…Berlin

摘要

Until the last election in the Federal State of Berlin, its social democratic/socialist government claimed that there was no housing shortage in Berlin, that there even was a surplus of 100,000 homes, thus the government need not deal with housing issues. In the Eastern boroughs hundreds of flats in the prefabricated housing slabs of the German Democratic Republic have been demolished since 2002 - a process that was sponsored by the government-funded programme Stadtumbau Ost. While housing activists were already pointing out that mainly in the inner city there was a lack of affordable housing, especially for students, the elderly and families, this fact only became official in 2011 when a new coalition government of the Social Democratic and the Christian Democratic Parties took over. Nobody could argue that Berlin was still 'poor but sexy' -as its Mayor Klaus Wowereit had in 2003, but it became obvious that more and more tourists and 'creatives' were flocking to Berlin from all over the world and that Berlin as the capital of Europe's strongest economy was becoming an important spot on the map of international real estate investors.