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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

I’m honestly kind of surprised at Google’s complete lack of cultural or diplomatic knowledge about Berlin. Kreuzberg is/was the center of artistic culture in the city, and choosing to have a presence there, no matter how small, would clearly be viewed as a corporate American attack on local countercultural values. As another commenter stated, they could have avoided this entire issue by picking somewhere in Mitte or a western suburb.

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Google probably thought "Hey, what's the coolest part of Berlin, where we'd make engineers happy to be in?" and that's about it. "Subtleties"[1] about why it's cool, or what its response to Google being there, probably weren't considered.

After the selection had occurred, the procurement machine had been tasked and at that point it takes a lot of resistance to stop that machinery.

[1] For some real estate group in Google determining office locations.

Yep, that's roughly how it must have went. They even hired a friend of mine to come up with PR strategies against the resistance. Needless to say, it didn't work out.

> ...what's the coolest part of Berlin, where we'd make engineers happy to be in?

but i also wonder: does Google consider itself to be one of the "cool kids?" i mean, when it tries to create a new campus like this, does Google think it will be welcomed with open arms?

It still does. I think that shine has been wearing a little thin the last year, but generally it does.

Kreuzberg is the center of left activism in Berlin which is anti-globalisitic, anti-corporate, anti-american and anti-gentrification, Google (and its entourage) is the embodiment of that. Ironically however, Google is present in Kreuzberg at "Factory community".

The irony is that this activism is often made up of people who are highly educated, affluent (because of parents or soon-to-be paying off high-education) who weren't born in Berlin themselves – in other words: By gentrificators.

Berlin has been a center of left-wing activism since at least the 70's.

Yes, by people who moved there from other areas of Germany (for example to elude the draft). The "swabian invasion" many Berliners face is not a recent thing.

...and Berlin was a counter-cultural center in the 1920s.

I'm not really sure what point you're getting at. Berlin is prized by its inhabitants for its unique culture - a modern, western city that for nearly 20 years was dominated by artistic culture. It has nothing to do with the "original inhabitants vs. the new transplants" and very little to do with NIMBYism from property owners, especially considering the the overwhelming majority of Germans rent, not own.

Connecting today’s or even 1970s counter-culture with that of the 1920s is really far fetched as most counter-culturalists where driven out shortly after (see 1930s) and never came back.

Following your logic, that it shouldn’t matter where new tenants come from - isn’t that what anti-gentrification activism effectively is about? Prohibiting new tenants to move in?

Understanding context is one of the most important thing, when you're trying understand the content/situation.

You repeatedly write that this happens because of some snowflakes' NIMBYism. Which is definitely not.

If we were talking about any other city in the world, whatever you're saying would make sense... because from the outside it looks like "oh the people who moved to city center doesn't want anybody else to move there".

That's not the case with Berlin.

Maybe you missed the topic recently but there was WWII and then East Germany, with Berlin Wall, death strip in between and East German State Police Stasi... and people who wants to escape from East.

Of course all of these happened in the city center, because the wall separated the city from the middle of it, and the areas once city center, become the dangerous ghettos.

The canals in Kreuzberg has become grave for some immigrant (and German alike) children, because it belonged to the East. If any child accidentally falls in the waters and scream for help nobody could save them. Because anyone who would enter the canals would be shot by East German police. And they did. And people couldn't save their kids from the waters, after these incidents happened. This is just one of the disadvantages of living next to a death strip, in the epicentre of the nuclear cold war.

Because of these dangerous properties, the place was cheap. And people in more "hip" areas didn't wanted to rent their flats to young people, artists, punks etc. So these people find home in Kreuzberg.

But yeah, feel free to forget about these context and try to blindly invalidate peoples experiences.

---

I gave the same example in another comment: There are many shops in Kreuzberg, which are located there for let's say 50-60 years. There are grocery stores, bakeries, markets, shoe repair shops, cheap quality restaurants, local bookstores etc.

But these people has to go now, because there is better buyer, who can afford the prices that these people can not. Or they have to increase their prices too. You were buying a croissant for 0,40€... now it's 4€. But hey, you can like our instagram page!

Now you're accusing these people of b+ching about the development, and you think they're greedy and they get what they wanted, now they're protesting so others can not get what they have?

Or do they want to live in the area, where they've been living for the last 60 years, and experienced many many disadvantages of the area?

The area was ghetto, so unwanted people located there. Now the area is hip again (after 100 years), and the people who lives there is unwanted again.

The real NIMBYists are the ones who pushed these people to ghettos, next to Berlin Wall.

I want my city to be better and i want workers to do this. -Immigrants? Not in my backyard.

I want my city to be culturally rich and i want to be proud of the art that created in my city. -Punks? Unemployed artists? Not in my backyard.

Because of this, these people located in Kreuzberg... many many years ago, before the Wall even came down.

Now the wall came down and the same people say:

I want to have a nice and cheap(er than my area) office next to Landwehrkanal in Kreuzberg. -Immigrants and artists next to my office? Not in my backyard.

Wow, not only are your points completely a-historical and just stitched-together buzzwords from German history. You also have chutzpah to teach others about their history while living just for two years in Berlin (as you openly admitted in another comment here).

Irony that might be true on the internet but not in the real world.

Meet your self-proclaimed „activist“ in charge, Berlin-Kreuzberg’s housing councilor [1].

