Homo Oeconomicus: There is a right to live cheaply in Berlin-Mitte

Uta Meier-Graewe

Until 2018, Uta Meier-Gräwe held the Chair of Household Economics and Family Studies at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen and was an advisor to the Federal Government.

(Photo: Equal Opportunities Office Freiburg)

“There is no right to live cheaply in Berlin-Mitte,” announced the director of the Institute for German Economics, Michael Hüther, in the Handelsblatt. That is an outrageous statement that the increasing residential segregation in Germany presents as an unchangeable market law. It legitimizes that the misunderstood high performers – saleswomen, geriatric nurses, daycare workers – are pushed out of the center of the Berlin metropolis.

Anyone who claims that high rents only affect new Berliners should take the S-Bahn to the surrounding area of ​​Berlin: the platforms are full of pensioners at nine o’clock in the morning who want to go to their neighborhood at least during the day can no longer afford.

The population of Berlin therefore supported the initiative “Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co.” (56.4 percent) on election Sunday. This allows conclusions to be drawn about the mood. Even if very few supporters assume that there will be expropriation: the future Berlin Senate must take this vote seriously.

It is important to curb the greed of private real estate companies promptly through resolute state action – this also applies to the protection of existing living space.

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Poor families with children are particularly affected

But it is also about very fundamental questions: How do we actually want to live together in the future – with respect and in residential areas that are as socially mixed as possible, flanked by a policy that resolutely counteracts social divisions in our cities? Or further to the Homo oeconomicus motto “everyone is the smith of their own happiness”?

In 2018, the WZB study “How fragile is the social architecture of our cities?” Led to the alarming result that the socio-spatial division of the East German cities developed an enormous dynamic within a few years, as we have only known from American cities so far. Poor families with children are particularly affected.

In 36 of 74 German cities there are now neighborhoods in which, despite the economic upturn in the last decade, more than half of all children live on SGB II transfer payments. This has negative consequences for their educational and life opportunities, as poverty and urban research has repeatedly shown.

That is neither socially just nor economically sensible: We are known to be heading for an unprecedented shortage of skilled workers. The city of Munich now has to cover a considerable part of the housing costs of daycare workers, because otherwise these skilled workers would have to move to the surrounding area and the daycare could no longer be maintained. Greetings from Absurdistan.

More: “Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co”: Discussion with initiative spokesman Taheri and constitutional lawyer Battis.

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