Rent madness | When justice is unattainable

The “Papageienplatte” on Berlin’s Habersaathstrasse: The remaining tenants, together with homeless people and activists, have been fighting for years against the demolition by the real estate company “Arcadia Estates” Photo: IMAGO/serienlicht On a Wednesday morning, an elderly tenant sits on a wooden bench in front of the hearing room of a German district court. Negotiations about her apartment will take place in a few minutes. The landlord has declared his own use. The woman looks nervous. She has contacted several law firms in the past few weeks. Some didn't answer. Others pointed to overload. Still others rejected the mandate because it was supposed to be billed through legal aid. Now she sits alone in court. The landlord is represented by a lawyer.”

I encountered scenes like this vignette from the DFG project “Forced Eviction” again and again during my ethnographic research on eviction procedures. They point to a problem that often remains in the background in debates about legal battles. The crucial question is often not how the proceedings will end, but whether those affected will even be able to assert their rights. The legal battle does not begin in the courtroom. He begins looking for legal support.

The housing issue has become a central social issue in many German cities. Rising rents, displacement processes, terminations of personal use and increasing debt mean that more and more households are under considerable pressure. At the same time, conflicts over housing are increasingly being dealt with legally. Eviction proceedings, termination proceedings and legal disputes are part of everyday life in many local courts.

This development cannot be separated from the profound changes in the housing markets. Since the 1990s, living space has increasingly been discovered as an investment and speculative property. The privatization of public housing stocks, the financialization of the housing market and the orientation towards returns have contributed to living space being increasingly organized according to exploitation logics. In this context, terminations for personal use, modernizations or evictions do not just appear as individual conflicts between landlords and tenants. They are an expression of a political economy of housing in which living space is both home and asset.

What is noteworthy is that these social conflicts are predominantly negotiated in tenancy law, an area of ​​civil law. Unlike social law, tenancy law is primarily aimed at regulating private law contractual relationships between formally equal parties. In court, structural questions of housing shortages, displacement or social inequality initially appear as disputes about notice periods, breaches of contract or the effectiveness of termination for personal use. The social question is translated into a civil dispute.

At the same time, tenancy law contains numerous protective mechanisms that are intended to balance the structural power imbalance between owners and tenants. However, these intellectual property rights do not apply automatically. They must be actively asserted by those affected, justified and often enforced by lawyers. The social protective function of tenancy law therefore depends largely on the ability to mobilize rights. This is precisely where a fundamental contradiction lies: the more housing is organized according to exploitation logics, the more important these protective rights become. At the same time, their actual effectiveness depends on socially unequally distributed resources: time, legal knowledge, linguistic skills and, in particular, access to legal support. Courts thus become central places where social contradictions are dealt with.

The difficulties faced by many tenants point to a class issue.

As part of the DFG project “Forced Evictions”, I observed and evaluated, together with a team, more than 250 eviction and tenancy law proceedings at five local courts across Germany over a period of 18 months. Tenants repeatedly reported considerable difficulties finding legal support. This applied even if they were entitled to legal aid. Many law firms no longer accepted mandates for legal aid, others pointed to a lack of capacity.

Some of those affected reported contacting ten or more law firms before even hearing back. Some ended up appearing in court without legal representation, while others chose not to seek legal recourse because they could not find support. Still others accepted comparisons whose consequences they could hardly understand. These experiences point to a fundamental shift. The problem here is not that low-income tenants have fewer rights, but rather that the costs of activating them are unevenly distributed.

The difficulties many tenants have in finding legal support cannot be understood solely as a problem with the justice system. They point to a broader class issue. While landlords often have access to professional property management companies, specialized law firms and many years of experience with legal proceedings, many tenants appear as legally inexperienced individuals. They often have neither financial reserves nor institutional networks or legal knowledge. The search for legal support becomes an additional hurdle in an already asymmetrical conflict.

This became particularly clear when the woman from the opening example, whom I will call Amina, gave notice for personal use. She is African-American and has lived in the same apartment in Hamburg-Eppendorf for more than 25 years. Although her chances of success did not seem bad, she described considerable difficulties in finding legal support. Several Hamburg law firms refused representation or referred to long waiting times. While the landlord received legal advice at an early stage and proceeded strategically to present his request for personal use with the help of several family members and representations, Amina had to manage large parts of the process alone.

Sarah Klosterkamp is a human geographer and researches law, housing, debt and social inequality. She leads the DFG project “Forced Evictions – Logics, Practices and Vulnerabilities in the Context of Evictions in Times of Multiple Crisis” at the Goethe University Frankfurt.

The relevance of these upstream inequalities is also underlined by the results of my DFG study on eviction proceedings (2024-2026) for the Frankfurt court location, whose proceedings have already been fully evaluated. Around 85 percent of the cases examined ended with the loss of the apartment due to an eviction judgment, personal use or a comparable decision in favor of the landlord. At the same time, there was a clear asymmetry in legal representation: while the landlord was represented by a lawyer in around 90 percent of the cases, the defendant tenants were only represented in around 30 percent. The majority of tenants therefore found themselves in court without professional legal support. The class question therefore appears to be a question of legal ability to act.

