Excluded Berlin
ANDREJ HOLM
BERLIN is internationally known as a tenants’ city with a low 14 per cent of housing classified under self-used ownership. The overall situation was for a long time defined by a relaxed housing market. Since around 2005, however, the situation has changed, with rent prices rising in most of Berlin’s neighbourhoods alongside a strongly market driven allocation for housing. This rising competition affecting access to housing highlights structures of disadvantage that go beyond the economy.
Some examples that illustrate the limited access to housing are Roma-families with restricted residence permit status, Turkish house seekers, and households depending on social transfer contribution – all pointing to the presence of various kinds of discrimination. A lack of residence authorization, racial discrimination and administrative restriction on housing are indicative of different varieties of shortfall of urban citizenship.
Compared to other German and European cities, Berlin historically experienced low levels of rent and living costs. As a result of an abundant supply of public and social housing, a boom in construction activities in the 1990s, and a high rate of ‘emptiness’, Berlin’s rent prices for housing remained stable until the year 2005, at the same level as in the beginning of the 1990s. The city-wide average for rental housing in 2005 was around four Euro per square metre per month; even for condominiums, a buyer had to pay only around a thousand Euro per square metre per month. This low level of housing costs, alongside availability of cheap loans, ensured that even low income households could easily access decent housing.
The low-price economy enabled spaces of experimentation and self-fulfilment, especially for young academics, creative freelancers and artists. Nevertheless, it was unable to solve the economic crisis at the bottom of Berlin’s urban economy. In the last five years, Berlin has lost this low rent-price advantage, a direct reflection of the neoliberal shift in Berlin’s urban and housing policy. Nearly half of the public housing has been privatized, all housing subsidies cut and many existing administrative restrictions in the field of planning, rent regulation and new building activity abolished. As a result, all housing segments have experienced rising rent prices. On average, rents have risen by around 25 per cent since 2005; in inner-city neighbourhoods, the rise is greater such that for contracting new rents, the inhabitants now have to pay twice the amount they had to five years ago.
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he changes in housing policy and emerging market dynamics reflect a common trend in Berlin’s urban development over the past few years. Unlike the gentrification dynamics during the 1990s, displacement is now no longer confined to specific neighbourhoods and renewal areas, as gentrification has become the new urban mainstream in Berlin. The city’s housing market faces severe pressure – a consequence of rising number of households, a slowdown in new building construction and liberalized rent and planning laws.1The reduced investment in new housing and in physical upgrading of existing housing stock points to real estate strategies of capitalizing ground rents in the field of new rent contracts. The high rentals in new contracts work as a barrier to fresh physical investment, since the returns from modernization and new construction do not compare favourably with the profits from increasing rents without investment. This kind of ‘rental gentrification’
2 has resulted in exclusionary displacement3 in many neighbourhoods. Beyond the ‘classical’ displacement of sitting tenants from their housing and neighbourhoods, the question of access to the housing market has given rise to renewed concern about growing social and spatial exclusion in Berlin.Most urban social movements as well as critics trace this social polarization to real estate market strategies of commodification and the hollowing out of social welfare politics. While not disputing the general thrust of such political economy explanations of social urban realities, I would like to highlight three particular cases of exclusion operating at the margins of urban citizenship that go beyond mainstream critical urban research.
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oma families: With the enlargement of the European Union, visa restrictions for people from South East European countries like Bulgaria and Romania were dissolved. Taking advantage of this new freedom of movement, thousands of Roma families chose to escape from poverty, discrimination and harassment by right wing, fundamentalist forces in their respective countries. Berlin became one of the many destinations of this migration movement. Unfortunately, given the freedom of travel guaranteed by the new European Union legislation, there is today no official estimate of the Roma population in Berlin. Estimates vary from 20,000 (Administration) to 200,000 (Bund Deutscher Kriminalbeamter, Federation of German Detectives).4During the 1990s, most of the Roma population in Berlin came from the former Yugoslavia and were given the status of civil war refugees. This included residence permission, an entitlement to accommodation (mostly in mass accommodation or refugee camps) and a subsidized supply of basic needs. Nevertheless, there remained a strong restriction on their freedom of movement. For instance, the so-called ‘residency obligation’ restricted mobility to a few pre-specified areas. Even though this mix of control and dependency has been criticized by human rights activists, left wing politicians and critical researchers as reflecting a state organized exclusion, the German Aliens Authority changed the residence status of refugees from former Yugoslavia in 1999, as a result of which many of them were forced to leave Germany.
