Why Berlin Is Cracking Down on Condo Conversions

From this week onwards, Berlin is putting a brake on new condos. On Tuesday, the Berlin Senate voted through measures to effectively ban the conversion of rental apartments to owner-occupied condominiums in a large area of the city. The protected area covers 160,000 homes and houses around 300,000 people (a large number in a city of 3.5 million) and may well be extended to a wider area in the near future. The goals of the move—to preserve a mix of social classes and slow down gentrification—are ambitious. As city planning senator Andreas Geisel put it: “Everyone should have the possibility of living in any part of the city.”

Right now, it’s the parts of the city where everyone wants to live that are coming under the microscope. Looking at a map of Berlin’s new no-conversion zone, it might almost come from the back of a real estate catalog detailing the city’s up and coming neighborhoods. Forming a crescent around the east of Central Berlin, the areas in question are mainly filled with streets of mietskaserne, stocky but attractive pre-World War I tenements whose once mostly working class courtyard apartments have become very fashionable. These areas already have a good deal of protection under nationwide “community defense” laws which, among other things, ban luxury upgrades that could allow landlords to hike their rents beyond what existing tenants can afford.