” who own more than 3,000 homes, which would become public property.

“The notion of expropriation is a little misleading, because in reality what we intend to do is called socialization, article 15 of the Basic Law”, explains Ingrid Hoffmann, one of the spokespersons of the initiative, in an interview with Efe. real name for fear of reprisals.

“For the purposes of socialization, land, natural resources and the means of production may be placed under a regime of collective property or other forms of collective management by a law which fixes the mode and amount of compensation”, clarifies Article 15.

Instead, expropriation is governed by Article 14 “and is applied at all times” to achieve another objective, such as the construction of a highway or the opening of a mine, and “the expropriated persons more or less expect to be compensated for market value. ”, Although this is not always the case in practice, adds Hoffmann.

With article 15, expropriation pursues “its own goal”, that of socialization, of “the establishment of a common economy system”, he specifies.

The initiative’s proposal states that affected companies are compensated “well below market value” on the basis of what the Basic Law dictates in that “compensation will be set with fair consideration of the interests of the community and those affected “.

Besides, proposes the creation of a public law institution to manage expropriated property, that it benefits from the democratic participation of society, tenants, employees and the Senate and that it stipulates in its statutes that these properties cannot be privatized.

Initiative argues that these large real estate companies are “primarily responsible for the crazy prices” of rents in Berlin, as his economic model is based, he adds, on the benefit of their increase.

“We must build, we are not against”, says Hoffmann, but recalls that “the objective of the campaign is not to create more housing” but “to guarantee the moderate rents which still exist in this city” .

According to the initiative’s calculations, compensation to large real estate companies “can be fully refinanced from the rents that accompany these 240,000 homes to the public law entity” that it proposes to create. In this way, “the city budget is not affected at all” and it is the decision of the Berlin government if it wants to allocate more money to the construction of social housing, he says.

The real estate company Deutsche Wohnen, which owns some 113,000 homes in the city, is clearly the main target. But many other companies would be affected, such as Vonovia (which is currently trying to buy out Deutsche Wohnen) and Pears Group.

In the opinion of jurist Ulrich Battis, even if on Sunday a majority of voters – more than 50% and at least 25% of citizens with the right to vote – is in favor of the expropriation of large real estate companies, the initiative not be implementable.

Socialization “would be a disproportionate interference in private property and violate the principle of equality” by affecting only a housing stock of more than 3,000 dwellings, he told the newspaper “Berliner Zeitung”.

Moreover, the loan taken out by a public-law institution to finance compensation would be an “inadmissible” way of avoiding the “debt brake”, he adds.

In addition, the city-state of Berlin lacks legislative powers for a socialization law, he says.

For this, it refers to the same argument presented by the Constitutional Court last April to annul the law of the regional government which froze the prices of rents after having already legislated the federal authorities in the matter.

However, Hoffmann rejects this argument and recalls that in the case of Article 15, as it has never been applied in the history of the Federal Republic since 1949 – not even at the federal level – there is no no state preference over the “Länder”.

It is “a completely virgin legal basis and we do not know what the Constitutional Court will say, which will ultimately have to decide on this,” he adds.

As robust as the legal front may be the political front. Berlin is currently ruled by a left-wing coalition made up of the SPD, the Greens and the Left Party. The proposal divides them deeply. The far-left Left Party strongly supports him, while the Greens have given mixed signals. The SPD, which is expected to remain Berlin’s largest party after the election, is opposed, as are the main opposition parties.

In the meantime, the organizers obviously believe that their proposal can “end the real estate crisis” and “save Berlin”. However, it is clear that the September 26 vote will not be the last word in the debate on homelessness in Berlin.

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