Germans up in arms over 'rent insanity'
AFP
news@thelocal.de
@thelocalgermany
6 April 2019
09:35 CEST+02:00
Germans up in arms over 'rent insanity'
Michaela Franz at her apartment in Berlin's Moabit district,
where her banner reads "Rental cancellation for condominium. We
stay." Photo: Tobias Schwarz/AFP
Michaela Franz initially thought she was spared sharp rent
hikes when her new property owner scrapped plans to renovate the Berlin
building she has lived in for a decade. In fact, something worse was brewing.
A few days later, she received a letter notifying her that
her rental contract had been terminated and that she would have to move out by
the end of May. For the 58-year-old, the landlord's intention was clear: kick
out long-time tenants and build new luxury apartments that fetch higher rents.
Not only in Berlin, but across Germany, Franz's experience
has been playing out. And the wave of
gentrification and rising rents is provoking rising anger and leading some to
even ponder radical solutions like expropriating housing from institutional
landlords.
Tens of thousands of people are poised to join marches
against "rental insanity" (Mietwahnsinn) on Saturday in cities like
Munich, Cologne and Frankfurt.
The problem is most acute in the capital, where rents have
doubled over the past decade, as Germany's booming job market attracts an
influx of workers, putting pressure on the housing market. Average rent prices
in Berlin have pushed past 10 euros per square metre per month, according to a
recent study by a real estate group CBRE Berlin and German mortgage bank Berlin
Hyp AG.
As property prices in Berlin traditionally lag behind those
of major European capitals like Paris and London, investors have also swooped
in, betting that the real estate boom was only just starting.
'Class struggle'
But a popular backlash appears to be growing, and organisers
of an initiative to requisition housing from real estate groups will on
Saturday begin collecting signatures in their push for a referendum on the
issue in Berlin.
The campaign's spokesman Rouzbeh Taheri said the movement
had radicalised as government measures to cool the property market have failed
to work.
"Many say this is a type of class struggle. Yes that's
what it is. But we did not start it," Taheri said. "We're taking
defensive measures against the class struggler from the top who has for years
been fighting against tenants."
The "Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co."
initiative, named after the biggest private player in Berlin, targets companies
with more than 3,000 apartments in their portfolios. Of an estimated two
million rental apartments in Berlin, Deutsche Wohnen owns 111,500, followed by
Vonovia with 44,000.
Taheri argues that cutting them down to size would strip
them of the influence they wield in deciding market prices.
"It's about sending a signal on which direction the
city wants to go. And a signal to speculators -- telling them that your capital
is not safe in Berlin," said Taheri.
But critics question whether the private groups really wield
that much influence. Calling the initiative "completely absurd",
Harald Simons, an economist at Leipzig University, noted that 70 percent of
rental apartments across Germany are owned by small landlords who each hold
between two and 20 apartments.
Singling out the big groups would "mean that about five
percent of Berlin tenants will suddenly not have to pay much while the rest
would have to keep paying just as much," he said.
The extreme move could also scare off investors who want to
move their businesses here and create new jobs, critics say.
Further, taxpayers face a huge bill -- Berlin authorities
have estimated the cost at €36 billion ($40 billion).
"When people learn about how many billions this will
cost, many would see this differently," Berlin Mayor Michael Mueller said.
Deutsche Wohnen boss Michael Zahn said the organisers of the
initiative were taking a "very populist tone" and warned that the
public was not being given the full picture.
Michaela Franz in her appartment iapartment Moabit district.
Photo: Tobias Schwarz/AFP
Michaela Franz in her apartment. Photo: Tobias Schwarz/AFP
'Rent rebel choir'
Amid the heated debate, Franz, who suffers from depression
and receives state aid, was digging her heels in. She has taken her case to the
courts, arguing "hardship circumstances" under a social clause in
rental laws that could halt evictions.
Across town in southeastern Berlin, Hans von Maydell was
also gearing up for battle, as the building he has lived in for 45 years
changed ownership for the first time early this year.
"The new owner ... buys and sells property with money
from investors who want to make the highest profits possible," the
75-year-old said.
In a pre-emptive move, he and fellow residents have sought
protection under Berlin's "Milieuschutz" rules aimed at halting
gentrification. Tenants have even formed a "rental rebel" choir to
belt out their protest against rising rents.
For von Maydell, a roof over one's head is as essential as
drinking water and should not be "left to speculation and the free
market".
