ONLY IMMIGRANTS STILL LIVE IN EUROPEAN PUBLIC HOUSING
Florian Urban
Few images are as persistent as that of the public housing estate as a tower block ghetto for marginalized and impoverished immigrants. The media has perpetuated the myth that only immigrants still live in European public housing. And yet nothing could be further from the truth in most European cities. In contrast to the United States, countries such as Germany, Austria, Sweden, and the Netherlands have been continuously investing in their public housing stock. At the same time, public housing in these countries is commonly accepted among the middle classes and by no means an exclusionary refuge for the neediest.
This is not to say that there are no challenges. The towers in Amsterdam’s Bijlmermeer, in Stockholm-Vällingby, or in Cologne-Chorweiler have a significant share of poor immigrants, and the marginalization of citizens with foreign ancestry is a serious problem in many European countries. If one looks at the whole of Europe, however, there seems to be little correlation between disadvantaged minorities and public housing. This is not only because the countries of the former Eastern bloc, which tend to have a large amount of state-built tower-and-slab designs, generally have a very low immigrant population. It is also that the traditional destinations of the postwar immigration wave—Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany—have relatively few public housing estates that show characteristics of ghettoization (and those that do have received disproportionate media attention).
This chapter will focus on Berlin, a city with a significant immigrant population and one that boasts some of Europe’s largest public housing estates. However, the largest concentration of first- and second-generation immigrants can be found in nineteenth-century tenements near the city center rather than in the public housing blocks on the periphery. The following chapter will show how this distribution resulted from particular sociocultural circumstances and how Berlin’s peripheral public housing estates, despite many challenges, did not become tools of spatial exclusion.
Berlin’s most famous public housing estates—Marzahn (Figure 7.1) and Märkisches Viertel (Figure 7.2)—are not ghettos in the sense of the now-demolished Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago or the Pruitt-Igoe development in St Louis. First, in both parts of Germany—to a greater extent in the East, but noticeable also in the West—state-subsidized and controlled housing became an accepted form of dwelling even among the middle classes. Second, the parameters of ethnically based exclusion—however painful for those who suffer from it—are different in Germany than in the United States.
Figure 7.1 Märkisches Viertel, West Berlin (built 1963–1975), section designed by Oswald Mathias Ungers. Photograph by author.
Figure 7.2 Märkisches Viertel, West Berlin (built 1963–1975), section designed by Shadrach Woods. Photograph by author.
This chapter will present the historic development of public housing in Germany and analyze how it intersected with patterns of ethnic division. It will then look at the different approaches that the German government has taken since the 1990s and compare these to housing policy initiatives in neighboring European countries.
The bulk of Berlin’s public housing estates were built between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s. Thus, they date from the era of Cold War division and include both those built under the socialist-planned economy in the East and by the capitalist welfare state in the West. While there are formal distinctions—among other things East German tower block estates tend to be larger and more standardized—the differences are not obvious to the layperson and became blurred in the course of two decades of renovation and structural modification. In any case, Berlin is a unique example of how, under similar sociocultural conditions, two different regimes generated formally similar buildings that nonetheless had a very different significance in their respective contexts.
Public housing in Germany, as in most European countries, consists of policy and architecture. Both are often collapsed in popular imagination, but not necessarily connected. At the policy level, the instruments varied at different points in time, and both the West German gemeinnütziger Wohnungsbau (nonprofit housing) and the East German state-operated housing differed in many ways from, for instance, the French habitations à loyer modéré (moderate-rent dwellings) or the British council housing. Public housing, in the context of this chapter, is therefore defined very generally as affordable rental housing that is subsidized and maintained by public or publicly regulated institutions, which retain the right of tenant allocation and guarantee a certain degree of protection against eviction.1 At the architectural level, public housing is mostly connected with the Großsiedlungen (“large estates” of mostly tower blocks), which cropped up on the peripheries of German cities beginning in the 1960s and were built according to the principles of Le Corbusier’s urbanism. They represent only one particular type that stands next to the smaller low-rises of the 1950s or the postmodern perimeter blocks of the 1980s. But the tower block estates are by far the most conspicuous physical presence, the housing type that is most debated in the media and, at least with regard to East Germany, also the most widespread form. Hence, these will receive the most attention in this chapter.
