 You have found us. You can find them very easily by clicking on the second translation channel. Welcome everyone to our talk about houses and it's called the houses to the people living there. Our speakers are Lina, Hohlin, Elke, Mans and a name I didn't catch are talking about us. The person in the room who has tried finding an apartment knows how difficult it can be. Either the rent is just not affordable or there are 200 other people there looking at their apartment. The meat sizes indicate, the syndicate for apartment houses are trying to be an alternative to this and how they are doing this and what role the CCC can be in this. This is what the talk is going to be about. All of Germany, all of this place is owned by private owners. Just one area is doing resisting this. It's not a village in the time of Rome's, but it's a project here. They developed a model to remove buildings from speculation of finding an apartment. It's not only a space to live for 100 people, but there is also a coffee and a lot of social initiatives in there. There is a feminist center, which is a network to help. There is also the computer club. There is an archive for social movements and also the studio from a radio station. For a rent of 6 euros per square meter in the inner city, it's against the free market of the apartment. No wonder this is a model, which a lot of other places are taking on. There is 130 projects all over Germany and this number continues to rise. Back in the days, it was very focused on keeping older buildings in a good state, but it's starting to be more about new houses being constructed as well. This is another project where you pay 7 euros per square meter and that's also very cheap compared to the other rents around the area. There is a bit of acceptance being gained for projects like this because the rents were rising and this led to this model being more accepted by general society. It's not just about setting a political example, but also an example for self-organization. There are plenaries where all the people renting in the projects make decisions together. It's about keeping rents cheap and it allows for participation also for people with limited income. It forces communities in a lot of ways. I'm very happy. We are very happy that so many people are interested in our project. The room is almost full. I wanted to introduce you to what we are going to talk about in the next 30 minutes. Lena and I will introduce the syndicate in a speech. We will explain in more detail what the movie just briefly mentioned. Then Fusil from the CTC Freiburg is going to talk about the cooperation between the syndicate or the possible cooperation between the syndicate and the CZC and in the end if there is time left Jochen offers to answer questions from the audience. He is also going to lead the workshop which will be after the talk where you can discuss questions which we don't have the time to answer during this talk. There are three main statements. First the houses to the people living in them. Living shouldn't be for trade and a roof over your head for everyone. That's in our basic statement of our organization. Houses to the people living in them. We think this should be sought in a wide interpretation because it's not only about the people living in them but there is also a lot of projects using this for some types of commercial use and also cultural initiatives. So it's also a mixed type of project not only for living. The idea to remove the houses from the free market is the other statement where we are looking for a construction where the houses can't be resold so they are removed from the free market. And another basic idea in there is one of the, like a fund for solitary money. So the projects which are organized within the syndicate are paying toward this fund and with this money other projects can be co-financed. I'm going to talk quickly about the history of the project. So the initiative was founded in 1992 in Freiburg and this is why the movie focuses a lot on Freiburg. Back in the day we had a different name which was about apartment buildings, self-organized and at that time there wasn't a house ownership but it was just the organization being founded. Then in 1994 the first participation in a house project was started and 1996 we started thinking about the name and we weren't quite happy with the name at that time so we found it a little bit hard. So we changed it to apartment house syndicate. There were some other ideas, apartment house combinates but we decided to go with apartment house syndicate. And for a couple of years it went kind of slowly. We didn't have the impression that a lot of people were interested but in 2001 more people got interested and more people after the Freiburg got involved. There was a project in Tübing joining us and we weren't quite sure whether that would work together with people from outside of Freiburg and thankfully the people who were saying, yeah let's go for it, that worked out so this was the first project outside of Freiburg. 2009 the 50s house project was joining us and 2018 we have 139 house projects which are part of the syndicate. To some of that in numbers there are 139 house projects with about 4.000 people living in them. There are also quite small house projects with only four people living in them and in Freiburg there is the biggest house project with about 80 people in them. We have around €150 million of volume. All of the houses can't be sold and are not privatised. All the people in there can organise cultural projects. They are self-governed and they decide everything together like where do we put the bins, how do we finance the project, it's a solidarity community. We give money to each other within this community and also to other projects which is very important. There are many questions from other countries for advice. There is a quite good exchange. The first initiatives in Austria have asked us like the habitat in the Netherlands, the Freikop and in France a clip. Those are organisations working like in the same way. What does the syndicate do? The syndicate has four parts. They are watching so that no of the houses who go into the syndicate can be sold again. We have ... The second level is the level of the umbrella organisation, all the organisations network together, work together and build the solidar foundation and from the solidarity found we pay part of the public work. The third level are the house projects themselves. It's important that we share knowledge and because all the people who live in the house project gain the knowledge of how to live in a house project, how to work in a house project and it's very important to pass on this knowledge to others and that's why we are also advising other projects and about 100 people are at the moment involved in this kind of advisory work. The fourth level is the level of political work. The meet houses in Dekat is taken seriously by the cities and we want the city to go into negotiations with us and it actually is also happening and whenever some new developments are happening we try to be involved on the city level as you have already seen in the movie. Now I pass on to Lina, there's a round of applause now. I go one level back and I ask the question why are we actually doing that? For all of us since 2008 the financial crisis there is a huge property bubble in the whole world and housing developed into a way of getting money and it's important so it's... there's a lot of cruelty going on, people being evicted and just being removed