- 3 min read
- 27.01.2026
- by Benjamin Rogmans
How the housing shortage in Berlin has become a political end in itself
Why more regulation exacerbates the shortage and Berlin must find its way back to building.
Of all the elections scheduled to take place in German states in 2026, the Berlin House of Representatives election has the potential to particularly inflame passions around the issue of housing. As is so often the case, it's about rents, protection, and justice. And the familiar promise to protect the little guy from the forces of the market. Hardly any other issue is as well suited to election campaigns and polarization as the question of rent.
The price of political protectionism
No German city has embraced its role as a social refuge as deeply as Berlin. And hardly any other city has paid such a high price for it. Because driving away investors prevents construction. Preventing construction creates a shortage of supply. And creating a shortage of supply ultimately drives up the very thing you wanted to cap: rents.
Politicians are aware of this. There is no data gap, no ignorance of cause and effect. According to the Berlin-Brandenburg Statistics Office, around 30 percent fewer building permits were issued in 2024 than in 2022, and thus a good 60 percent fewer than in the years 2016 to 2018. In the first half of 2025, the number of completions is at its lowest level in a decade. Despite the recently decided construction boom, politicians continue to focus on regulation, restrictions, warnings, and polarization in other areas. Acceleration is announced, but narrowing is practiced. After almost two decades of this policy, the question is no longer whether it understands what it is doing, but why it is doing it.
The answer lies deeper, in the political DNA of the city. For decades, Berlin's left wing, whether red, green, or dark red, has thrived on the pose of protector—defined by conflict, not by its solution. A relaxed situation would devalue its strongest argument: the fear of rising rents and displacement. Anyone who pacifies the housing market takes away the fuel for their own narrative. In this sense, housing policy is entirely rational, just with a different set of goals. It stabilizes interpretive power, not the supply of housing. Niklas Luhmann would have called this “second-order rationality”: action that no longer aims at reality, but at preserving its own logic.
This creates a political economy of denial that disregards the interests of the urban population because it protects not the tenants but the narrative of scarcity. The greater the bottleneck, the stronger the moral legitimacy. And the less willingness there is to correct one's own logic.
Scarcity cannot be governed
It can take its revenge in the form of capital flight, social division, and possibly even the devaluation of a city that has long had the potential to become a modern metropolis. Berlin could have been building for a long time. Quickly, sustainably, in partnership. If the political will were there. At least one obstacle has now been removed. With the Bauturbo, there is now at least one instrument that could enable acceleration. Whether it works will be decided not by the decision, but by administrative practice.
The answer to the housing shortage lies not in discourse, but in the economic realities of construction. Returns are not a threat, but a prerequisite for renewal. Capital is not an enemy of the common good, but a tool for it, if used wisely. The Berlin election in September is therefore not a question of left, right, or center. It is a question of realism. Whether the city wants to remain in a symbolic economy of excitement or return to the reality of construction and investment. “Poor but sexy” was once an ironic self-description. Today, it sounds like a resigned diagnosis. Anyone who wants to change that should recognize that a future cannot be built on scarcity.
