 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. On September 26th, elections took place to elect a federal government in Germany as well as in some states. But there was another vote which people across the continent and across the world in fact were looking forward to. This was on a referendum to expropriate houses from big private real estate companies in the capital city of Berlin. The expropriate Deutsche One and Co. campaign actually won this referendum, getting over 55% of the vote. And now there's a proposal to actually expropriate this which will have to be passed. And there's a lot of challenges said of course, but this victory has been hailed across the continent and the world as a major milestone in the struggle for equitable housing for all. Today we're joined by Anisha Petku who's been very closely associated with this referendum, who works with organizations as partners. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Happy to talk about the referendum anytime. So first of all, I just wanted to ask you about the situation in Berlin that led to the rise of some of these demands and could you take us through maybe the housing situation in the city over the past few decades? What was the context in which the movement for this referendum arose in the first place? I think there are a couple of important aspects that need to be understood. First of all is the fact that Berlin used to be a city with very affordable housing and it used to be a city with affordable housing in recent memories. So to say it's something that we could still say about the city 10-15 years ago and so people remember and it's a thing that was important for the city and that people loved and that made life affordable and much more enjoyable for that reason. Second of all is the fact that 85% of people in Berlin are actually renters. So this issue of rent prices and rent increases affects the vast majority of the population and so there were a lot of people that would have been concerned and the campaign spoke to a lot of the people living in the city. And it also for example used to be a city that had a lot of socialized housing but that started to change. In the last 10 years alone the rents have almost doubled in a certain part of the city but the wages have not been proportionately increased so that already started to create this discrepancy and we started seeing big players so to say coming into the market. Those socialized houses that I mentioned before starting to be bought off by private investors and so of course the amount of available living space and the cost of living space in Berlin started to increase and there's one for example outrageous incident that I can mention in 2006, Deutsche Wohnen, one of the big companies that we are trying to expropriate bought 60,000 apartments in Berlin for prices as low as 8,000 euros and then of course they used these properties to rent out for rents which were a lot less affordable than what people used to pay before. And so in the last 10 years to make it short the landscape changed from Berlin being a city that was affordable and that welcomed people to being a city that was privatized and that started having very high rents. A lot of people are affected and so there was a lot of anger about that and people eventually decided to to do something about it. Right absolutely so this brings us to the next question which is really about the organizing around the campaign itself but you also maybe take us a bit to the history of how this organizing began. What were the groups and coalitions for instance which joined together for this campaign? You yourself I believe work with an organization which works with migrants so how did these various sectors come together for this campaign? Yes it's important to keep in mind that there was a lot of organizing way before our campaign came along. I don't want it to sound in any way as if we're the first ones doing it. There were always tenants unions who were trying to fight for their rights and as these privatizations and these rent increases started to happen there was also a lot of grassroots activism that started to happen. I think it's also important to say that a lot of these movements have been driven actually by people with migration backgrounds for example. Those socialized housing that I mentioned before there was a big number of people living there who had migration background because as we know because of discrimination those are often the people that don't have such a good material situation and then they were affected by it and they decided to do something about it and to fight for their rights and to start fighting already years ago for the re-communalization of housing in Berlin and for example in 2011 the tenants in some of the buildings that had been sold finally came together in an organization which is called Cotty and Kohl which we still whom we still work with quite closely and there's a lot of exchange between us. Then in 2016 other tenants of other Deutsche Wohnen building started to organize themselves and to organize the people in other buildings so they started taking it to the other buildings and kind of spreading this and trying to provide support and knowledge so that the other people could do the same kind of organizing that they did. These are just two examples there's a lot there's a lot happening in the city and many of these groups came together or people from these groups came together they recognize the legal potential for this because the German constitution allows for this kind of an expropriation that's also important to say and through their efforts and through their vision in 2018 Deutsche Wohnen Entegnen so expropriated Deutsche Wohnen actually became an official fully fledged movement here in Berlin. That's a bit about the yeah about the history of organizing here. Right so now big question has been what happens next because even if you look at a lot of the media reporting around this campaign while they have cautioned you know they've been talking about their campaign everyone is happy to say that oh there are too many challenges oh the real estate lobby is not valid and of course we are the fact that Francis Kagefi who's the new mayor of Berlin herself has been reportedly known to state that she's not really in favor of the idea of expropriation as well because she doesn't want Berlin to be that kind of city so could you maybe take us through water say the procedural aspects that come next and you know how does the movement see this going forward. Yeah I'm not gonna lie it's difficult what's coming it was difficult organizing the referendum it was difficult winning we were very happy about it but the work is definitely not over you are right to say that Francis Kagefi the newly appointed mayor is not happy with this referendum and her party officially at least is not happy with this referendum we are not a political party we are a people's movement we did get support from some parties especially the left parties the different left parties that we have here and we have one party in the actual coalition the left party which is supporting us officially and we have a lot of members of the other parties so the the basis of those parties who think the referendum should be implemented but the social democrats are definitely against it officially and the greens say that they would only consider this as a last option they think there are other things that should be done before so we're definitely not facing sort of a happy groud that wants to that wants to support us. In terms of next steps what I can say is that we have to continue pushing we have to keep applying pressure on the politicians they're trying now to I think take the wind out of our sails so to say they're trying to say that now we need to have a commission that needs to check if this is possible and we need to talk and we need to plan and all these things are false really because we know that this is possible legally and economically otherwise this wouldn't have been allowed to become a referendum so it's not a question of if we can do this it should be a question of how are we going to do this and so we're trying to apply pressure they want to organize a commission for example that will discuss this we are not happy with this idea because it's not at all transparent who's going to be in that commission if you're going to have people who are in the housing market lobbyists on that commission trying to fight against us of course it's not going to be fair or transparent we've been invited to participate in this commission and we sort of said yes but only if you give us 59.1 percent representation because that's how we want the referendum and if it's all transparent and regular meetings and all of that which we'll see if that happens um and otherwise we're really trying to move it even more into the direction of grassroots we want to organize tenants to provide them with the tools to organize themselves to identify their needs and to empower them basically to um to get to become even stronger and to apply more pressure on on from this from this base level of of the population we're doing a lot of networking we're trying to also see what other topics we want to discuss and connect with and become allies with so that we support each other in this fight for an affordable city and for an affordable life there's a lot of planning to be done there's a lot of work still to be done but we're of course very motivated because we want this historic referendum and so we're gonna keep on going absolutely and finally quickly also just to see if there's also a nationwide movement that's building around some of these issues what have been the kind of links slash solidarity that has come from various other parts of Germany or for that matter even other parts of the continent and what are the kind of bonds you build um there's I know that there's another expropriation movement happening in Hamburg for example um so there's definitely other cities which are affected by the same kind of problem and they're trying to do something about it I don't know about anything at national level at the moment but you know maybe we set the precedent we've been getting a lot of international attention there's been people from basically all the big cities in the world wanting to talk to us inviting us over we did workshops we went to conferences we tried to share this knowledge that we have and to share this what we've learned and this power that we've achieved because of course we would like for this to happen in all the cities and we would like all the cities to be affordable and a good place to live in and then there's a lot of networking potential in terms of other struggles as I've already mentioned where for example a big topic for us is voting rights there have been a lot of people that have not been allowed to vote in this referendum even though they're very affected because Berlin has a great population of people with migration background and so that's unfair and we're trying to do something about it and we're trying to apply pressure and the campaign has done that as well and we're looking for ways to network and to continue this in the future um there's I myself am active in the campaign but mostly active in the group that of people with migration background I myself am such a person I came to Germany four years ago um and we also do a lot of intermediation you know between the Germans and us um we are trying to also where my group is also kind of trying to put together this network of people concerned with ecological movements and climate activism and to include this topic into the idea of affordable and sustainable housing so that in the future housing can be green and the city can be greener for for everyone uh we recently supported gorillas workers gorillas are um it's a delivery service here in Germany and they had very very bad uh working conditions and we supported their strike and we talked a lot about how of course fair wages and fair rent prices and fair housing are all part of the same big uh big topic about yeah affordable life um so we're recognizing the different the different kind of dimensions of the housing problem I've mentioned before this whole migration background discrimination issue how hard it is for a person that has a migration background the different sounding name or a different skin color or not perfect German how hard it is for those how much harder it is for those people to find a place here in Germany so we're trying to fight for that as well yeah it's a recognition a lot of a lot of topics that connect to housing and we're trying as much as possible to network and to develop the the law and the proposal that is going to come uh in a way that uh recognizes and addresses all of these different issues hi thank you so much Anisa for talking to us thank you as well we're looking forward to covering a struggle in the future as well that's all we have time for today keep watching People's Dispatch