If you are visiting Berlin on a limited budget and want to try something different, how about staying in Angela Merkel’s old apartment?
No fear: the chancellor’s old digs in the eastern neighbourhood of Prenzlauer Berg has been given a thorough renovation since the former physicist lived there in the 1980s. The coal oven has been removed; the two white-walled rooms are bright and airy and filled with Ikea-esque furniture. And it can be yours for just €50 a night on holiday-stay website Airbnb.
If that’s too bourgeois for you, how about the apartment that was once the notorious Kommune 1? Berlin’s former free love stronghold is now a free market stronghold and, like Angela Merkel’s old flat, a holiday apartment.
Berlin’s city fathers are not amused, given a rising housing shortage, and have declared war on the thriving grey market in holiday lets. But the outcome of their campaign is far from clear.
Last week a city official said that a trawl through the internet found 23,000 flats on offer as short-term rental to tourists in Berlin. Nothing unusual, you might think, given the explosion in tourist numbers in Berlin from eight million overnight stays five years ago to 28 million last year.
Squeeze
But this comes as more people than ever before are moving to Berlin. After years of decline, an extra 44,700 people made the German capital their home last year, pushing the population up to almost 3.6 million and putting a squeeze on the housing market.
Estimates say Berlin needs an extra 15,000 apartments each year to house the new arrivals but, in the last years, almost no new apartments were built in the city.
So, as a short-term fix for the housing market, the city passed a new law last year outlawing the “misappropriation” of apartments for commercial purposes. In effect it was a declaration of war on landlords of holiday flats, requiring them to register their properties or face fines of €50,000.
Just 5,700 holiday apartment-owners in Berlin have done so, meaning that the city has 17,000 illegal holiday flats. The greatest offenders are landlords in eastern Berlin’s Mitte neighbourhood, with almost 5,000 flats, of which just 1,557 are registered.
Berliners who’ve had to live cheek-by-jowl with the rise of holiday apartments have welcomed the law as an overdue first step against the constant stream of strangers in their buildings, all-night parties, and roller suitcases on the cobbles at all hours.
So how will the law work? After a two-year transition period, landlords with holiday apartments will have to re-apply for licenses from next year – for which city officials promise a very restrictive procedure with the aim of freeing apartments for long-term tenants.
But, in Berlin, nothing is ever as simple as it sounds. One complicating factor is to differentiate between holiday flats and doctors or lawyers who use apartments for their practice. They have been promised they can stay in their premises until their current lease expires. But just who will keep an eye on all this is far from clear.
Holiday apartment landlords have been quiet, fearing reprisals if they go public with their concerns. Off the record, many complain that the law is far too broad and fails to distinguish between large-scale holiday-flat landlords and someone who rents out their flat while they are on holidays to finance their trip.
Scapegoats
Others believe they have been made the scapegoats for politicians’ belated reaction to the pressure on Berlin’s housing market.
Many legal experts have said the law is dead in the water and wide open to challenge given Germany’s high protections for property owners, a reaction to a bitter history of disappropriation and property theft.
Another problem: even if Berlin justifies the law by claiming there is a housing shortage – an elastic term with no clear definition – the city’s 23,000 holiday apartments are, critics say, a statistical irrelevance given Berlin’s 1.9 million apartments.
In a report Helge Sodan, ex-president of Berlin’s constitutional court, described the “misappropriation” law as “sloppy, and with grave shortcomings” and indicated that one legal challenge would be enough to have it thrown out.
Until then, Berlin’s overworked and underpaid civil servants are caught in the middle. With 17,000 illegal apartments, the 17 staff assigned to this new project are unimpressed by the political expectation that they can police 1,000 apartments each.
“What are we supposed to do,” one asked me recently, “hide in the bushes and count the number of roller suitcases that come and go?”
