Berlin Renters Are Still Waiting for Their Own Referendum

On Saturday, September 5, 2026, thousands of people marched from the Rotes Rathaus through Berlin's city center under the banner "Her mit den Wohnungen, runter mit der Miete" - give us the housing, bring down the rent. Organizers put turnout at 11,000; police said 7,500. Either number makes it one more chapter in a fight Berlin has been having with its own government since 2021 - a fight the government keeps refusing to lose gracefully.

Here is the part that should embarrass anyone who still believes in the basic mechanics of democracy: in September 2021, 59.1 percent of Berliners who voted said yes to a referendum ordering the expropriation, with compensation, of large landlords - Deutsche Wohnen, Vonovia, and other corporate housing groups holding upwards of 3,000 units each - into public ownership. Five years later, not one apartment has changed hands. The Mietendeckel that briefly capped rents was struck down by the constitutional court. The Vorkaufsrecht that let districts buy up buildings before speculators could was gutted by the courts too. And the current CDU-SPD Senate, when pressed by a Green lawmaker for records explaining why it still hasn't drafted implementing legislation, has reportedly stonewalled rather than hand over the files.

This is not a story about slow bureaucracy. It's a story about what happens when a housing market becomes an asset class for people who never intend to live in the building. Vonovia's own reported average rent on existing contracts sits around 8.23 euros per square meter - a figure the company waves around as proof of restraint, while tenants describe mounting service charges, deferred repairs, and a mail-in-your-complaint-and-wait bureaucracy that functions as a de facto second rent. A landlord holding tens of thousands of units in one city isn't a housing provider anymore. It's a rent-extraction machine with a legal department, and the 2021 vote was Berlin trying to switch the machine off.

That the Senate has spent five years finding reasons not to act tells you where power actually sits in this city - not with the electorate that voted yes, but with capital that can afford to simply wait out a mandate. The timing of last week's march wasn't accidental: it came two weeks before the September 20 Abgeordnetenhaus election, with Linke leader Ines Schwerdtner naming implementation of the referendum a red line for any coalition her party joins, while SPD candidate Steffen Krach has flatly ruled it out. Whoever wins, the "Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen" campaign says it is already drafting a second referendum with a self-executing law attached - a fallback for when the first mandate keeps gathering dust.

None of this is abstract for the people who spoke at Saturday's rally: tenants of Vonovia buildings describing mold, disrepair, and rent increases they cannot contest without a lawyer they cannot afford. Housing is not a policy debate for them, it is the difference between staying in the neighborhood they grew up in and being priced into the periphery. A city that lets its own referendum sit unenforced for half a decade has not stayed neutral on that question - it has already picked a side, and it isn't the side of the people who voted.

Sources

taz: Mietendemo in Berlin: Enteignen, jetzt!
rbb24: Demonstration gegen hohe Mieten und für Enteignung in Berlin
Wikipedia: Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen