 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 there, 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. 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? Sure. 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 memory, 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 started 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 do something about it. Right, absolutely. So this brings us to the next question, which is really about the organizing around the campaign itself. Could 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 a 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 Kotti & Kohl, 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 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 happening in the city and many of these groups came together or people from these groups came together. They recognized 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 history of organizing here. Right. So now a 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, 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 have the fact that Francesca Giffey, 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 what are, say, the procedural aspects that come next and how does the movement see this going forward? Yeah. I'm not going to 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 Francesca Giffey, 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, Die Linke, the left party, which is supporting us officially. And we have a lot of members of the other parties. So 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 a happy crowd 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. 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 become even stronger and to apply more pressure from this base level 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 going to 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 kinds of bonds you've built? I know that there's another expropriation movement happening in Hamburg, for example. 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 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 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. There's, I myself am active in the campaign, but mostly active in the group of people with migration background. I myself am such a person. I came to Germany four years ago and we also do a lot of intermediation between the Germans and us. 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 everyone. We recently supported Gorillaz workers. Gorillaz are it's a delivery service here in Germany and they had very, very bad 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 topic about affordable life. So we're recognizing 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 of a lot of topics that connect to housing and we're trying as much as possible to network and to develop the law and the proposal that is going to come in a way that recognizes and addresses all of these different issues. Thank you so much Anise for talking to us. Thank you as well. Thank you as well for covering a struggle in the future as well. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.