Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017).
Joanna Kusiak, Radically Legal: Berlin Constitutes the Future (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
The German economy is a case in point. In cities such as Berlin, most residential property is owned by individuals or companies holding multiple units, while the largest landlords are corporate real estate firms. Renters in Germany pay approximately €150 billion in rent each year, generating substantial wealth for landlords and shareholders while reinforcing gendered, racialized, and class-based wealth inequalities. See Gabu Heindl and Nina Manz, “Klasse Eigentumswohnung: Vermögensungleichheiten in der kritischen Wohnraumforschung,” in “Wohnen mit Klasse,” ed. Amelie Ochs and Rosanna Umbach, special issue, kritische berichte 2 (2025): 41–52.
Nick Bano, Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis (London: Verso, 2024).
Raquel Rolnik, “Late Neoliberalism: The Financialization of Homeownership and Housing Rights,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, no. 3 (2013): 1058–66.
Rolnik, “Late Neoliberalism.”
European Commission, European Affordable Housing Plan, ➝.
Raquel Rolnik, Urban Warfare: Housing under the Empire of Finance, trans. Felipe Hirschhorn (London: Verso, 2019), 57.
Harald Trapp, “Capital Home,” ARCH+ 231 (2018): 32–39.
The most standardized recipe of replacing wooden windows with those that offer optimized insulation can result in the development of mold and subsequently serious damage to the home and tenants’ health—and in even graver consequences: According to geographer Sarah Klosterkamp, landlords instrumentalize the presence of mold by claiming that renters did not ventilate properly, which has resulted in a number of evictions in Germany. Not to go into details of building physics and specificity of German tenant law, but suffice it to say that some of the renovation projects are designed so as to build a case for evictions. For further reading see: Sarah Klosterkamp, “Spores of Displacement: Legal Geographies of Mould, Evidence and Housing Precarity,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 51, no. 2 (2026).
Concept introduced by Dubravka Sekulić during the symposium “Common Housing Futures,” Department of ARCHITECTURE CITIES ECONOMIES (ACE), University of Kassel, September 2025.
See Iva Marčetić, Housing Policies in the Service of Social and Spatial (In)equality (Zagreb: Pravo na grad, 2021).
A likely result of the influence by the European Cities Alliance on Short-Term Rentals.
Scholars such as Andrej Holm, David Madden, and Joanna Kusiak to name a few have all at different times expressed this view that rent control, or rent caps are beneficial instruments to relieve housing stress.
Rent regulation and strong tenant protections were also preconditions for the municipal housing program of Red Vienna after the First World War. See Gabu Heindl, “Towards a Radical Democratic Politics of Urban Land: The Case of (Red) Vienna,” in Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, ed. Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny (Vienna: Architekturzentrum Wien; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019).
At the time of finalizing this article, Germany’s governing coalition, consisting of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), agreed to introduce a bill that would legally prohibit socialization (Vergesellschaftung). It remains to be seen how legislation could be used to effectively prohibit a constitutional provision. In the meantime, the initiative Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen is organizing protests and other forms of resistance in response to this proposal.
Lecture delivered at the symposium “Common Housing Futures,” ACE, University of Kassel, September 2025.