"We are in favour of these things coming under communal
control and managed for the well-being of the community, and not for the
well-being of the few who want to get rich quickly and ruthlessly."
By AFP's Hui Min Neo and Thierry Tranchant
Berlin's rental revolution: activists push for properties to
be nationalised
Cities
Support is growing for a referendum on whether to ban large
landlords from the German capital and turn their property into social housing
stock
Philip Oltermann
Philip Oltermann in Berlin
@philipoltermann
Thu 4 Apr 2019 06.00 BST Last modified on Thu 4 Apr 2019
17.55 BST
When Berliners take to the streets on Saturday to protest
against rising rents, 77-year-old Barbara von Boroviczeny will be right at the
front.
As crowds of marchers set out from Alexanderplatz, the
activist will be using a van with a megaphone to encourage people to sign up to
nothing less than a housing revolution: a vote on banning large landlords from
operating in the city and expropriating their property into social housing
stock.
The proposed referendum, which could take place as soon as
the middle of 2020 if activists manage to gather 20,000 signatures within the
next six months and a further 170,000 by February, would set a legal precedent
in establishing housing as a human right, and affect real estate companies as
far away as London.
If they make it to the referendum stage, campaigners can
afford to dream about victory: according to a Forsa poll from February, 44% of
Berliners think nationalising large landlords a sensible measure, while only
39% reject the idea. In Berlin’s press, the campaign, named Expropriate
Deutsche Wohnen & Co after the city’s largest private landlord, has already
caused a debate on whether socialism is returning to the former capital of East
Germany.
If you don’t dare,
you're never going to achieve anything
Barbara von Boroviczeny
Von Boroviczeny herself is no nostalgic east Berliner
harking back to the days of the GDR, hailing instead from Zehlendorf in the
city’s affluent west. She is nonetheless fulsome in her enthusiasm for the
radical demands of the referendum.
“I think this kind of provocative language is exactly the
right way to go about it; we’ve got to stop being so stately,” she says of the
petition’s call to “expropriate” housing stock owned by large private
companies. In terms of rhetoric, she argues, activists were only drawing level
with the tactics large property speculators had been using for years.
“If you don’t dare, then you are never going to achieve
anything,” she says. Sporting a neat grey bob and a silk neckerchief at a
meeting in Kreuzberg ahead of the demo, Von Boroviczeny does not so much stand
out from the crowd as confirm a pattern: rising rents in the capital are not
just putting the squeeze on students and young professionals but also the
over-60s, who made up the largest part of the group gathered here.
The radicalisation of previously demure Berlin pensioners
serves to explain the growing momentum behind the Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen
& Co campaign. In 2005, the real estate conglomerate that had acquired the
Bauhaus-designed estate on Argentinische Allee where the pensioner has lived
since 1959 announced a 100 euro increase in her monthly rent, to pay for
renovations most of the tenants felt were unnecessary.
Demonstrators against
rent increases in Berlin.
Incremental reforms of German tenancy law have enabled
landlords to force through “energetic modernisations” of their properties and
pass down up to 11% of their costs to the tenants. Critics allege that the law
allows landlords to flush out old tenants and immediately put the flats on the
market at a higher price without having made any significant improvements.
Since German law restricts the possibility of class action
lawsuits, Von Boroviczeny and around 170 of her neighbours took their current
landlord, Deutsche Wohnen, to court on an individual basis. “Like all good
Germans, we dragged our case from one court to the next,” she says – with
limited results.
Many tenants lost their cases, and neighbours had to
organise fundraisers to help compensate for their losses. Von Boroviczeny now
spends 60% of her pension on her rent.
She is not the only tenant to worry whether she will
eventually be forced to move out of her home. Once a haven for artists and
dropouts because of its exceptionally low rents, Berlin property prices rose by
20.5% in 2017, faster than any other city in the world.
The impact of the so-called rent brake, introduced in large
cities like Berlin, Hamburg and Munich in 2015 to stop rents spiralling out of
control, has been underwhelming, partly because it places the onus to calculate
fair rental payments on the tenant, not the landlord.
But since the start of the Expropriate DW & Co campaign
last year, Von Boroviczeny has regained hope that the frustrations of tenants
across the city could be bundled into one movement.
Land, natural
resources and means of production may, for the purpose of nationalisation, be
transferred to public ownership …
Germany's Basic Law
“Suddenly, things are moving,” she says. “All sorts of
measures are being discussed that had been stashed away at the back of the
drawer.”