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fter the next phase of EU enlargement beginning from 2007, Berlin became a major destination for a rising number of Roma families from Bulgaria and Romania. Unlike the earlier legislation governing Roma refugees in the 1990s, the current lot of Roma immigrants are not subject to residence restriction and administrative control, but in the absence of a full work permit they can be characterized as unregistered inhabitants with restricted employment permission.5 This legal status constricts the economic activities of Roma people, forcing them to rely on the informal sector, characterized mostly by low and erratic incomes.
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s a result, most of them did not have the wherewithal to conclude a rent agreement. In an effort to cope with this limited access to the housing market, some Roma families were even forced to stay in public places like parks or greens, or had to sign contracts agreeing to difficult conditions and extortionate rents.6 A range of house owners (mainly in the Neukölln locality of Berlin) took advantage of the exigency of Roma to extract double and more of the usual rent price. Many Roma families attempted to compensate for high housing costs through overcrowding, with sometimes up to eight people living per room. Also, especially in the summer, many Roma chose to relocate to public (greens and streets) and semi-public spaces (courtyard and gardens).7 The enhanced public visibility and intensive use of public and semi-public spaces, in turn provoked complaints and conflict with other residents, as well as repression by the police and administration. Unfortunately, though expected, the debates in media and in the field of politics have only rein-forced the stigmatization of Roma. Overall, a combination of restricted employment permission and economic disadvantage has directly resulted in both limited access to housing and their exclusion from this central public good.
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urkish house seekers: From as far back as the 1960s, Berlin has been home to a rising population with Turkish roots. Over the years different waves of migration have created a large Turkish community in Berlin. While most of them enjoyed full rights of residence and an increasing proportion also had German citizenship, a combination of earlier restrictions in access to housing and in part an effort to establish a Turkish local economy and infrastructure, have resulted in the Turkish communities being concentrated in some inner-city neighbourhoods (Kreuzberg, Neukölln, Wedding).8Since the end of the 1990s, German cities have carried out an intense debate on social segregation and integration at the neighbourhood level.
9 The spatial concentration of ethnic communities and school segregation has become, in public and political debates, an allegory of problematic areas and disintegration of society. A common motif of conservative positions in this context is the so called ‘formation of parallel societies’, which assumes that ethnic minorities do not have any interest in integration and instead enforce segregation by their residential decisions.Beyond personal decisions about preferred places to stay, the quality of access to housing is an important explanation for ethnic spatial segregation. Emsal Kilic, sociologist and social worker, analyzed the prospects of house seekers with Turkish names in contested housing applications for her Diploma in Social Science.
10 Based on hundreds of application letters by fictitious candidates (with similar socio-economic backgrounds but different ethnic provenance), her study reveals a dramatic discrimination against applicants with Turkish names in almost all boroughs except for neighbourhoods with a strong presence of Turkish communities. Independent from the type of owner (including housing cooperatives and public housing associations), Emsal Kilic observed significant discrimination affecting the access to housing.In the context of discussions on the inter-relationship between citizenship and exclusion from housing, this case study points out that access to affordable public goods depends not only on the formal status of citizenship, but also the informal discrimination practised by gatekeepers of the housing market.
