Housing: The Last Squat in Berlin
By Emma Toscani
BERLIN — In central Berlin, a nondescript, East German-style building with a prefabricated façade stands defiantly against the rapid gentrification happening around it. The building is referred to by its street address: Habersaathstraße 40–48.
“Habersaath 48 stays queer,’’ reads one banner hanging from window. “Against Homelessness,” reads another. Anarchist and left-wing stickers cover the four entrances to the apartment building, advertising with a fervor the latest among many upcoming protests.
Since mid-June, more than 10 protests have taken place in Berlin in anticipation of an impending deadline for the building to be demolished. Some 300 residents have been ordered to vacate by August 1, but previous deadlines have come and gone and the residents are not leaving without a fight.
Squatting is one of the hallmarks of Berlin’s anti-establishment culture, and the squats have become destinations for artists, creatives and left-wing activists. Many building façades throughout the city are decorated with murals and anti-fascist political messages.
Since 1970, nearly 540 squats have existed in some form or another in Berlin. In recent decades, they have been concentrated in East Berlin where ownership became murky after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. Now, most have been vacated or torn down, succumbing to the forces of gentrification and rapidly rising rents. Habersaathstraße is widely considered by Berliners as the last squat in Berlin and has become a symbol of a larger struggle to define the character of the city and to keep housing affordable.
“The question is who is the owner of the city? Is it the people who live here, or the idiots from the big companies — these speculators?’’ said union organizer Daniel Diekmann, spokesman for the squatters.
Built in 1984, the building originally housed medical personnel for the nearby Charité Hospital, founded in 1710 to treat plague victims and now used for university research. The city took over Habersaathstraße after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but most of the medical staff stayed on, paying low rents. In 2006, the city sold the building for $2.5 million and the new owners started pressuring residents to vacate.
Habersaathstraße tenant Diekmann was ready for this. Diekmann had moved in the previous year, paying just over $300 for a small one bedroom. A facilities manager by training, Diekmann had been a labor organizer in his youth and rallied the tenants to form a union.
“It’s been 15 years of struggles, and 15 years of documents,” said Diekmann, who is now in his early 50s and still serves as the building’s spokesman.
The conflict between the few tenants left and the landlord ramped up after a second sale in 2019. This time, the building sold for $22.6 million, and the new owner, Arcadia Estate, run by Andreas Pichotta, ordered evictions and, according to Diekmann, began to harass the remaining tenants. While most of the building stood empty, the landlord purposefully left windows open in vacant apartments and neglected the building to make Habersaathstraße unlivable and drive up bill payments, Diekmann says.
Another organization, Leerstand-hab-ich-saath — “Vacancies” in German with a German-language play on words for the name of the street — formed in 2020 to take up the cause, organizing protests and performing community outreach.
Last winter, 50 homeless residents moved in as part of a Leerstand-hab-ich-saath site occupation campaign, and the municipality allowed the group to stay during the winter months. Social workers were brought in to help the new residents seek care and work. But, after winter subsided, the formerly homeless refused to leave.
In an effort to remove the formerly homeless residents, the landlord accepted Ukrainian refugees when war broke out late February. Instead of the squatters leaving — both old tenants and formerly homeless residents — refugees occupied the remaining apartments, effectively filling up all 120 apartments for the first time in 10 years. Now, roughly 300 people live inside Habersaathstraße 40–48.
“They are trying to get marginalized people to fight against each other,” said Diekmann. “They want war, refugees against homeless tenants.”
Big profits are at stake in the fight. Since the Berlin Wall fell nearly 33 years ago, the old East has become fashionable and expensive. Buildings have been scrubbed clean or torn down and the city’s landscape transformed. Many of these old buildings have been purchased by large investment companies, German and foreign, and tenants often do not know the name of their landlord.
Berlin has had a thriving squatting culture for decades, with notable squats that include the infamous anarchist squat the Georg-von-Rauch-Haus in 1970s West Berlin where young people sought building preservation rather than demolition.
Squatting gained momentum in the chaotic months after the Berlin Wall fell. As East Germans fled west, West Germans headed east, flooding abandoned buildings to take up residence. Most were not legal and there were clashes between police and activists. However, the city did subsidize some creative co-ops to maintain peace, creating art centers such as Tacheles on Oranienburgerstraße in the early 90s.
“When the Wall fell, we could walk through the streets like we hadn’t before,” said Heinke Castagne, a 53-year-old social worker. “And we saw all these empty houses and it was an invitation. Just take one. It was a bit like shopping.”
Heinke Castagne squatted in the former East’s Brunnenstraße 7 in 1990 with her college friends and never left. Thirty-two years later, she lives there legally with her son in an apartment with nine other people. Each person has their own spacious bedroom.
Now, the house is a communal housing building. Residents have semi-weekly or weekly meetings to discuss house decisions on topics from upcoming events to COVID-19 policies.
Many squatters have managed to stay in place by legalizing their housing.
One way an apartment can gain a permanent lease is through contracts offered by the city for squatters living in a building. This only happens when the squatters can prove they live there with utility bills in their names, or by taking care of the building. According to Castagne, these contracts can be easily challenged and voided in court, but it is harder to contest a bunch of contracts at the same time.