The district court locations that I examined were predominantly in cities with particularly tight housing markets. The conflicts were conspicuously concentrated in certain parts of the city: neighborhoods with high poverty rates, an above-average proportion of migrant households and strong pressure for displacement. Where the need for legal support is particularly high, it often seems to be the most difficult to access. This observation points to a legal-geographical problem: lawyers, advice centers, tenants' associations and support networks are unevenly distributed. Some districts have a comparatively dense legal support infrastructure. Others are characterized by undersupply. This leads to a dynamic that particularly favors those who are financially well positioned.

Another example of this is someone I'll call Martin, a well-dressed businessman I met during my fieldwork. Although his income was significantly higher than that of many other participants in the proceedings, he also fought against a significant rent increase. Unlike many other victims, however, Martin had the resources to organize legal support at an early stage, obtain expert reports and weigh up different strategies. His case makes it clear that the legal situation alone says little about the chances of a case. What is more important is what resources people can mobilize to enforce their rights.

The housing question and the legal question cannot therefore be separated from each other. Anyone who lives in an area affected by displacement is not only at increased risk of losing their home. At the same time, the chances of effectively defending oneself against this loss often decrease. Rather, in and through these procedures in the area of ​​tenancy law, geographies of legal accessibility and geographies of legal absence arise, which in turn are also reflected in the question of who is allowed to stay in a district and who has to leave.

Geographies of legal accessibility refer to those socio-spatial constellations in which legal support, advice centers, tenants' associations and informal networks are available and actually accessible. Here tenants can mobilize their rights, meet deadlines and receive strategic support. Law becomes an available resource that at least makes staying in the neighborhood more likely. Geographies of legal absence, on the other hand, arise where these infrastructures are missing, overloaded or difficult to access. The search for legal representation remains unsuccessful, advice is provided late or not at all, and legal options are not exhausted. Spatial marginalization, social precarity and limited access to justice reinforce each other. The ability to mobilize law itself becomes part of urban inequality and determines who can stay and who is pushed out.

The developments described are not the result of individual wrong decisions made by individual lawyers or judges. Rather, it is about institutional processes. They are also related to the structure of tenancy law itself. Rent debts initially appear legally as a breach of contract: non-payment of rent is treated as a breach of contractual obligations and is therefore dealt with under civil law. Although social law considerations can be taken into account, they are usually secondary to the question of whether a contractual obligation has been breached. The social causes of payment arrears inevitably fade into the background due to formal and structural considerations. This legal framework also shapes legal practice. If the conflict primarily appears to be a civil contract dispute, legal action is based on the professional requirements of representing interests in the individual case. This is where the connection to the professional regulations of the Federal Lawyers' Act (BRAO) and the Professional Regulations for Lawyers (BORA) arises, which on the one hand oblige lawyers to represent their clients independently, but on the other hand offer little incentive to make social problems beyond the specific mandate the subject of their work.

Section 49a BRAO generally obliges lawyers to provide advisory assistance. At the same time, § 16a BORA allows exceptions, for example in the event of overload. In any case, there is no obligation to take on a mandate for legal aid. Added to this are the consequences of the reform of advisory and legal aid from 2014, which was marked by fiscal savings. The reports from those affected, advice centers and individual lawyers indicate that the hurdles for low-income parties have continued to rise since then. Complaints about denied advice or lack of legal support are often individualized. Structural problems appear to be isolated cases. Experiences of those affected are psychologized or attributed to individual characteristics. The institutional causes are lost sight of. This is precisely where a special form of contemporary class justice lies: judges or lawyers do not consciously negotiate against poor people. But institutional arrangements mean that formal legal equality and actual legal enforcement are drifting ever further apart.

This observation ties in with the diagnosis made by Ronen Steinke in his book “Not everyone is equal before the law. The new class justice” has already been formulated for German criminal law. He argues that the rule of law is increasingly leaving its central promise – equality before the law for all – unfulfilled. He is less concerned with individual errors in judgment than with systematic differences in the way social inequalities are translated into legal procedures. While economically privileged actors often have the resources to strategically design proceedings, purchase legal expertise or resolve conflicts out of court, economically disadvantaged people are much more directly exposed to the routines of the justice system.

The parallels to tenancy law are striking. Here, too, it becomes clear that the legal situation alone says little about the actual chances of success. What is more important is whether people have the resources to effectively mobilize their rights. The tension described by Steinke between the normative promise of legal equality and the material conditions for fulfilling it is particularly visible in tenancy law conflicts. Because here the question of social participation is not only decided by fines or imprisonment, but also by the loss or preservation of one's own apartment.

According to Steinke, the judiciary does not automatically have a corrective effect in times of growing social inequality, but can actually reinforce existing differences. The ethnographic observations from eviction proceedings suggest a similar dynamic in tenancy law. Not because courts would consciously rule against low-income tenants, but because the conditions for successful legal mobilization are socially uneven. The result is a form of legal inequality that hides behind the constitutional state's formal promise of equality.

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