An Accepted Form of Dwelling
Berlin’s public housing estates, like those all over Europe, are the product of a great hope. Along with rapid modernization in the mid-twentieth century, there was a widespread conviction that the dreadful housing conditions of the early industrial era could be overcome, and the divide between the life standards of the rich and the poor narrowed. A strong state was believed to be capable of carrying out this epochal task: providing modern amenities for everybody and ending substandard living and overcrowding.
These ideas spawned the much-celebrated Siedlungen (housing estates) of the 1920s, with their innovative design and technology. In Berlin, for example, these include the Hufeisen-Siedlung (Horseshoe Development, designed by Martin Wagner and Bruno Taut, 1925–1931), the Siedlung Schillerpark (designed by Bruno Taut, 1924–1930) and the Weiße Stadt (White City, designed by Martin Wagner and Otto Salvisberg, 1929–1931), which in 2009 were declared UNESCO world heritage sites. They were too few to have a wider impact on society at the time, but they clearly set the stage for a new type of architecture that a few decades later was constructed at a broader scale. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the West German economy grew at breathtaking rates, large amounts of state-subsidized apartments first went up in the West. East Germany did some planning at the same time, though construction on the largest estates did not begin until the 1970s. By that time, public housing had become an integral part of many Germans’ daily life.
The ideological conditions of modernization and increasing state intervention were similar to circumstances in the United States, but they developed against a different cultural background. In Europe, state authorities were traditionally perceived as benevolent. Even die-hard market liberals acknowledged the necessity for state regulation in matters of basic life. Voices in favor of a lean state were virtually nonexistent until late in the century.
Germany’s interventionist housing policy was forged under a particular set of conditions. At the end of the Second World War, most large cities were heavily damaged or destroyed, and approximately twelve million ethnic German refugees had fled from the territories that Germany had to cede to Poland and the Soviet Union, as well as from countries such as Czechoslovakia and Hungary. More than eight million ended up in West Germany, where they were soon joined by another wave of refugees from East Germany. Millions had to live in camps or emergency shelters throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In this context, all social groups perceived the housing shortage as one of the region’s most pressing problems. In the bombed cities, both rich and poor suffered from dire conditions; a refugee’s fate was not class-specific. The Pomeranian and East Prussian aristocracy had lost their homes in the same way as the Silesian coal miners. Members of both the conservative Christian Democratic Party and the leftist Social Democratic Party, therefore, supported the attempts to regulate the market and pour state funds into housing.
Their efforts were eased by the fact that in the whole of Germany a free housing market had been nonexistent for decades. Already during the economically unstable Weimar Republic, state authorities had imposed numerous restrictions in favor of tenants. The Nazi regime in 1933 had reinforced these regulations, effectively replacing the free rental market with a system of apartment distribution through municipal authorities.2 Also in the early postwar years, a free housing market was absent in both the socialist East and the capitalist West. Only as of 1951, when West Germany passed its Wohnraumbewirtschaftungsgesetz (Law on the Management of Dwelling Space), did houses and apartments cease to be distributed exclusively by state authorities, although numerous regulations remained in place. In East Germany, a parallel openness in markets did not occur until after the German reunification in 1990.
The greater acceptance of state intervention was also related to the fact that Germany had developed a particular form of tenant culture. Unlike England, the Netherlands, or the United States, Germany has had a centuries-old tradition of apartment living. In dense metropolises such as Hamburg or Berlin, even the upper-middle classes lived in flats within multistory structures. There was, therefore, no cultural bias against sharing an entrance with strangers.
Tenancy was also favored by the simple fact that between 1900 and 1951, German legislation outlawed ownership of individual apartments.3 In an era when homeownership spread rapidly in Anglo-Saxon countries, German city-dwellers could rarely own their living space. With the exception of the very wealthy, who possessed entire buildings, urbanites tended to be tenants. Even today, 85 percent of Berliners rent their apartments—in London the rate is less than 50 percent.4 In the whole of Germany, the homeownership rate of only 45 percent of all households is one of the lowest in Europe, compared to approximately 70 percent in the United Kingdom.5 The fact that influential middle-class groups were tenants not only advanced a staunch acceptance of tenancy as a way of life but also helped promote particularly tenant-friendly legislation, which has determined the course of German housing to date. Tenants frequently stay for decades in the same apartment, and unless the owner of a building wants to move in, it is next to impossible to end a contract against the tenant’s will.