The Social Democratic party (SPD), senior partner in
Berlin’s current governing coalition and the main driver behind the
privatisation of the capital’s housing stock in the late 90s and early 00s, has
distanced itself from the campaign, although it has proposed freezing rents in
the city for five years. The SPD’s youth branch, by contrast, has trumped the
campaign’s demands and proposed expropriating any landlord with over 20
apartments.
In December last year the city senate tried to stop 316
apartments in three buildings on Karl-Marx-Allee, a grandiose Stalin-era
boulevard in the east of the city, from acquisition by Deutsche Wohnen.
If tenants across Berlin are feeling emboldened by the new
grassroots campaign, it is because they believe its most radical demand can be
supported by Germany’s 1949 constitution, the Basic Law.
According to article 15 of the constitution, which was drawn
up before the country had fully embraced the market economy, “land, natural
resources and means of production may, for the purpose of nationalisation, be
transferred to public ownership or other forms of public enterprise by a law
that determines the nature and extent of compensation.”
In late 2017, the housing campaigner Rouzbeh Taheri
discovered that while article 15 had never been put to use in the way proposed
by the campaign, the Berlin senate itself has used the paragraph to threaten
landlords with expropriation in order to make way for infrastructure projects,
such as new motorways.
Taheri, now the campaign’s spokesperson, argues that court
cases between Deutsche Wohnen, which owns over 100,000 apartments in the German
capital, and tenants like Von Boroviczeny prove the company is currently
abusing its economic power in the city, thus providing sufficient reason for
triggering the previously overlooked legal paragraph.
His campaign’s specific proposal: landlords who own more
than 3,000 apartments should be dispossessed and their property passed into the
hands of a new public body responsible for social housing. By the campaigners’
calculation, such a move could free up around 200,000 apartments.
Deutsche Wohnen thinks the idea is legally unenforceable and
would amount to “saying goodbye to the market economy”. But three legal surveys
commissioned by the Berlin senate support the basic tenet of the campaigners’
approach, one even suggesting that “socialising large companies may be easier
to justify than small companies”.
Nonetheless, several hurdles still need to be cleared before
Berlin can proclaim itself Europe’s new champion of housing rights. Exactly how
many landlords would be affected is unclear, and remains difficult to establish
while privacy rights in Germany restrict centralised access to the land
registry.
What is certain is that Berlin, once regarded as a “renters’
paradise”, has over the years come to attract an unusually high number of big
property players when compared to other European capitals like London, where
even the biggest residential landlord, Grainger, owns only around 1,500 units.
While the senate’s initial cost estimate claimed that 10
private companies owned more than 3,000 apartments each, a new study has dug up
two more landlords – both of them with links to the UK.
According to claims on its own website, London-registered
Pears Global Real Estate owns 6,200 residential units in Germany, “primarily
located in Berlin”, while more than 4,000 apartments can be traced to a
Jersey-registered real estate fund management company called Warwick Square
Trust.
Further, some legal experts believe a successful referendum
in favour of expropriating private landlords would mean large state-owned
housing companies such as Degewo would also have to hand over their housing
stock to the new social housing authority.
A referendum in favour of expropriation, they warn, could
end up not only scaring away private companies like Deutsche Wohnen – which
owns 6.8% of Berlin’s rental properties – but also discourage other landlords
from building and managing property in the city.
The higher the number of apartments affected by the proposed
cull, the higher the cost for the senate – which in turn is eventually likely
to be passed down to Berlin’s citizens in taxes. According to the senate’s own
estimate, expropriating around 240,000 apartments would require compensation
payments of between €28.8bn (£25bn) and €36.6bn. The official Expropriate DW
& Co campaign questions the authorities’ calculation, offering up a cost
proposal of €18.1bn instead.
Increasingly relishing their taste for controversy, some
Berlin tenants are happy ignore the warnings. Instead, they propose even more
radical solutions. In a recent talk show on German television, one veteran
housing activist suggested the senate should offer no more than €1 in
compensation payments.
“€1 per flat?” the moderator asked. “No! €1 per company,”,
the activist responded.
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Lisboa prolonga suspensão de novos alojamentos locais
Medida é transitória até que entre em vigor o novo
regulamento para o alojamento local, que está em fase final de elaboração.
