I'd be interested to hear the opinions of any Berlin residents. Vocal NIMBY minority driving away new jobs and beneficial development? Genuine victory in preserving local culture and character? Bit of both? Other?
- Most residents in Berlin (and in Germany for that matter) rent their apartments.
- There's a fairly good supply of newly built homes. It's still not enough to absorb the population growth, but it's much better than in many German cities.
People complain because they can see the downside of this influx of tech workers very clearly, while the benefits aren't obvious, at least not yet. Rents have doubled in some areas. Government offices are understaffed. So are kindergartens, schools, ...
While the government is partly to blame, a lot of startups haven taken advantage of Berlin's situation in questionable ways. The time where you could hire cheap developers is definitely over, but it's still very common to underpay and abuse people in non-engineering positions, who very often are interns and freelancers.
Kreuzberg is maybe too emblematic and Google is a scapegoat here, but I can understand the resentment against tech incubators.
It will just keep getting harder to hire staff. Candidates know that their purchasing power and quality of life are threatened by the gentrification quicker than the government is willing to raise wages and invest in the infrastructure.
However: I literally cannot confirm or refute the possibility of blame shifting, as my German comprehension is at the level of headlines and 50% of content, I can’t do in-depth news coverage yet.
Logically you would think as these rich 20-somethings become rich 30-somethings they will start having children, but after 10 years they cannot afford SF either, so they also move away.
Sure, forcing out Google doesn't solve the problem, but it sends a very clear message: Profits are not more important than livable communities.
I would argue it is mostly for the better. But of course it is not necessarily that nice for the locals who are confronted with vastly increased prices for basically anything.
The city has changed a lot and is growing and projected to continue to grow by about 50K people a year for the foreseeable future. This is good for Berlin because it definitely needs economic development as it has been living well beyond its means for some time and because it is still catching up in terms of economic activity that was lost between WW II and the fall of the wall. All this growth is increasing employment opportunities and lots investment money is being spent in this city, which is definitely benefiting local businesses.
Meeting actual Berliners born and raised in Berlin is actually not that common. Change is very much the local culture. Major changes of the 19th and 20th century originated here and were fueled by waves of people moving here. So most people you meet here are part of the problem (in terms of gentrification). So complaining about gentrification is a bit disingenuous for most.
I would say it's a shame that a bunch of anarchists get to push back economic development in what is still one of the poorer neighborhoods. They're a vocal minority and they don't speak for all. They live in Kreuzberg because it used to be a dump before the wall fell and was thus cheap. Basically, this area was heavily damaged in WW II and the West Germans put a lot of cheap housing for immigrants there (these are not the people doing the protesting). After the wall fell, it happened to be conveniently close to the former East German historical center and it became a popular place for young people moving to Berlin to settle and for poor startups to open up cheap offices.
So, most of the protesters moved there because it was cheap and now they feel entitled to live cheaply in the middle of a major world capital that is once again flourishing around them.
This city is not done growing. There is plenty of room to build and expand.
As it's stated by others also, the area was ghetto and the border to East Berlin, separated by the death strip and the wall. So "the unwanted" people located here. (they've been invited by the German government to repair the country after the young working population died in WWII)
Now the wall is gone, the place become hip again, and the people are "unwanted" again. And if you say that the local immigrants (mostly Turkish) doesn't protest, it's basically misinformation and not recognising their efforts to keep the area what it's been for many decades: a cultural hub of the misfits. (immigrants, punks, musicians, artists etc.)
https://www.bizim-kiez.de One of the main initiatives by the local immigrants. (Bizim means "our" in Turkish, and Kiez means "neighbourhood" in German)
Most of the people moved here because it was cheap and the society was welcoming the misfits. But what you say as "economic development" is destroying the culture there and pushing people out of the town. If you create a big startup hub there, all the shops will transform into hipster cafes and restaurants... Which is happening for many years and if you can't see this, open your eyes a bit. How can you expect people who live there for the last 50-60 years to pay the increasing rent, while their income doesn't because they don't work in a Startup? How can you expect a grocery store who sells cheap vegetables to compete with a vegan smoothie store, which sells the exact vegetables for 5 times the price, or even more? And after all the places will be gentrified, the rents will go even more up... then you will start protesting the smoothie prices goes up. (Which you think is happening there, which is not!)
Especially the campus idea - which in London, for example, attracts tens of thousands of techbros and -sises per year - puts more burden on the neighborhood as "just" a regular startup office. Neither google nor the city of Berlin could address any of the concerns, housing costs, general costs of living, traffic situation, just to name a few.
Berlin in general suffers a lot from rising real estate prices and rents - and the area where google wanted to put their campus is even more heavily affected than other parts of the city. This neighborhood - I am living a mere 500 m from that place - suffered from an influx of people probably more than other parts of Berlin. On top of that it turned into one of the hip party areas.
Given that this neighborhood historically houses lower-income families, which won't gain anything from google moving here, but will have to face even faster rising cost of living, and at the same time have no chance to move to other parts of the city - with the housing market being as tight as it is - it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that this move saw local opposition.
Compared to the situation in the US ("fly-over states"), it's still trivial to get to your trendy night time activities: Eastern coal mining hubs are 2 hours or less by car from Berlin, and less from Dresden or Leipzig. Western coal mining is in an area with one of the highest population density of the country. That makes me think that the regular "who wants to move there" argument isn't as convincing here as in the US.
I'm happy for a single reason: as long as Berlin startup scene preserves its working culture (that reflects German working culture in general), it will be a better working environment than the Silicon Valley. Big campuses and the presence of foreign corporations in general will have a slow but steady cultural influence on the IT workforce, normalizing the level of individual and systemic exploitation that is acceptable in the USA but not in Germany. Unpaid hours, unclear separation between work time and leisure time, ideological brainwashing, identity politics are all things I wouldn't like to see in the company I work for, but if a majority of my colleagues have worked for American corporations before (because they can afford to offer good salaries), it's more likely for it to happen.
Zalando is enough of a meat-grinder, we don't want more.