Public Housing in East and West Germany
During the four decades of the German Democratic Republic (GDR; 1949–1990), almost any dwelling could be considered public housing; with the exception of owner-occupied single-family homes, all buildings were administered, maintained, and rented out by state institutions. In the West and later in reunified Germany, public housing was a temporary status granted to particular dwelling units that had been erected with public subsidies. This status expired after a certain time period—usually twenty to forty years until the subsidies were amortized—and the units could then be rented or sold on the free market. This temporariness distinguishes German public housing from that in other European countries such as Sweden or Austria, where it is permanent. The arrangement in Germany has also led to a substantial diminution of public housing units in past decades, as most support programs have been discontinued. However, given Germany’s tenant-friendly legislation, many units for which the official status has expired have retained some of the characteristics of public housing: they are affordable and tenants are protected against eviction.
When West German Conservatives and Social Democrats forged a coalition in the 1950s to funnel state funds into the production of housing, they claimed that their efforts would benefit the entire population. In practice, however, public housing was first directed to the middle classes who could afford rents that were higher than in older buildings.6 In the early years, approximately 70 percent of the population was considered eligible for public housing. This reflected the desolate state of the war-ravaged country, but at the same time, it signaled a situation in which receipt of state benefits was no embarrassment for anyone. Although the economic situation improved over the course of the 1950s, the institutional culture of public housing had been firmly established and would remain in place for decades to come.7
West Germany’s big housing drive was carried out in the 1950s and 1960s under various conservative national governments, but it was supported by the Social Democratic Party. During that time, 3.9 million public housing flats were built in a country of approximately fifty-five million inhabitants.8
In the early postwar years, flats were predominantly built in the inner city, often in areas that had been bombed. They formed comparably small developments of unadorned three-to-four-story blocks, assembled in continuous rows, with loosely scattered green spaces in between. Examples include the Ernst-Reuter-Siedlung in West Berlin’s Wedding district (420 apartments designed by Felix Hinssen, 1953–1955) or the Heinrich-Heine-Viertel in East Berlin’s Mitte district (four thousand apartments designed by Werner Dutschke, Josef Kaiser, and others, 1958–1961).
Since the 1960s, the new paradigm Urbanität durch Dichte (“urbanity through density”) spawned the Großsiedlungen.9 They were public housing estates composed of six- to twenty-story high-rises, situated on the urban periphery, and organized by the principles of the Athens Charter (functional separation, separation of traffic flows, and predominance of light and air). Such large tower block developments were erected all over West Germany and included Neue Vahr in Bremen (1957–1962, designed by Ernst May for twenty-five thousand inhabitants); the Cologne-Chorweiler (begun in 1957, designed by Gottfried Böhm and others for twenty thousand inhabitants); Hamburg-Steilshoop (begun in 1960, for nineteen thousand inhabitants); Hamburg-Mümmelmannsberg (1970–1980, for nineteen thousand inhabitants); Frankfurt-Nordweststadt (1963–1968, designed by Walter Schwagenscheidt and Tassilo Sittmann for twenty-five thousand inhabitants); Frankfurt-Limesstadt (1962–1973, designed by Hans Bernhard Reichow for ten thousand inhabitants); and Munich-Neuperlach (1963–1978, designed by Bernt Lauter and others for fifty thousand inhabitants). All large estates were fitted out with ample car infrastructure, but were reasonably well connected to the city center through public transit.
East Germany carried out a comprehensive restructuring of its construction industry from 1955 onward. From that time, buildings were predominantly erected from prefabricated concrete slabs. To date, these buildings are referred to as Plattenbau (slab building) or simply die Platte (the slab). At the same time, the first large estates were planned. The new town of Hoyerswerda was begun in 1957 to house the workers of a newly founded chemical plant; eventually, apartments for fifty thousand people were built. Construction on Halle-Neustadt, the largest slab estate in East Germany, was planned for one hundred thousand inhabitants in the 1950s and begun in 1964.
The bulk of East Germany’s housing estates nevertheless did not go up until at least a decade later. Walter Ulbricht, East Germany’s head of government from 1949 to 1971, had limited economic resources and preferred to concentrate architectural investment in the city center. His successor, Erich Honecker, by contrast, strongly promoted housing. Under his auspices, Honecker’s East German parliament passed the Wohnungsbauprogramm (Housing Program) in 1973. It promised the construction of approximately three million new dwelling units for a country of just seventeen million inhabitants. In the remaining years of the GDR, the government built approximately two million of these, most of them on large estates using prefab technology.10 The program had a massive and lasting impact.
