In the summer of this year, the Berlin SPD (Social Democratic Party) published a draft law intended to define the framework for socialisation (Vergesellschaftung) in key areas of public services such as water, energy, and housing provision. It is not a law that implements the socialisation of housing, it merely provides a general interpretation of the process of socialisation in key aspects. This so-called framework law was agreed upon by the governing coalition parties, the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and SPD, in their 2023 coalition agreement. The agreement must be understood in the broader context of how — or more accurately, how not — the successful referendum on housing socialisation has been addressed. On 26 September 2021, 59.1% of eligible voters in Berlin supported the socialisation of housing owned by real estate corporations holding more than 3,000 apartments in the city. To date, Berlin’s government has not implemented the successful referendum.

The referendum was organised by the campaign Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen (Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co). The campaign’s 2023 concept proposes transferring these housing stocks into a newly established public-law institution (Anstalt öffentlichen Rechts, AöR). The intended change in ownership structures is designed to enable:
(1) a needs-based allocation of housing,
(2) a (radically) democratic management of the housing stock and a democratic planning of investment planning, as well as
(3) a socially and ecologically oriented housing management (Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen 2023).

If the campaign’s concept would be implemented
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(1) Housing allocation would no longer be mediated by markets but instead based on needs, affordability, and sensitivity to discrimination.
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(2) A council-based structure is intended to secure democratic participation through an iterative process linking local levels (neighborhood and district councils) with a central General and Administrative Council composed of representatives of tenants, civil society, the Senate (the Berlin government), and employees of the AöR. The lowest level of the council structure would comprise neighborhood councils that address immediate local concerns, such as the design of shared communal areas in the neighborhood and the location of shops, childcare facilities and cafés. The neighborhood councils would also identify urgent maintenance and modernisation needs. At the central level, the General and Administrative Council would define overarching principles for housing management and make broader investment decisions.

(3) Urgently needed energy-efficient retrofits would be financed from the revenues of the AöR, rather than through rent increases. Rent caps would also encourage apartment exchanges, which could lead to greater floor space sufficiency over time  and thus contribute to climate-just housing provision (Berfelde and Möller 2023).

State regulation and/or comprehensive economic democratisation?

The transformation of private property into common property is intended to create a fundamentally different mode of disposition over housing — one that is oriented towards the common good and towards the democratisation of housing provision. The initiative Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen bases its proposal for housing socialisation on Article 15 of the German Basic Law, which permits the socialisation of land, natural resources, and means of production into common ownership or other forms of Gemeinwirtschaft (public or common economy).

At the core of both the campaign’s proposal and the SPD’s framework law for socialisation lies the question of what Gemeinwirtschaft actually entails. Raed Saleh, chair of the Berlin SPD, interprets Article 15 as a “state intervention tool” (Saleh 2025) for enforcing a genuinely social market economy — for example, by limiting profits, setting investment requirements, and regulating prices. Within the framework law proposed by the SPD, Article 15 is thus understood primarily as an instrument of enhanced state regulation. According to the SPD concept, a change in ownership is not necessary for socialisation to be achieved. This could also be done through rules governing the use of profits, price-setting mechanisms, or the specification of climate targets (Rothemann 2025).

In this interpretation, socialisation is not understood as a means of democratising economic processes. This contradicts a legal-historical interpretation of Article 15 — adopted by the Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen campaign, for example — which understands it as a fundamental democratic right. According to this interpretation, Article 15 establishes a collective right to abolish private ownership of specified objects, means of production, land, and natural resources, and it is also considered a freedom right that creates possibilities for democratic self-determination through the transfer of private into common ownership (Feichtner 2025, 202).

The financialisation of housing as a question of ownership

Compared to other European capitals, Berlin’s rental housing market exhibits a high degree of capital concentration. Large publicly listed housing corporations, such as Deutsche Wohnen, Vonovia, TAG, Covivio, and Grand City Properties, together own around 230,000 apartments, representing roughly 15% of Berlin’s total housing stock (Trautvetter 2020).

This ownership concentration is the result of Berlin’s specific privatisation history. Following German reunification in the 1990s, privatisation primarily affected the housing stock of the former GDR in East Berlin. In the early 2000s, austerity policies intensified the privatisation of state-owned housing and land. For example, the formerly public housing companies GEHAG and GSW were privatised, and their housing stock now belongs to Vonovia (formerly Deutsche Wohnen). In general, private equity firms, real estate investment trusts (REITs), and publicly listed real estate companies acquired the privatised real estate assets.