In Castagne’s case, there are 65 individual contracts for her building which makes it nearly impossible to remove tenants, which prevents the landlord from cashing in on the gentrification of the surrounding neighborhood.
Another way residents can legalize their housing is to buy the building through crowdfunding and donations, often with help from the German housing nonprofit organization Meithauser Syndikat, or rental house syndicate.
The organization helps establish communal housing, sometimes rescuing historic buildings and providing inexpensive housing. In Martin Hagemeier’s case, he used $9,600 from Meithauser Syndikat to supplement his own $50,000 to buy the oldest surviving farmhouse in an agricultural district established in the 18th century by Frederick the Great. He turned the farmhouse in Berlin’s Wedding neighborhood into a housing collective project for himself and 14 to 15 others.
“We are our own investors,” Hagemeier said.
With property values so high 12 years later, a farm like Hagemeier’s could not be bought at that price.
It is harder to legally remove residents from a building in Berlin than in the United States, but police in the past two years have conducted raids, clearing out four large squat residences. Now, most remaining squats are bars and community centers, but even these are scarce compared to a decade ago.
One of the most famous was Tacheles — Yiddish for ‘Straight Talk,’ which housed performance spaces and museums, anchoring a revival of the old Jewish quarter after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was purchased in 2014 by a New York real estate developer and was mostly demolished for a large mixed-use development now under construction.
Prices have risen sharply in Berlin, which became Germany’s capital after 1990’s reunification. Rent is out of reach for many Berliners and protests over affordable housing take place frequently. With 85% of Berlin renting, the city depends on stable rent prices, housing advocates say.
“It’s trendy to own an apartment in Berlin now,” Castagne said. “Berlin was a city of rent, now it’s a city of property.”
A major challenge for those living in Berlin is housing scarcity, as increasing numbers of foreigners or Germans from elsewhere are buying a second apartment in Berlin. Some rent out their places to Airbnb customers.
Building more housing is one solution, but contractors would rather build expensive houses than affordable ones in order to capitalize on the financial boom.
Former state senator Katrin Lompscher faced scrutiny in her 2016–2020 tenure as Berlin’s urban planning and housing chair when she focused on rent capping and property indexes rather than green-lighting more new construction.
“The strategy of the government is to empower the public companies and co-op companies. We need to keep real estate prices from rising,” Lompscher said.
A rent cap would stop rents from rising more than a few percentage points each year, ensuring housing affordability. But a popular rent cap instituted in Berlin in 2020 was subsequently ruled unconstitutional, and resident who benefitted had to pay the difference back in full to their landlords, leading to many evictions.
In September of 2021, a voter referendum approved a Berlin Senate plan for the city to buy back 15% of all property from large-scale landlords within municipal boundaries. The nationalization plan will apply to major real estate management companies who own most of the buildings in Berlin.Neither Diekmann’s nor Castagne’s landlords will be targeted in the buyback.
Lompscher says only socialized housing will reduce profit-driven rent hikes and she suggests the housing crisis can be solved with a few steps. The first is to increase the construction of housing units by government-subsidized public companies, co-op companies and private companies that utilize a rent ceiling. Another step is to prioritize conscientious house building in city planning — making long term plans for a housing first city planning.
The government can also institute rent assistance measures — subsidizing housing and expropriating private apartment buildings for public housing. Lompscher said there were 310,000 apartments in public housing when she started in 2016 and by last November that had risen to 350,000 units. According to Lompscher, 60% of all public housing is low-income priority.
The latest referendum may limit private companies from owning much of Berlin’s residential real estate. After the Wall fell 1989, state-owned properties in East Berlin were up-for-grabs when the East German government that owned the buildings was dissolved. The unified city bought what it could but had to sell off properties as an economic recession hit in the 2000s. Now, over 60% of the city is owned by private companies, both international and local—and residents support the city’s effort to buy it back.
Meanwhile, the fate of Habersaathstraße 40–48 has yet to be sealed — though the Mitte neighborhood council voted in July for its demotion. The squat still intends to put pressure on Arcadia Estates and draw attention to its tenant-hostile techniques, says Leerstand-hab-ich-saath organizer Paul, who withheld his last name for privacy’s sake.
Habersaathstraße is set to be sold for $46 million now. The current tenants, squatters and refugees are not leaving until they know this building will not be turned into a high-rise apartment or something gentrified and unaffordable.
According to Lompscher, the center of the city is “the dream of all investors and the source of a lot of local conflicts over buildings.”
There are only nine contracts and 12 to 15 legal tenants at Habersaathstraße. With $46 million at stake, the landlord has sent numerous legal letters to those tenants in the last few months, filled with complex legal jargon. The landlord’s letters make threats against the residents and often give an impossible timetable to work with, such as calling a building representative to a meeting with the landlord on the same day they receive the letter. The most recent letter arrived at the wrong address and by the time anyone saw the letter, the scheduled meeting time had already passed.
The building won’t be torn down until Diekmann and the other legal tenants leave, no matter how much Arcadia Estates threatens them.
“We are fighting for the good life for everyone,” Diekmann said.
Emma Toscani is going into their final year at Western Washington University, pursing a double major in journalism and studio art, and a minor in professional writing. They are reporting from Berlin this summer.