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ousing restrictions in social transfer regulations: Around 350,000 households in Berlin are recipients of social transfer benefits. Since the implementation of the new social transfer law in 2005, the absorption of housing costs is liable to new regulations. In general, the subsidy provided by social administrations only covers housing costs up to a locally defined maximum rent price. Barring some exception for households with special needs, this implies that general social transfer households experience major limitations in their access to housing. Households with existing rent contracts have to move out if they are affected by a rent increase over the limits of cost absorption. In the context of general rent price dynamics in the past few years, this usually results in households unable to meet new rental levels being forced to search for new accommodation in neighbourhoods with low rent levels. Mostly these are large real estates on the outskirts of Berlin. In the context of emerging gentrification trends in inner city areas, this regulation can be characterized as an administratively organized displacement, boosting the socio-spatial polarization in the city.11These three case studies highlight that alongside economic resources, the access to housing and a right to the city and urban public resources are strongly dependent on formal and informal restrictions and discrimination. These cases of exclusion from access to housing could be understood as an amplifier of real estate market rules, but nevertheless also force us to consider questions of citizenship in the sense of equality before the law and the market. Since all kinds of urban citizenship are based on socioeconomic structures, the question of housing cannot be divorced from general questions of redistribution of wealth in our societies. Those on the margins of urban societies in terms of social deprivation and ethnic discrimination experience not only a lack of equality but a deficit of equity. Urban justice has, therefore, to be necessarily based on reducing all exclusionary barriers to access to housing – and not merely concentrate on solving the problem of housing costs for the urban poor.
Footnotes:
1. Andrej Holm, ‘Wohnungspolitik der rot-roten Regierungskoalition in Berlin’, in Andrej Holm, Klaus Lederer and Naumann, Matthias (Hrsg.), Linke Metropolenpolitik. Erfahrungen und Perspektiven am Beispiel Berlin. Westfälisches Dampfboot, Münster, 2011, pp. 92-112.
2. Mathieu van Criekingen, ‘ "Gentrifying the Re-urbanisation Debate", not vice versa: the uneven socio-spatial implications of changing transitions to adulthood in Brussels’, Population, Space and Place 16(5), 2010, pp. 381-394.
3. Peter Marcuse, ‘Abandonment, Gentrification, and Displacement: the Linkages in New York City’, in Neil Smith and Peter Williams (eds.), Gentrification of the City. Allen and Unwin, Boston, 1986, pp. 153-177.
4. Freia Peters, ‘Die Roma von Berlin-Neukölln’, Die Welt, 28 September 2010 (http://www.welt.de/die-welt/politik/article 9920445/Die-Roma-von-Berlin-Neukoelln.html).
5. Zacharias Zacharakis, ‘Roma in Berlin. Nomaden der Neuzeit’, SpiegelOnline, 3 June 2009; Also, Senatsverwaltung für Integration, Arbeit und Soziales 2011: Roma und europäische Wanderarbeitnehmerinnen und –arbeitnehmer: Rechtsgrundlagen zu Aufenthalt und Bildung sowie Kontaktstellen. Informationsblatt für Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter der Verwaltungen, August 2011, Berlin.
6. Lisa Steger, ‘Neue Heimat Hinterhof – Roma ziehen nach Berlin-Neukölln’, Radio-Feature Deutschlandradio Kultur, Länderreport vom 18 May 2011.
7. Drom Amaro, ‘Zielgruppenspezifische Unterstützungsbedarfe der Roma-Communities’, in Flughafenkiez (ed.), Studie im Auftrag des Quartiersmanagements Flughafenstraße. Berlin, 2011.
8. Martin Greve and Tülay Cinar, Das Türkische Berlin. Reihe: Miteinander leben in Berlin. die Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats. Berlin, 1997; Also, Sanem Kleff and Eberhard Seidel, Stadt der Vielfalt, Das Entstehen des neuen Berlin durch Migration. Berlin: Der Beauftragte für Integration und Migration, 2009.
9. Hartmut Häußermann and Andreas Kapphan, Berlin: von der geteilten zur gespaltenen Stadt? Sozialräumlicher Wandel seit 1990. Leske+Budrich, Opladen, 2000; Also, Verena Dill, Uwe Jirjahn and Georgi Tsertsvadze, ‘Residential Segregation and Immigrants’ Satisfaction with the Neighbourhood in Germany’. SOEP (The German Socio-Economic Panel Study), 410/2011, Berlin, DIW, 2011.
10. Emsal Kilic, Diskriminierung von Migranten bei der Wohnungssuche – Eine Untersuchung in Berlin. Unveröff. Diplomarbeit am Institut für Sozialwissenschaften der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2008.
11. Andrej Holm, ‘Kosten der Unterkunft als Segregationsmotor. Befunde aus Berlin und Oldenburg’, Informationen zur Raumbeobachtung, Heft 9.2011, pp. 557-566.