THE STRUGGLE OVER WEST BERLIN’S TOWER BLOCKS
In West Berlin, the housing policy of “urbanity through density” yielded three great settlements: Falkenhagener Feld on the northwestern periphery (1962–1975, planned by Hans Stefan for ten thousand inhabitants); Gropiusstadt in the south (1962–1975, originally planned by Walter Gropius, modified by Wils Ebert, for fifty thousand inhabitants); and the Märkisches Viertel (Figure 7.3) in the north (1963–1975, planned by Hans Müller and Georg Heinrichs for thirty thousand inhabitants).
Figure 7.3 Slab buildings in East Berlin’s Marzahn district (built 1980s). Originally, the buildings displayed an unadorned concrete façade. The bright white panels and the blue and yellow ornaments were added when the buildings were renovated in the 1990s. Photograph by author.
Of these three, the Märkisches Viertel received most attention. During the 1966 building fair Berliner Bauwochen, forty thousand Berliners admired pictures of shiny towers, while the press enthusiastically celebrated what they called an innovative approach to end the shortcomings of the past.11 Public opinion nevertheless swung against it only two years later, when in the wake of the 1968 student protests a rebellious young generation questioned the principles of expert planning and top-down decision making. Labels such as “inhuman ghettos” referred to infrastructural shortcomings as well as the disruption of old neighborhood structures through large-scale tenement demolitions.12
The initial outcry was just as harsh as in the United States, Britain, and France.13 Subsequent investment, however, mitigated the protests. Over the following decades, the municipally owned housing companies improved insulation and finishing and the local government invested in public services. The city completed the promised infrastructure—parks, shops, schools, and nurseries—and public transit connections improved. By the 1980s, the storm had waned, and the estates received considerably better press.14 The tenants as well as the general public pragmatically accepted the tower blocks as an unspectacular but at the same time comparably cheap form of dwelling.
SLABS IN EAST BERLIN
East Berlin’s most famous public housing estates were built on the eastern fringe of the city. In 1990, they housed approximately 350,000 of the half-city’s 1.1 million inhabitants. The first, Marzahn, was started in 1978 in an area formerly covered with fields and garden plots; the land was declared East Berlin’s ninth city district in 1979. Two new districts followed: Hellersdorf in 1981 and Hohenschönhausen in 1983. Prefab blocks were continuously built until the German reunification in 1990.
Like those in the West, the first residents of East Berlin’s tower blocks received them with enthusiasm, since many had vivid and unpleasant recollections of life in overcrowded tenements. At the time, a prefab block was the only type of housing that offered central heating, warm running water, and elevators. These amenities did not become generally available until the early 1970s, when the first tenement renovations reconciled the former opposition between old buildings and modern living. Despite the generally positive response, criticism of monotonous design and unimaginative planning began to be voiced at an early stage and increased over the years. But the majority of the new residents were only too willing to put up with such deficiencies in return for a self-contained flat where they did not have to carry coals and heat their bathwater over the kitchen stove.
Social inequality was comparably low in the German Democratic Republic. The apartment distribution policy reinforced a social mixture where medical doctors and factory workers shared the same buildings. Those with party connections or influential friends sometimes secured preferential locations or slightly bigger flats than the average, but, with the exception of a handful of top leaders, all East Germans shared rather similar living conditions. Against this background, die Platte was widely accepted as a home for the ordinary citizen.15
ETHNIC BERLIN
The postwar boom, which afforded Germans a higher degree of housing equality than ever before, nonetheless generated a new set of disparities. Since World War II, the country had been, for the most part, ethnically homogeneous; it soon became a destination for immigrants.
Like other European countries, West Germany experienced a large influx of foreign nationals in the 1960s. Between 1955, when the first bilateral agreement was passed, and 1973, when official recruitment was stopped, the West German government actively attracted labor from Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Morocco, Portugal, Tunisia, and Yugoslavia. During that time, approximately 2.9 million foreigners entered West Germany, mostly to work in factories or at menial jobs. They were referred to as Gastarbeiter (“guest workers”), which emphasized that not only the majority population but also many of the workers themselves considered their tenure in Germany as temporary. This changed in the 1970s, after many had established themselves and migrants were increasingly understood as permanent residents.
