Berlin freezes rent prices
Rising rates a problem
BERLIN — Berlin is freezing the rents of 1.5 million apartments for the next five years starting this Sunday in a controversial move to control the exploding costs that have forced many to move outside Germany’s capital city.
Berlin is the first German city to influence the rental prices so directly and the law has been both celebrated as a step toward more fairness by its supporters and ripped apart as a socialist method by critics.
“It is correct that Berlin tries to stop the spiraling rent costs,” Ulrich Ropertz, the head of the German Tenants Association, told German news agency dpa. “The federal legislature has missed the opportunity to pass effective measures in recent years.”
Only a minority of Berliners own their homes or apartments — as in the rest of the country, the majority of people traditionally rent their homes.
The German capital had been a low-rent mecca after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 opened the gates to the economically depressed former communist east of the city.
That gave rise to an influx of artists and others seeking a more bohemian way of life. However, in recent years, rents have skyrocketed in the city of more than 3.7 million inhabitants, pushing middle class families from Berlin’s central residential neighborhoods like Mitte or Prenzlauer Berg to the outskirts. Even traditionally working class and immigrant neighborhoods like Neukoelln or Kreuzberg have become so gentrified that longtime tenants can no longer afford the rising rents.