as a precarious being removed from the inner city and the right to a place to live is actually a human right as a human right and also in our legislation here in Germany but instead housing is becoming about trade and we think that shouldn't be the case and additionally the public institutions are leaning back and this could be the thing for the cities. A lot of cities were selling property to the states and with this were gaining money for the city but have lost influence about the social structure within the city so the syndicate was thinking well we have to do everything by ourselves and we founded a type of organization a type of legal organizations which allow us to remove properties from the trade and are self organized by the tenants because this is kind of difficult because the legal structure usually is leaning towards private property and I'm trying to explain this in some ways so what we are doing is all the people within one who want to live or work in a house project are founding an organization and there is two different German legal organizations which need to be founded one is an association and one is a limited corporation and with this construct of these two organizations working together that allows us to remove the houses and the third thing is the apartment house syndicate the association where everything is cooperated and most decisions can be made just by the houses themselves but the apartment house syndicate has a 50% vote so if a house might be sold then the syndicate has the opportunity to stop the house being sold because they have a 50% vote in that because the projects within themselves change and the people within themselves change and some might get an idea to just maybe sell their houses and the syndicate is there to stop this this is why there is this construct of these organizations working together so what is the syndicate actually so there are individual people being members which are just people who are saying yes that's a cool idea we want to be involved with this and then there is groups involved who are saying yes that's a nice project and then there is the association of the individual houses and all of these are members within the syndicate so this association of the association is the only owner of the houses it's a little bit complicated so the projects all are very different the syndicate doesn't really want to have an influence on that so some people are contacting us that they are looking for an apartment but that's not a thing we do so the houses are deciding this on their own who is allowed to move in and how they are decorating their houses and so on that's all decisions by themselves there is some houses as big as 280 people and all the houses are structured very differently some have a flat share others just live on their own in one flat others are living in caravans so it's very interesting because there is a lot of different realities of life which are coming together within these house projects and within the syndicate and one thing that's important is the connection between all the projects so there is a double transfer one is the transfer of knowledge which is the opportunity for new projects to contact all the projects who already have experience and we see that there is a lot of pressure going on this house is being sold so we are being contacted a lot actually because and we aren't that many people who can answer to this and the other is the solidarity fund where the projects are paying a certain amount so in the beginning it's 10 cents per square meter and it goes up by I think 5% because in the beginning they have a lot more stuff they have to pay for and with time the other stuff they have to pay for it usually gets less so the contributions they can make to the association can get a bit higher so it's not only about the first generation who has to put in a lot of money and a lot of work and the people joining after 30 years have a very easy time but the idea is to use this money to start new projects and the new projects get a funding of 10,000 euros I think which is the standard amount of money we give out as a syndicate and there is a person as a syndicate with a half-time position doing public relations and everything else is done by voluntary work we have a lot of info material which are here in front at the stage and you can pick them up later but it's also available online so you can just download it and the funny thing is that the people living in the project don't have so much money so it's always a question coming up how can we finance this to buy a house because we don't have a lot of money one important segment is direct credits from friends or people you know family members which you borrow and then later pay back so that's a certain amount of the credit and then you can get the rest from banks if there is a need for more money so if you don't know what to do with your money that's a good option to go for and you will get it back eventually and in some federal states there is also some public funding which can go to social housing developments but that depends on the federal state and over the years by people paying rent the credits are paid back to the private credit and also the credit from the bank how this works exactly there are a lot of different models and I think that's kind of interesting to experiment with this which I think is good because it's different than just a traditional tenant agreement so that also is decided by the individual house project and the syndicate doesn't have a direct influence on this so syndicate can give ideas but doesn't decide this that all sounds brilliant but it also has limits and problems which I also don't want to so one question is how big can we grow because right now we are 139 projects and we have general assemblies where all the house projects are being invited and everyone has a vote and that's 200 to 300 people meeting three to four times a year and we need bigger and bigger rooms and we can't quite afford this area here and this is becoming more and more complicated so if we would try to reach a consensus within this room that's more difficult than with just 10 people so that would be interesting to talk to the CCC about how if there are other solutions because there is a lot of cooperation going on with people who aren't necessarily at the same place and then we could be thinking about whether everything should be in the same syndicate or if there could be more regional ones which are just ideas right now and we don't have an answer to that another question is just for a certain type of subculture because there is quite a high barrier to doing this a lot of bureaucracy you have to own up to 1 million euros and that's quite a high barrier to jump over while at the same time it's very subcultural but we think it is an idea which might be relevant for all of society and maybe that's even the wrong focus maybe we should look more at the real politics and put pressure on the cities and to the state that rent is more affordable to everyone and it's not just owned by private firms and the last question is if ownership is even the answer here or if we should just occupy the houses it was just a question so I've written a little to-do list for all of us wherever you live you could try to take part in the city politics maybe you know people who are selling their property and maybe you can talk to them so that they won't you can go to your cities and make pressure there another thing is to take property from the real estate market and the last