West Berlin became home to 120,000 Turkish nationals, most of whom originated from the underdeveloped areas of Anatolia. Germany’s island city counted approximately 12 percent non-Germans in the 1980s, one of the largest foreign communities in the country.16 The provisional status of the “guest workers” and their weak economic situation, as well as racism and xenophobia, often confined them to the least-desired residential areas, which at the time were the tenement neighborhoods in the inner city. These included the districts of Neukölln, Wedding, Tiergarten, Schöneberg, and above all Kreuzberg, whose eastern half near the subway stations Kottbusser Tor and Schlesisches Tor came to be known as “Little Istanbul.” Many of these areas had been slated for demolition as part of the city’s 1963 First Urban Renewal Program. The temporary presence of guest workers in the crumbling tenements fit the official plans, which assigned these buildings a life span of only a few years. But just like the “guests,” the buildings also lingered and became an integral part of a reconfigured urban geography. For the most part, these are not considered public housing units, although rents have been comparably cheap and tenancy is protected under the general German rent laws.
The situation in the German Democratic Republic was quite different. The insular socialist regime barely tolerated migration. By 1990, East Germany had a non-German population of only about one percent, compared to more than 8.4 percent in the West.17 Apart from a few students, most foreign residents in the East were so-called Vertragsarbeiter (“contract workers”). They were sent by communist countries such as Vietnam, Ethiopia, or Angola, officially to support international exchange but unofficially to fill unattractive manual jobs. Reflecting the regime’s implicitly racist structures, these migrants were separated from their German colleagues and confined to strictly controlled group homes, though not to particular areas. Given their small number, they had little influence on East German society as a whole. At the time of the German reunification in 1990, approximately ninety-one thousand contract workers lived in East Germany; ten years later, only thirteen thousand remained, most of them Vietnamese.18 There were never any immigrant neighborhoods in East Germany, and the housing estates on the periphery as well as the tenements in the inner city remained almost entirely “German.”
In West Germany, on the other hand, immigrants exercised substantial influence. As in many European countries, city planners and politicians largely ignored them during the 1960s and early 1970s. This changed in the mid-1970s, however, once the slackening economy affected both Germans and foreigners, as German-born children of “guest workers” challenged traditional conceptions of an ethnically based German identity. West Berlin, the country’s most liberal and most experimental city, soon embraced an image of a multicultural metropolis. Kreuzberg, which boasted Germany’s largest concentration of kebab stands, became an attraction for both Berliners and tourists. In a society where many could afford regular holiday trips to southern Europe for the first time, Berliners began to cherish Mediterranean cuisine and global music, and West Berlin’s tourist brochures featured Turkish culture prominently. The moniker “Little Istanbul”—applied to an area in which Turks made up less than 27 percent of the population—reflects the ambivalence of a country that had not yet come to terms with its new ethnic diversity. Everywhere the new lure of the exotic remained uncomfortably mixed, with resentment against the unknown “other.”19
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Berlin’s ethnic geography has become more diverse. Turkish nationals are still the largest group among the 14 percent of Berliners who have a non-German passport.20 They are followed by Poles, Russians, Italians, Greeks, and several others. In addition, there is a large community of nationalized citizens, as well as several thousand Aussiedler, ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe (mostly Russia). Both groups hold German passports but are often perceived as foreigners by their German neighbors. Kreuzberg and the adjacent Neukölln district have become hip neighborhoods with fashionable clubs and bars. The rent level is now higher than in the traditional bourgeois districts of Charlottenburg or Wilmersdorf, which puts additional pressure on the poorer immigrants.21 Protection of existing contracts, however, has so far prevented a comprehensive redistribution of the population.
Public Housing in the Neoliberal Era
Since the 1980s, Germany has followed a contradictory policy with regard to public housing. At a time when countries all over the world have cut back state-provided services, Germany has also been steadily reducing its housing programs. In 1988, the West German government abolished the eighty-year-old legal privileges for gemeinnützigen Wohnungsbau (nonprofit housing).22 Shortly thereafter, the German Democratic Republic collapsed and East Germany’s state-owned homes were transferred to newly created companies, which were mostly owned by towns and cities but privately managed as limited liability corporations. At the same time, however, the state continued to pour generous subsidies into the housing stock. Municipal companies, not only in the East, received ample funds to renovate buildings that frequently had started to crumble less than two decades after their completion. During the 1990s, nearly all Großsiedlungen in Berlin were renovated. Those in the East received additional insulation, updated plumbing, and often added balconies. Bleak spaces between the buildings were refurbished and in some cases built up with shops and service buildings. Since that time, East German slabs have boasted bright colors with geometrical ornaments in a retro-1970s style. In 2007, the federal government transferred responsibility for housing partially to the Länder (regions), which are compensated for this task with ample subsidies (€600 million per year in 2011).23
At the same time, Germany’s municipally owned flats began to fall victim to a political move that was originally unrelated to housing. German towns and cities, which were suffering from high debt burdens, discovered that sales of apartments could be used as a quick fix to relieve their financial misery. Between 2000 and 2006, Berlin sold one hundred thousand dwelling units to international private investors, thus deliberately divesting itself of a powerful tool to influence the local housing market.24 A system working with long-term success was thus sacrificed for short-term profit.
