Berlin's Invisible Gentrifiers

I still think sometimes about the Berlin apartment I came so close to buying this spring. With herringbone parquet floors and a big sunny balcony looking out over birches and pines, its two rooms cost around half the price of London’s cheapest studio. The subway was round the corner, and a huge new park was so close I could almost have flicked a beer mat into it from the kitchen window. After years of shuttling between Britain and Germany, I’d have finally had a permanent Berlin base (for a few months annually) that was also rentable to tourists via the Internet when I wasn’t in town.

Talking to Berlin friends, however, I realized that buying the flat would have turned me into one of the city’s current villains: the locust-like out of town buyer who is supposedly stripping the city of attractive property, leaving only stubble and chaff for the locals. With a glut of Berlin holiday apartments available online – some estimates place the number as high as 25,000 – some feel tourist accommodation is actually damaging the city.