João Pedro Pincha
João Pedro Pincha 6 de Abril de 2019, 8:15
A câmara de Lisboa vai prolongar por mais uns meses a
suspensão de registo de novos estabelecimentos de alojamento local (AL). As
zonas abrangidas são as mesmas que já tinham sido ‘fechadas’ em Novembro:
Alfama, Mouraria, Castelo, Bairro Alto, Príncipe Real, Bica, Madragoa e parte
da Graça.
Esta suspensão é uma medida transitória enquanto não entra
em vigor o novo regulamento para o alojamento local, que está em fase final de
elaboração. Esse documento deverá ver a luz do dia nas próximas semanas, mas
será depois colocado em consulta pública e discutido tanto na câmara como na
assembleia municipal, o que significa que ainda vai passar algum tempo até que
esteja em vigor. Daí o prolongamento da suspensão, que a lei estabelece que
possa ir até ao máximo de um ano.
As zonas vedadas a novos AL assim deverão continuar depois
de o regulamento ser aprovado e até não é improvável que mais zonas sejam
incluídas na proibição, uma vez que já em Novembro a câmara apontava áreas de
risco, aquelas em que a percentagem de AL estava quase a ultrapassar 25% do
total de fogos.
A intenção da autarquia lisboeta é forçar o mercado a olhar
para lá do centro histórico, alargando a oferta nas freguesias mais
periféricas, para onde o AL se tem estado a expandir, como revelou uma análise
feita pelo PÚBLICO em Outubro do ano passado.
O alojamento local foi um dos temas em debate no Fórum de
Autarcas para o Turismo Urbano Sustentável, que se realizou em Lisboa na
sexta-feira, onde Fernando Medina se comprometeu a ter uma cidade “boa para os
residentes e também para os visitantes”.
FMI alerta para risco de queda abrupta dos preços das casas
nos próximos três anos
04 abr, 2019 - 18:28 • Henrique Cunha com redação
A sobrevalorização dos imóveis e o aumento excessivo dos
créditos concedidos podem vir a prejudicar a banca e a economia mundial, alerta
Fundo Monetário Internacional.
A rápida subida dos preços das casas nos últimos anos pode
levar ao colapso dos mercados imobiliários e a uma descida abrupta dos preços,
nos próximos três anos.
O alerta é do Fundo Monetário Internacional, no capítulo
“Riscos negativos para os preços da habitação”, incluído no relatório semestral
sobre a estabilidade financeira global, publicado esta quinta-feira.
A instituição liderada por Christine Lagarde avisa que a
sobrevalorização dos imóveis e o aumento excessivo dos créditos concedidos
podem vir a prejudicar a banca e, consequentemente, a economia mundial, como no
passado, na crise financeira de 2008.
Para evitar este cenário, a instituição acredita que as
políticas macroprudenciais e as políticas monetárias poderão ter um papel
fundamental.
“Um aperto nas políticas macroprudenciais está associado a
uma redução dos riscos negativos sobre os preços das casas", escreve a
instituição, que sublinha que isto se aplica sobretudo a políticas destinadas a
reforçar a resiliência dos mutuários (aqueles que pedem o empréstimo),
nomeadamente através do aumento da taxa de esforço (rácio entre o montante da
prestação mensal e o rendimento do cliente) e dos limites máximos do rácio
entre o montante do empréstimo e o valor do imóvel dado como garantia.
Portugal não é referido neste relatório, mas as notícias
sobre a rápida subida dos preços no setor são conhecidas.
No ano passado, o FMI já tinha alertado para o risco de
sinais de desequilíbrios revelantes no setor imobiliário, em Portugal.
"Portugal não está à beira de uma bolha, mas de uma
explosão"
A Associação Nacional das Empresas de Mediação Imobiliária
não esconde a existência de alguns riscos no sector. Ouvido pela Renascença a
partir do Brasil, onde se encontra a tentar encontrar investidores que apostem
em habitação para a classe média, o seu presidente Luís Lima diz que esses
riscos decorrem da escalada de preços das casas nos grandes centros urbanos.
Mais pessimista, o presidente da Associação Nacional de
Proprietários afirma que se está a caminhar para um cenário insustentável.
"Portugal não está à beira de uma bolha. Portugal está
à beira de uma explosão. E tal como estamos a pagar os prejuízos de operações
que nunca deviam ter sido feitas pelos bancos, é evidente que na altura vamos
ser convocados para pagar este tipo de prejuízos", considera António Frias
Marques.
O representante dos proprietários diz que Portugal é um
paraíso para especuladores e pede a criação de barreiras que possam enfrentar
aquilo de chama de "grandes interesses internacionais".
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