Berlin Voted to Expropriate the Landlords in 2021. Berlin Still Doesn't Own a Single Building.

In September 2021, 57.6 percent of Berlin voted yes on a referendum to expropriate corporate landlords holding more than 3,000 apartments each — Deutsche Wohnen, Vonovia, the rest of the portfolio-capital class that has turned the city's housing stock into a yield instrument. It was the largest tenant mobilization in a German city in living memory, and it won outright, district after district. Five years later, not one square meter has changed hands. The 2021 red-green-red state government spent the interim commissioning an expert panel that concluded expropriation was legally sound, then the current CDU/SPD Senate passed a toothless "Vergesellschaftungsrahmengesetz" — a framework law with no expropriation attached to it — and called that compliance. A social movement won a landslide and the state's answer was a committee.

This month the story turned from stalling to sabotage. In July, the federal coalition government in Berlin — Union and SPD — agreed to pass a law that would strip state governments of the power to expropriate private rental housing at all, a measure written specifically in response to the Berlin vote, designed to make sure no Land ever finishes what Berliners started. It is the clearest possible admission of what capital fears: not that expropriation might fail, but that it might work, and spread.

Then, on September 20, Berliners went to the polls again and made Die Linke the strongest party in the Abgeordnetenhaus, campaigning explicitly on implementing the 2021 result. Lead candidate Elif Eralp has repeated it since election night without hedging: "If the Left governs, we will vergesellschaften. I said that and I'm sticking to it." The tenants' initiative that ran the original referendum called the result a mandate: "The Left won this election with one clear promise: expropriate, and make housing affordable. That promise must now be implemented."

But the post-election numbers cut against a clean narrative of momentum. An Infratest-dimap exit poll on the same night found only 37 percent of Berliners now back the expropriation, against 51 percent opposed — a near-total reversal of the 2021 landslide. That is not proof the movement was wrong; it is proof of what five years of stall tactics, landlord-lobby messaging, and a governing class that treats "juristische Auseinandersetzungen" as a strategy rather than a cost actually accomplishes. Delay is not neutral. It is how the state metabolizes a movement's mandate into eventual, engineered public doubt.

None of that changes the material argument. Deutsche Wohnen and Vonovia did not become slumlords with better spreadsheets by accident — they are financial vehicles whose entire business model is extracting rent growth from a city that cannot build its way out of scarcity fast enough to matter, and won't while the buildings are owned by people who profit from scarcity itself. Expropriation was never about magically producing new apartments; it was about removing profit motive from a fixed, unexpandable resource that people need to live. Every year Berlin's government "studies" that argument instead of acting on it is a year the referendum's authors were proven right about exactly one thing: capital will always find a legal, procedural, bipartisan way to make sure a vote against it never actually counts.

Sources

ZDFheute: Berlin streitet über Enteignungen – das steckt dahinter

Tagesschau/rbb24: Mehrheit gegen Vergesellschaftung großer Immobilienkonzerne (Infratest dimap, 21.09.2026)

Die Zeit: Mehrheit in Berlin gegen Enteignung von Immobilienfirmen