The wallpaper is purple-and-gold fleur-de-lis in this tiny apartment located on the fringe of Berlin’s trendy Friedrichshain neighborhood. A bar with two white faux-leather chairs divides the chrome stove from a cookie-cutter modern sitting area with a glass-topped coffee table. The residents aren’t newlyweds or Airbnb’ers, though. They’re Syrian refugees — three of them, grown men. They’ve shared this 350-square-foot room for nine months on the government’s dime. Move-out date? No one has a clue.
More than 1 million asylum seekers arrived to Germany this past year — 100,000 in Berlin alone, a figure that’s likely to remain the same or rise according to the U.N.’s predictions. Given all that, an initial housing shortage shouldn’t surprise anyone. But even many of those refugees who have been in Berlin a year or more have not been able to secure permanent housing, which will likely worsen asrefugees continue to arrive. In response, an underground industry has sprung up to offer “temporary” rooms. For the landlords, it’s lucrative; for the tenants, it’s complicated.
The current situation is the natural conclusion of Berlin’s decade-long disinvestment from social housing, says Josh Crites, a strategic advisor for the Seattle Housing Authority, who recently spent 10 months researching German social housing. In Berlin specifically, this trend has been compounded by gentrification and the city’s lack of preparation for the influx of refugees. “You have a crowded housing market and now you are slamming a million new bodies into it,” he says. Some areas in Germany, like the Ruhr valley, may have more housing available, but fewer jobs or less welcoming attitudes toward foreigners, according to Crites.
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Research was supported by the Transatlantic Media Fellowship Program.
Please note that the views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of the Heinrich Boell Foundation.