Property in general confers a “power of disposition,” while private property in particular grants “exclusive disposition” over goods and resources (Nuss 2019, 9–10). This power establishes not only a relationship between a subject and an object, but also a social relationship between two subjects: the one who holds control, and the one who is excluded from it. Private ownership of housing establishes the landlord–tenant relationship and enables the extraction of ground rent, enabled by the ownership title. Rent payments by the tenants are intended to generate returns over time on “capital fixed in real estate” (Holm 2025, 404).

Rent increases and cost-cutting measures — such as neglecting maintenance or implementing hyper-efficient administration (for example, housing companies that cannot be reached or are inactive when elevators break down) — are strategies designed to increase profits from rent. Besides rent extraction from tenants, for financialised real estate firms, valuation gains are equally important. They allow for higher payouts to shareholders and increased liquidity (Bernt and Holm 2025, 6). Private ownership of housing enables both the extraction of ground rent and the accrual of financial interest through speculation. The latter is an especially strong abstraction  from the use value of housing — a process urban scholars David Madden and Peter Marcuse have aptly described as “hypercommodification” (Madden and Marcuse 2016, 26).

The social philosopher Rahel Jaeggi grounds the need for democratising housing provision in the “particularly evident tension between public relevance and impact, on the one hand, and private appropriation and control, on the other” (Jaeggi 2025, 370):

Who is able to live in a neighborhood shapes the character and ‘social mix’ of entire districts, with consequences across many areas of social life — from educational opportunities to democratic participation, from catchment areas for childcare and schools to care provision for older people. The state of the housing market affects labor markets and the conditions for studying in a city. (ibid.)

Housing thus has an effect on society that goes far beyond its immediate function of social provisioning. The aim of socialisation is to realise this social nature of housing through a specific form of democratisation — a form of collective self-determination over central aspects of shared social life.

Lessons from the transformation strategy: Organizing as practice

As a strategy of transformation, socialisation seeks to create social housing provision and comprehensive democratisation by suspending market logic for a segment of the housing sector. Examining the organizing practices of the Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen campaign reveals three key strategic elements:

(1) Using the law for emancipatory purposes.Reference to Article 15 of the Basic Law is central to articulating a fundamentally different vision of housing provision (Berfelde and Heeg 2024). Invoking constitutional law demonstrates that implementation is legally feasible and makes the demand more credible (Kusiak 2024).

(2) Direct democracy through referendums.In 2021, Berliners voted on the socialisation of large real estate corporations in a referendum. Since then, the governing parties failed to implement the result. That is why the campaign is currently drafting its own housing socialisation law with legal experts. The campaign plans to hold a  second referendum for Berliners to directly vote on the implementation of this law. Signature collection and campaigning also provide an opportunity to discuss socialisation via conversations on the streets and at people’s doors (Bach and Berfelde 2024).

(3) Self-organisation as a core political practice.Founded in 2018, the campaign aimed to bring together a variety of tenant initiatives under one powerful demand. The campaign builds on the practice of tenant self-organisation and seeks to further support this ecology of tenant initiatives through organizing projects.

Steering or democratising the economy?

Could socialisation provide a blueprint for a broader socio-ecological transformation strategy? Understood as a shift from private to common ownership, socialisation enables both stronger steering of economic processes as well as their democratisation.

Socio-ecological transformation requires, for example, the efficient expansion of renewable energy infrastructure and the planned phase-out of coal, alongside regional structural development. Such comprehensive coordination goes beyond the scope of  current market-framing and regulating strategies (Christophers 2024). It is a form of coordination that could be achieved through public ownership over key assets and sectors.

At the same time, socio-ecological transformation fundamentally depends on democratising consumption, production, and investment decisions: to create procedural legitimacy for transformation processes and to build institutions capable of negotiating social needs (Stoll 2024).

Therefore, the question of steering versus democratisation must be adapted to different sectors. In which sectors  is stronger planning required to steer economic processes? And in which areas is economic planning needed to deepen democratic participation? The answer depends on the material and functional characteristics of specific economic processes, and must be further developed through future research.

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Editorial Note:

This article is produced in collaboration as part of a collaboration between Rethinking Economics International, Makronom and the Economists for Future DE and was originally written in German language. The 2026 contributions engage with ongoing debates on anti-authoritarian and anti-fascist perspectives on economic policy, with particular attention to how social security arrangements can help counter authoritarian and nationalist tendencies. Contributions in this series also explore welfare state design, property relations, pension systems, and institutional reforms with a view to strengthening democratic cohesion, ecological stability, and economic resilience. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the participating platforms.

About the author:

Rabea Berfelde is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Social Critique at Humboldt University of Berlin, where she co-directs the research project ‘Socialisation in Theory and Practice: Democratising Access to Land and Energy’. Her research focuses on financialised land economies and common-good  alternatives. Her book Spaces of Urban Platformisation: Airbnb and Coworking in Berlin will be published by Routledge in May 2026.

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