The privatization policy introduced a sharp increase in rent levels, as the new owners tended to exploit all options for profit offered by the law. It also resulted in a further polarization between attractive flats, which received the bulk of investment by their new owners, and less attractive ones, which were deliberately neglected.25
To some extent, the privatization resonated with policies in other countries.26 But in contrast, for example, to Britain, the parameters were reversed. Slightly simplified, one can say that, in Britain, state-owned flats were sold because the owning institutions maintained them poorly and hopes were that private owners would do better. In Germany, on the other hand, maintenance by state institutions was largely acceptable, but buildings were privatized for political reasons, after which maintenance deteriorated in the cheaper apartments.
Other foundations of the German welfare state have not yet been abolished. State authorities continue to assume a general responsibility for the housing situation, regulate the rental market on a variety of levels, and cater to the most vulnerable through welfare and housing allowances. The increase in rent levels as well as the widening gap between rich and poor nevertheless shows a gradual erosion of societal cohesion and a waning support for social justice. It seems that the goal of greater equity has lost its lure precisely for those middle-class groups who owe their current high living standards to the social policies of the past.
Berlin’s Großsiedlungen, however, have largely been spared the effects of privatization. Presumably, investors seeking a quick profit from resale found Marzahn or the Märkisches Viertel less attractive. Many buildings there remain owned by municipal companies, and rents have stayed comparably low.27 For a small two-bedroom flat of 65 square meters in a renovated Marzahn slab, a tenant has to pay about €400; in a similar tower block flat in the Märkisches Viertel, the rent would be about €500 (2011 figures).28 These numbers have to be judged against the local minimum wage in the construction industry (€11.05 per hour for an unskilled worker in 2012, or about €1,800 per month before taxes).29 While some who could afford it have left for inner-city flats or single-family homes in the suburbs, most long-term residents remained.
Integrated Tower Blocks
Berlin’s tower block estates are modest neighborhoods, but generally well-integrated socioeconomically and not significantly worse off than the rest of the city. At the peak of the economic crisis in the early 2000s, only 14.5 percent of the Märkisches Viertel inhabitants were on social welfare, well higher than the Berlin average of 8.1 percent but not overwhelmingly different,30 and the unemployment rate was at 17 percent, compared to the Berlin average of 13 percent.31 Immigrant presence never became as strong as in the tenement neighborhoods in the inner city. In 2006, only 9.3 percent of the residents in the Märkisches Viertel held a non-German passport (2.5 percent Turks), well below the Berlin average of 13.8 percent (3.6 percent Turks), and markedly different from the ratio of 39.5 percent in Kreuzberg’s “Little Istanbul” (26.5 percent Turks).32
The low share of foreigners in the Märkisches Viertel is reflected in other West Berlin tower block districts such as Gropiusstadt (14.3 percent foreigners, including 5.5 percent Turks).33 There is no sign of the development of ethnic enclaves.
East Berlin’s housing estates are similarly well integrated but have changed significantly since the end of the socialist regime. The slabs in Marzahn, Hellersdorf, or Hohenschönhausen were once loved for providing modern amenities; now they have turned from a comparably privileged to a comparably underprivileged environment, given the general rise in living standards. The days of the proverbial mixture of university-educated workers and unskilled laborers are gone. Those who have stayed are mostly elderly, and those who move in increasingly belong to the lower classes. The areas are nevertheless not exclusively inhabited by the marginalized. In 2004, the unemployment rate reached 18.5 percent in Marzahn, 16.5 percent in Hellersdorf, and 15.2 percent in Hohenschönhausen—certainly very high, but not so far above the Berlin average of 13 percent.34 Most inhabitants, both employed and unemployed, are Germans: the rate of foreigners was only 3.4 percent.35
The massive investment by the Berlin government in renovating these buildings enabled them to remain socioeconomically integrated. With their low ceilings and small flats, they could not compete with stately tenement flats or single-family homes, but the technical improvements prevented many long-term residents from leaving. The typical inhabitant of East Berlin’s tower block is now elderly and not wealthy, and the large majority are of (East) German rather than immigrant origin.
