In Hamburg, a turn to a more radical tenants protection policy? © Beck for THE TIME of contents page 1 — This is the hardness page 2 — The city is suddenly much stricter requirements On a page

read The embattled house is located in the middle of the party area, every weekend thousands of party-goers along to get to and from the hill to the neighborhood and Vice versa. 15 years ago, not a potential luxury property would have been under the address: Hein-Hoyer-Straße 18-22 conceivable. Today, Bars and Restaurants in Babyfon apply distance as a location advantage. St. Pauli is booming.

in the summer of last year, the tenants have noticed that the green were currently landed houses 32 apartments on the real estate market. A Letter put in the mailboxes, it came from a real estate company, announced that it had bought the Ensemble. “Since then, it has heard none of whom ever re-do something,” said a tenant.

For your 62-square-metre apartment, the woman paid around 600 euros cold rent. For comparison: On the Internet platform Immonet is currently being removed in the bleach road, not 300 metres as the crow flies, a 31-square-meter Apartment for the “first time use after refurbishment”. For 700 euros, so, 22,80 euros per square meter, more than twice as much as the tenants in the Hein-Hoyer-pay street. The landlord of the Swedish property giant Akelius, which has in Europe and the United States about 47,000 homes. In Hamburg, the company has purchased in the past ten years, about 4,200 Apartments. Also the buildings in the Hein-Hoyer-Straße were the views of the company. The business model: buy, modernize, and then so expensive to rent as the market will bear.

In the Hein-Hoyer-Straße, this strategy has failed for the first time, to the policy. Akelius wanted to acquire the Ensemble of the real estate company that had bought it only a year earlier. But it was nothing. Because of the location belongs to a “Social area of Conservation”, can exercise the city there is the so-called right of first refusal – they can snatch the buyer of the object in front of the nose. And this is what happened: On the recommendation of the competent district center, the financial authority has purchased the Ensemble, probably, it is passed on to the urban Saga.

The competent politicians are social Democrats, they all emphasize that the event signal should have effect. He’ll show, “how important to us the protection of Hamburg’s tenants prior to displacement”, says urban development, Senator Dorothee Stapelfeldt. Finance Minister Andreas Dressel stated that the right of first refusal was “an important part of our active land policy”. And district office Director Falko Droßmann announced that it will examine “every contract of sale within the meaning of the objectives of the Social preservation regulation quickly and professionally”.

This article dates back to the TIME no 48/2018. Here you can read the entire issue. Berlin has in the last three years, 800 apartments

This is amazing bought. So far, the exercise of pre-emption belonged to the right, not to the Arsenal of Hamburg’s politics. In Munich, it is for years a common practice to prevent sales to all-too-greedy investors. Berlin has acquired in the past three years, about 800 dwellings via a right of pre-emption, especially in the district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, where a green Baustadtrat by the name of Florian Schmidt is pursuing an ambitious goal: Within two decades, he wants to bring the half of all apartments owned by cooperatives and state-owned housing companies.

Quite different in Hamburg: a year Ago, BelTA learned from the city development authority, although they have threatened, in individual cases, with the right of first refusal, but so far, it had not been necessary to exercise it. In eleven residential areas, the city has adopted the so-called Social conservation regulations, the conversions of rental difficult in condominiums. From the point of view of the Senate, they offered yet sufficient protection from speculators. Unlike in Berlin, there’ll be in Hamburg rarely the case that the houses be bought in, and in condominium decomposed.

Actually took place since 2011 in the areas of Social preservation regulation in Hamburg only three conversions from rental into condominiums, for a total of in the inner city districts of 1860 conversions. For comparison: In Berlin between 2006 and 2015 were converted to almost 75,000 rental units in the property. The investors, the houses’re gonna buy? It was in Hamburg, it is not necessary, they thought, yet in the SPD-led Senate, only no unnecessary excitement.

deepening of the Elbe river – the daily Newsletter for Hamburg know Every day what is in Hamburg, important. Relevant and concise. Personally, and pointedly. The deepening of the Elbe is the new daily Newsletter, the TIME for Hamburg. Privacy statement

Now of Hamburg, the SPD-politician-suddenly sound like a squatter from the eighties. “We are in Hamburg do not want to have speculators,” said SPD parliamentary group leader Dirk Kienscherf in the television cameras, in the background the house in the Hein-Hoyer-Strasse. “We do not want foreign investors to modernise the houses and then expensive to sell, which would mean that tenants would be displaced.”

The district of Altona will now apply to five homes in the hill district the right of first refusal, the district of Eimsbüttel checks for multiple houses.