one is to make basis democratic decisions together in big assemblies like this there will be today a workshop at 6 p.m. in lecture room 2 and on Sunday at 11 o'clock there will be the possibility to go to a syndicate project in the Eisenbahnstraße 80 in Leipzig it would be really cool if you tell if you want to join because we need to organize that in the end I want to use this moment to send solidarity greetings to Frankfurt there have been attacks on projects in Frankfurt we don't know yet who has done them but they need our solidarity I will talk something about the Case Computer Club Freiburg at the beginning of this year we had the opportunity to go into a syndicate in the oldest syndicate in Freiburg with our club and this is all very interesting what actually unites us is that both of us hack we hack computers, the syndicate, the rent market and the society however but how this looks in reality, how the number of assemblies rose to actually unite both communities it's quite difficult at times we had many many assemblies and this sometimes is really challenging but what is a good thing is that we are actually our house life and so we can actually decide for ourselves what to do with the house where we are in asking the other parts of the syndicate as well of course sometimes ideas are different there from colors or special things if anything can blink this makes creative work much easier than living for rent or also like if we had bought something and had restrictions from the city so for one part we can really take part we can do things together with other groups because in the syndicate where we are there are also many other groups not only private people and there is much asking each other we do things together we have a bar together we do trips together there was a brewery where we made beer it was really good what does it mean it was set already for the future we have a similar structure like the syndicate the CCC also is growing we have similar problems how do we deal with this growing how can we work on our decision processes and that's basically the same problem as the apartment house syndicate there are technical solutions not technical solutions well one thing is like phoning over long distances with other groups which can be really helpful for us it's a really nice community a nice being together there are many many possibilities I don't know how to describe all of that in the end it's probably only about giving something back to the world it's like not being a really special project but to have an aim and to actually do something so now there is the possibility to ask questions if you have a question please go to the microphone for everyone who is posing a question two little hints one sentence is the length of a question and there is a question mark in the end the other one is if you're speaking into a microphone please go close to the microphone don't bite into it but go close to it and the rest of the room should be rather quiet so that we actually can hear the people hello from our basis democratic aim and the aim to make cheap apartments for the people why don't you do it's very important that you don't have one organization but you have a lot of these central little units and that is because if one project fails you still have the other projects that can take over and the whole project is not in danger there are more reasons but but it's very important that the house projects are autonomous on a level and if you have a if you have a more like conventional kind of housing project then it can still be sold and that's sad and that's not the intention of this whole project that is not possible number four please housing projects and apartments for holiday this is both a thing in cities but the question is are there also apartment house syndicates where holiday apartments for for short times to reach destinations can be can be put in place for short times also to make exchange between the different projects to bring people from projects together a lot of house project have guest flats or guest rooms and you can always ask whether you can live there for a while but I don't know any house project that has the designated hobby designated guest guest flat but there was one house it was a guest house is so to have one door have one big colleague the destination together is a problem of agreeing agreeing upon it this is also about the group in the end thanks for the interesting talk you said you also work together with cities with the politics what can city congresses actually do to improve the situation the most important thing is that the houses that are owned by the city or the houses that we can it is easier to get those houses and there is a concept that they're not sold for the highest possible price but for a reasonable price and to also establish syndicate projects there additionally on the provincial and the country wide level and there is also a lot of things to do and we are also there is also laws for example that interfere with with credit systems and with giving away the houses and we are also trying to be involved in that and change that thank you a company is a company I would want to know how do you do things with taxes who is there wanting money are there do you as a co-op discuss about how many people are working for you how do you discuss it what are your experiences about this topic short answer like income tax I'm not really a problem but we have made houses to take over sorry this was about legal talk we are sorry microphone number four okay you said the payment you are the houses are paying to the syndicate is raising is there like a limit and how do you do it there is no maximum but okay again we have some legal talk I'm sorry it's like it remains at one level at a certain point we have we have like a rent our houses have very different sizes so we have to really think about how can we compare the houses with each other how can we say how much rent which house has to pay we don't really have rules for this because it's a really complicated thing but we are discussing much about it this is much in movement also number two I haven't understood something right I think there are two parts one having 51% the other 49% and how can it be that the person with only 49% can put a veto that's another reason for the company with limited viability they are independent from the original capital that people get into it's very independent of that it's independent from the fractions of property ownership and it's only viable for certain things like selling the house and stuff fine so the last question will be from the internet is there networking with other groups is there a network working in plans to groups with other forms of actual courthouses about Berlin I cannot say that much but I think so there are 3000-4000 people who are in those projects and of course they are connected with each other and there are also different projects and groups that are members of the syndicate and that try to support it yes so yes and there are many many divers but it's very difficult to count them because there are so many and that's why we are here because we want to connect a bit more with the CCC so our time is over I don't know if you guys could post their question but you can go to the workshop if you still have a question in lecture room for everyone if you don't know where it is if you go to Adam's look to the exit it is on the left and the link above with Das ist unser Haus syndicate and you can visit our website please applause for our people