Berlin's New Plattenbauen

Filling in Berlin's blanks with new buildings.

While reading Farnam Street's newsletter, I came across this interesting long read, The Housing Theory of Everything.  

The TL;DR version is that overpriced housing leads to all sorts of problems — inequality, lower economic productivity, climate change, and lower birth rates. You get overpriced housing when demand exceeds supply. 

Like any theory for everything, some of its arguments are flimsy. But there are some takeaways that make sense, like building higher-density communities to increase housing supply in a smaller area.

Berlin is struggling with a housing shortage. Everyone has a story about how hard it was to find an apartment. Prices are also rising. And there's a fear that locals will be priced out of their own communities and the character that draws so many people to the city will be gentrified beyond recognition. 

Berlin has been fighting it in different ways. When we moved to Berlin last year, there was a rent cap in place. It was thrown out of the constitutional court. In the recent election, a referendum passed that allows the city to appropriate property from the large companies that domain Berlin's real estate market.

Measures like that, which run against free market orthodoxy attract a lot of love, hate, and headlines. But, there's something else grinding on, away from the headlines. 

Berlin is pocked with all sorts of bits of unused land. There are swaths of land running along the city's commuter railways. Strips of what was once the kill zone on the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall. Empty lots that were levelled in the war, and left empty for decades.

These are all spaces where new modern, residential high-rises are rising, or Neubauen. Berlin is gradually adding high-density residential housing to meet the growing demand, filling in the blanks on the city map. There's just one hiccup.

Berlin's architecture was dominated by big, stone apartment blocks built in the late 1800s (and rebuilt in the 40s and 50s) seem like they were built to last centuries. The housing built after the war feel eternal, but feel like they have some durable staying power.

Some of the new builds are nice to look at. But, having looked a few of them while we were apartment hunting, many feel like they might fall apart soon after you've moved in. They're built quickly and cheaply to maximise profit for the developers. The density pushed by that long-read doesn't necessarily mean quality.

In some ways, they're no different than the Plattenbauen, those old prefabricated East Bloc residential buildings that make seems to make so many eyes sore. The purpose was the same: create supply to meet the demand for housing. The difference is that some one is walking away with a fat profit.