Against the sell-out of public housing

According to German Tenants Federation data, over 1 million housing units in Germany have been sold to speculative financial funds during the past decade. About 3 million remaining public housing units in Germany are still on the focus of international investment trusts such as Terra Company, Fortress, Cerberus and Morgan Stanley.

The housing markets in Germany are one of the principal targets of international investment trusts, which collect world-wide capital from private pension funds in order to receive maximum returns by speculative investments into public goods.
As experiences particularly from North America show, tenants and inhabitants pay the price for this development by being forced to pay rising rents, by displacement through transformation of rental housing to free hold condominiums and by the neglect of maintenances. Municipalities and public authorities at the same time loose their capacities to invest in social building for persons with low incomes and they are rapidly loosing their influence on urban development.
International financial investors like Annington/TerraFirma are extremely interested in taking over LEG. Tenants organisations and trade unions fear, that they will cut LEG into pieces, worsen the maintenance and reinvestment, destroy the culture of participation and social management, use green space for new constructions and convert rental housing into condos.

Knut Unger, MieterInnenverein Witten

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