Expropriate & Organize! Combining strategies of transformation for socialized housing in Berlin.
Beitrag für den Sammelband Hope. Reclaiming the future
The belief that things are going wrong and nothing can be done about it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Such political depression is disempowering, while actions carried by solidarity and emancipatory collectivity can cure political depression and improve messy realities. There are no guarantees of success, but moving collectively has been shown to overcome hopelessness and create concrete changes. By continuing and interconnecting, conditions favorable to profound transformation are becoming more probable and can be seized by those who are active, organized, and alert.
Disaster by design
Rising rents, climate change, economic crises and democratic erosion are often framed as unintended side effects of otherwise functional systems. Yet a closer look reveals that these outcomes are not accidental, they are structurally produced. The current state of social and ecological crisis increasingly raises a fundamental question: How is it possible that large corporations are able to destroy the conditions of our livelihood — housing, energy, land, and infrastructure — while democratic institutions appear unable or unwilling to intervene effectively? The answer lies in power. Power determines whose interests prevail, whose futures are realized and whose needs are marginalized. Decision-making-power is deeply entangled with property. In capitalist societies based on private property, those who own land, housing, energy infrastructure or productive assets hold decision-making power over how these resources are used, who has access to them and under which conditions.
The problem with private property
While property is often treated as a natural right or a relation between a person and an object, it actually is a relatively new, social relation: To own something means to have socially recognized power of disposal over something — something is mine, because it is not yours. Private property grants its owner exclusive control over an object, including the right to use it, withhold it, speculate on it or even destroy it. In this sense, property is fundamentally political. Private property, especially over the means of production and essential infrastructures we all need for a living, can be a contradiction to democratic principles: When private property is as highly concentrated as it is today, huge decision-making power over our living conditions lies in the hands of a very small and not democratically legitimized minority. The public gets excluded from decisions that affect public life and collective capacity to shape the future is limited. Further, private property enables private appropriation of social wealth while externalizing costs on society. It drives competition and speculation as engine of continuous growth and thereby fuels ecological destruction.
The housing crisis in Berlin illustrates these dynamics vividly. Rents have exploded at unprecedented rates while social housing stock has drastically declined and new construction increasingly serves speculative corporate interests rather than social needs. From 2022 to 2024, average rent rose by more than 36%, which is more than the entire period from 2015 to 2022. In 2024, the official(!) number of homeless people in Berlin reached more than 55.600, 50% of Berlin tenants spent more than 30% of their income on rent and 4,4% of Berlin households couldn’t heat their homes.[1] The consequences are severe: people living from sublet to sublet, in way too little apartments or staying in violent partnerships just to keep a roof over their head, energy poverty, evictions, homelessness, fear, shame and social disintegration. Despite housing being a basic necessity, its provision is largely governed by profit-oriented real estate corporations whose interests are structurally misaligned with the public good. For example, decisions about modernization or energy-efficient renovations are usually made by property owners, not by the people who live in the buildings. While such measures are necessary ecological upgrades, the owners can externalize their costs into rent increases. In this way, ecological and social needs are made to compete against each other instead of answering both. Socialization could be such an answer.
[1] https://www.ibb.de/de/ueber-uns/publikationen/wohnungsmarktbericht/2024.html