Berlin Voted to Expropriate Its Landlords in 2021. In 2026 They're Still Waiting for a Law.

In September 2021, 57.6 percent of Berlin voted yes on a referendum to expropriate corporate landlords holding more than 3,000 units and fold them into public ownership. It was the largest tenant mobilisation Germany had seen in decades, built by the Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen (DWE) campaign against years of rising rents and speculative buyouts of the city's housing stock. Five years on, not one apartment has changed hands. The Senate — first under SPD's Franziska Giffey, now under CDU's Kai Wegner — has spent that time proving that a democratic mandate means nothing to a government that simply refuses to act on it.

The delay was never really about legal uncertainty. An independent expert commission convened by the Senate itself, the Expertenkommission Vergesellschaftung, concluded in 2023 that socialising large landlords under Article 15 of the Basic Law is constitutional, workable, and proportionate. That should have ended the argument. Instead the Senate treated the commission's answer as one more thing to sit on. Wegner's government has openly opposed implementing the vote it was legally obligated to respond to, and tenant groups have called the stalling what it is: democracy denial dressed up as due diligence.

DWE didn't wait for Berlin's politicians to find their nerve. The campaign has now drafted the actual expropriation statute itself, with a law firm and outside legal review, and is pushing for a second referendum — this time binding, a Gesetzesvolksentscheid that would take effect immediately on passage with no parliamentary veto point left for the Senate to hide behind. It is the first attempt in German history to actually invoke Article 15 against private capital rather than just theorize about it.

Watch what happened the moment that threat became concrete: the SPD, sensing the ground shifting under Die Linke and the Greens, suddenly discovered its own housing platform in January 2026 — rent caps, profit-distribution limits at 4 percent of net cold rent income, a digital rent registry, a dedicated prosecutor's office for rent gouging. Fraktionschef Raed Saleh was explicit about the point of all this: "We don't want expropriation, we want regulation, and drastic regulation at that." Translation: give tenants just enough to defuse the referendum without touching who actually owns the buildings. It's the standard move — the state discovers urgency for reform only once the alternative is losing control of the asset entirely.

None of this is abstract for the roughly 47,000 people the city itself counted as homeless or in emergency housing in January 2024, a number that keeps climbing while landlord dividends do too. Regulation that leaves Vonovia and Deutsche Wohnen owning the stock and setting the terms is not the same as taking rent out of the hands of people whose entire business model is extracting more of it. A rent cap can be litigated away, as Berlin's first one was by the Constitutional Court in 2021. Ownership, once socialised, is harder to reverse. That's exactly why the Senate has spent five years finding reasons not to do it — and why DWE's binding-law strategy for 2026 matters more than another round of SPD press releases promising toughness it has no intention of delivering.

Sources

rbb24: Regulierung statt Enteignung — SPD will Kurs in Berliner Wohnungspolitik verschärfen
Deutsches Architekt:innenblatt: Enteignen gegen die Wohnungskrise?
Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen: draft socialisation law
ZDFheute: Berlin streitet über Enteignungen