It has to be stressed, though, that the absence of ethnic enclaves has not necessarily led to more equal opportunities for second- and third-generation immigrants. Unemployment rates are still disproportionally high.36 The number of politicians, business leaders, or cultural celebrities of Turkish or Middle Eastern origin remains tiny. Many of the liberal hipsters who appreciate Kreuzberg’s multicultural shops and eateries at the same time fear the bogeyman of Muslim fundamentalism and take extreme measures to keep their children from entering public schools dominated by immigrants. Meanwhile, politicians frequently conjure the necessity of cultural integration and the promotion of “Western values.” At the same time, Berliners only loosely connect these discussions to the debates over public housing, which by and large is conceived as a social rather than an ethnic challenge.
The position of first-, second-, or third-generation immigrants in European societies is thus very different from that of ethnic minorities in the United States. Like Latinos or African Americans, European immigrants also suffer from racism and prejudices, carry layered identities, and hover between conflicting impulses of integration and retreat to their own groups. In many respects, they face more obstacles to social advancement than American minorities, since European societies are more homogeneous, and widespread ideas about an ethnically based national identity still account for numerous glass ceilings. In terms of housing, however, their situation is likely to be more influenced by their financial means than by their ethnicity.
Public Housing in other European Countries
Berlin’s public housing policies are to some extent reflected in other European countries. Everywhere state involvement has been receding, and at the same time hardly anywhere has the state completely renounced regulation of the housing market. Individual countries have nevertheless adopted very different approaches. With regard to the aforementioned definition of public housing (affordability, right of tenant allocation by public institutions, link with public policy, and security of tenure), the percentage of public housing units in relation to the whole housing stock therefore ranges from 1 to 30 percent (Figure 7.4).
Perhaps most striking, Eastern European countries have been the ones that most thoroughly embraced neoliberalism. In the former Eastern bloc—where state accountability for housing had been all-encompassing under socialism and two generations had grown up sheltered from high rents, insecurity, and homelessness—post-socialist regimes were rapidly abandoned, exposing many residents to predatory capitalism. In the 1990s, when millions were offered the opportunity to buy their apartments at very low cost, the older generation could still profit from early forms of privatization. The younger generation, however, had to rely on the uncertainties of a barely regulated market.
Figure 7.4 Percentage of public housing units compared to the total housing stock in different European countries, and correlation with severe housing deprivation. The numbers are comparable only to a certain extent, since the specificities of public housing are different in each country. For the purpose of this chart, public housing is defined as affordable rental housing that is subsidized and maintained by public or publicly regulated institutions, which retain the right of tenant allocation and guarantee a certain degree of protection against eviction. “Severe housing deprivation” refers to indicators such as overcrowding, lack of sanitary facilities, or structural deficiencies. Chart by author; definition and data from Alice Pittini and Elsa Laino, Housing Europe Review 2012, Brussels: CECODHAS Housing Europe, 2011, pp. 19 and 23.
The percentage of public housing is therefore very low in Eastern Europe. It ranges from less than one percent in Estonia and Latvia to about 3 percent in Lithuania, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria to about 10 percent in Poland. A notable exception is the Czech Republic, which deliberately chose not to privatize its large housing estates.37
The correlation between a low percentage of public housing and a high percentage of severe housing deprivation is obvious. In Western European countries, less than 3 percent are considered to suffer from substandard housing conditions such as overcrowding or leaking roofs, whereas the highest rates can be found in Eastern Europe (Romania at 29 percent, Latvia at 23 percent, and Bulgaria at 19 percent).38 The de facto abolition of public housing in the former Eastern bloc about two decades ago is likely to have contributed to this housing distress. Many tenants-turned-owners are hard-pressed to maintain their buildings, and many young people cannot afford to move out of their parents’ homes.
This contrasts with higher rates of public housing in Western Europe—32 percent in the Netherlands, 23 percent in Austria, 16 to 18 percent in Britain, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, and 5 percent in Germany.39 Austria has successfully resisted the privatization fashion and continuously invested in its public housing stock.40 Vienna is famous for its innovative public housing estates built in the 1920s under the “Red Vienna” government. Unlike Berlin, where the Horseshoe or Schillerpark developments from the same era have been largely privatized in recent years, the Austrian capital still operates architectural icons such as the Karl-Marx-Hof (designed by Karl Ehn, 1930) (Figure 7.5) or George-Washington-Hof (designed by Karl Krist and Robert Oerley, 1927) under the aegis of the municipal company Wiener Wohnen. The approximately 220,000 residential units in Vienna’s Gemeindebauten (council buildings) house about half a million people, more than one-fourth of the population.41 They are highly desired dwellings, with no hints of ghettoization.
