Quite possibly Americans will be horrified by the following phrase from a press release: “… local government embarked on the path of re-nationalizing apartments by buying 670 flats at the Karl Marx Allee.”
It contains not only the word ‘nationalizing’ but also the mention of a street named after a U.S. national bogeyman.
Much of the rest of the world can read this news without worrying that their country is going to hell (a.k.a. soviet-era gulag) in a hand basket. The press release comes from The Mayor.eu, an information portal for European cities and citizens. It details steps that the City of Berlin is taking to address a growing crisis of housing affordability.
Europeans are more accustomed to reading about aggressive government social actions. They do not immediately imagine government overthrow, regime change and the installation of communist dictators.
With Berlin’s affordable housing crisis growing acute, the press release details some steps that any socially proactive local government might take to help mute the more damaging excesses of free enterprise housing markets.
Read more about how Berlin is trying to fix a crisis (which some critics feel is at least partly the fault of the city itself) at The Mayor.eu: Berlin Continues Fight For Affordable Housing
