Bulletin from Abroad
New Zealand could learn a thing or two from Berlin’s anti-gentrification bylaws.
There was a demonstration outside my door the other day. No, it wasn’t an anti-Trump rally, although there have been plenty of those in Berlin recently.
The protest featured a cast of dozens, carrying angry signs denouncing the capitalist pig from London who had invested in the apartment building next door. When I asked them why, I was told the new landlord was evicting one of the families, who had been there for 19 years. He was selling off the flats. Resist gentrification, the demonstrators cried, expelling furious gusts of breath into the freezing morning air and waking the neighbour’s baby.
There are many similar protests in Berlin. Last weekend, about 2000 people took to the streets to protest at the closing of a wellknown 20year-old bakery in Kreuzberg. Last month, a local anarchist collective glued flyers decrying the growing number of fancy, hipster boutiques to the windows of fancy, hipster boutiques. They’ve also chucked buckets of red paint at other establishments. And every day you can read oddly erudite graffiti on the corner that tells you what to do if the landlord plans rent increases. All of which is why it was particularly nice to find a small brochure from the Berlin city council in my mailbox recently. Congratulations, the leaflet said, you and everyone in your apartment house are winners. Well, sort of.
What it actually said was that our block and more than 20 others around us are now protected by the “Milieuschutz”. Basically, these are a set of local bylaws that defend “the social and cultural mix” in neighbourhoods stalked by the dread spectre of gentrification.
The regulations stop building owners from doing renovations that allow them to put the price-permetre up, driving lower-income renters out. This includes such things as installing fancy bathrooms, underfloor heating and oversized balconies or turning two flats into one. It also includes making flats into holiday rentals.
New Zealand’s anti-gentrification movement doesn’t chuck red paint at overpriced Grey Lynn villas, but the subject has certainly been debated there, too. Could something such as a Milieuschutz be useful for such a real-estatecrazed nation? Could something along those lines preserve the vibrant community colour in an area such as Auckland’s legendary Karangahape Rd?
Of course, there are major differences in property ownership between Germany and New Zealand: close to 60% of Germans rent, and most likely will never own.
In Berlin, the Milieuschutz assists tenants, seeing them as creators of local culture. The German rules have been devised mostly in the interests of social justice, but it’s also clear that if the original population is pushed out, a neighbourhood loses the qualities that drew the gentrifiers in the first place.
Any comparable New Zealand rules obviously couldn’t work the same way, but surely the idea of protecting the social fabric and better balancing community needs, history, culture and the rights of landlords versus tenants in some areas bears thinking about.
The demonstrators on my street didn’t get the desired result. The Milieuschutz came too late for that family, forced out of “trendy Neukölln”. From my balcony, I watched as police carried out the family’s suitcases, then a few days later, workmen chucked out pieces of their old walls.
Today, there’s a stream of visitors on their doorstep, consulting Google on phones and asking for directions to the nearest cool dive bar. Thanks to the Milieuschutz, there’s no hurry to get there.
Hopefully the welcoming multicultural vibe that brought them, and the dive bars, here, won’t be going anywhere any time soon.
In Germany, close to 60% of people rent their homes, and most likely will never own.