The Netherlands, where public housing comprises 32 percent of the total building stock and 75 percent of all rental units, is another country where regulated rental units continue to be the backbone of a successful national housing policy.42 Dutch public housing is largely provided by private, nonprofit organizations. The restructuring of housing policies since the beginning of the neoliberal era was limited to the 1994 bruteringsoperatie (“balancing-out”), in which direct subsidies were abolished and the housing companies received greater financial freedom from the national government. The rents nonetheless remained regulated, and the national government continued to supervise housing companies and provide access to guaranteed capital market loans.43 In contrast to Germany, where the construction of new public housing had largely stopped by the turn of the twenty-first century, Dutch housing associations continue to produce new units—about seventy-two thousand in 2005 alone.44 In light of a system that effectively serves the majority of Dutch renters, the spectacular case of southeast Amsterdam’s poverty-ridden Bijlmermeer public housing project (begun in 1966 and partially demolished in the 2000s) ought to be viewed as a clear anomaly.
Figure 7.5 Karl-Marx-Hof (design: Karl Ehn, 1930), one of Vienna’s most famous Gemeindebauten (council buildings). More than one-fourth of the Austrian capital’s 1.7 million inhabitants live in public housing. Photograph by author.
Architecture, Policy, and Social Cohesion
In the European context, the equation of public housing with crumbling tower blocks where disadvantaged groups eke out a miserable living is profoundly flawed. This is not to say that European cities are all well integrated. But the spatial geographies are very different than in the United States.
Three fundamental aspects of public housing are uncontested in most European countries, at least until very recently. First, there is no stigma attached to being a tenant or living in a multistory building. This applies particularly to Germany, where cities are traditionally built up densely with apartment buildings, and where postwar suburbanization and the rise of the motorcar never managed to obliterate the predominance of the city center. Early-twentieth-century legislation made Germany a society of tenants, a condition that is supported by the middle classes and guarded by a high degree of rent protection. Other European countries have higher homeownership rates, but tenancy still tends to be an accepted way of life.
Second, state intervention on the housing market, always a main bone of contention in the American debate, is to a large extent accepted in most European countries. A long tradition of uncontested state powers made municipal authorities the obvious actors to tackle the exacerbating housing situation in the early twentieth century. Despite the fact that the German Empire as well as the Federal Republic of Germany were capitalist countries, there was no free rental market throughout much of the twentieth century. Large portions of both the working and middle classes lived comfortably in apartments that were controlled by, and increasingly also built and administered by, municipal authorities. Being the rule rather than the exception, no German schoolchild at the time would have been bullied by his or her classmates for living “in the projects.”
And third, urban changes are slow because of rent protection and a cultural bias against frequent moves. This has so far prevented the growth of ethnic neighborhoods in the American sense, places where an overwhelming majority belongs to the same group. Even Berlin’s “Little Istanbul” in the Kreuzberg district, which is widely portrayed as an ethnic enclave, is less than one-third Turkish. In this context, one can hardly speak of ghettoization on the basis of architecture or housing policy.
Notwithstanding the serious challenges facing many German estates, public housing as an institution has been highly successful in Germany in achieving its original goals. Since the 1970s, overcrowding and deep housing deprivation have largely disappeared, and the overwhelming majority enjoys acceptable living conditions and modern amenities. Demographic stability and an unprecedented level of wealth provided a strong foundation, but success has mainly been a consequence of national policy.
At the same time, public housing to some extent has fallen victim to its own success. The significant improvement in dwelling conditions for the majority has led to diminished political support; those who had improved their situation no longer regarded housing as an extremely pressing problem. The fact that from 2000 onward many German municipalities shortsightedly traded long-term influence for short-lived financial relief may well constitute the most consequential side effect of these shifted priorities.
The comparison of Germany with other European countries nonetheless shows that there is ample scope for local policy, and that demands for greater flexibility can be met by many possible responses that do not entail a surrender to the free market. Most important, however, the European cases demonstrate that public housing need not enhance marginalization and deprivation but, on the contrary, can be a successful response to the challenges of social instability and polarization.