Born in Cologne (not Berlin), finished School in Frankfurt (not Berlin), studied humanities for nine years (in Hamburg, Barcelona and then Berlin). And before holding political office never once worked in a private sector job where he payed into social security.

Pretty much ironic what goes as anti-gentrificationista these days.

[1] https://www.berlin.de/ba-friedrichshain-kreuzberg/politik-un...

We should be careful about easily judging others, there are different life philosophies and diverse definitions of success in life, and different paths than most people in this forum have taken. But I have to agree here.

He is portrayed in this documentary for his fight against a major housing property investor and shows the camera team around his Kreuzberg flat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI2QpsWQgEA&t=580s

I really wonder how he can still be living in his old 2-room student Kreuzberg apartment with a full family. It is not true that Berlin has no cheap apartments for families anymore. Outside the hip quarters for sure, but certainly offering better living spaces for 2 little children and a wife than this tiny Kreuzberg flat. He may believe that he is carrying the fight over to his private life but I call this irresponsible.

And this guy was one of the major players chasing Google away.

While I echo your concerns about judgements I stated him as a perfect example of what agitators of anti-gentrificationists are.

Let's not loose focus of my main argument here: How are people claiming the moral highground on who should become a new tenant, if they themselves where new tenants very recently?

How can you call yourself an "activist" on the good side of democracy or morale in general, whilst being an office-holding politician, without even being elected into that office?

And regarding your admiration for him for living in a 2-room Kreuzberg apartment

... I grew up the same way, where is my medallion for that ? Do I get extra points for not getting to choose to live that way, like he did?

... as a housing councilor of the city rest assured he's not poor, makes 7.533,07 € a month [1], 2.3 times the median Berliner income

... and wasn't poor before that, indicated by the fact that his family used to travel frequently between homes in Barcelona and Berlin

[1] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/berliner-bezirke-stellen-...

I thought the video added a bit to the characterization of the agitator, which you had started ;)

I didn't admire his living conditions, I think you misunderstood me here. He is indeed not exactly poor^1, maybe unable to pay for decent housing for a family in a Kreuzberg with rising rents. But he would certainly be able to pay for a decently sized apartment in a less hip quarter. It looks as if he is not willing to for reasons we can only speculate about.

1: You added the numbers, and this is certainly enough money for much better living conditions even in the hippest quarters of Berlin.

FWIW, they're not that active at the Factory (a coworking space / startup community with offices in Kreuzburg and Mitte). Members have limited access to a global network of Google coworking spaces, and Google hosts office hours for entrepreneurs every so often, but IIRC those also tend to be in the Mitte location rather than Xberg.

I think arbitrary restrictions on groups that can purchase or lease space in a neighborhood is bad for a free society. I guess people say it depends on what group you're imposing. Now it's Google which you may or may not like, but other groups can be harmed in the future. This is part of the whole NIMBY movement.

As long as the group is following laws and zoning restrictions, there should be nothing preventing them from joining a community

I used to agree with you, but considering the fact that San Francisco has gone from “semi-affordable haven for weirdos and off-beat culture” to “single most expensive city in America filled primarily with tech workers and the homeless” in less than 30 years, I don’t any more. Semi-similar situations for lower Manhattan, Paris, East London, ad infinitum.

A place can have a unique culture that’s worth maintaining. How to maintain it - I don’t know. But converting everything to MegaCo offices probably isn’t the solution.

San Francisco is actually a good example of what NIMBYism does. Zoning restrictions and rent controls that are unrivaled in the US did everything to that city you've just stated as things to avoid while attributing them to "MegaCo".

The housing market by its nature has a weak flexibility to adapt to new demand. NIMBYism acts like a lever on that inflexibility.

Building more housing would not suddenly make MegaCo's presence and impact on the culture less noticable in X city.

Not even 30 years, more like 15.

Nobody is restricting Google from doing anything. They are expressing--in a way that is part of, and frankly should be expected of being a member of, one of those "free societies" you mention--that Google is unwelcome, and no, nobody is obligated to make you feel welcome. There are cases where not making somebody welcome kinda makes you an asshole, but that does not, frankly, apply to anybody who's got a stock ticker symbol.

This is "you piss in the pool wherever you go, please stay away from our pool." This isn't NIMBY in any meaningful way and the comparison is downright mendacious.

> Nobody is restricting Google from doing anything

From the article: In September activists occupied the building it was to be located in for several hours.

That seems like the activists were preventing them

> This is "you piss in the pool wherever you go, please stay away from our pool." This isn't NIMBY in any meaningful way and the comparison is downright mendacious.

Saying you do [something I don't like] and I don't want you to do [thing I don't like] in my neighborhood is exactly NIMBY

You realize that Google has billions upon billions of dollars and effectively unlimited weight to throw around, yes? A few protestors hanging out in a building does not prevent them from doing anything they want to. They have run the numbers and presumably realized that having your neighbors not want you there is not worth the PR hit of doing it--but literally nobody is stopping it from happening.

This poor-benighted-Google thing is gross. These companies are not on anyone's side.

> Saying you do [something I don't like] and I don't want you to do [thing I don't like] in my neighborhood is exactly NIMBY

No, that's most definitely not NIMBY. NIMBY means you support something when it's farther away but oppose it happening close to you. It stands for "not in my backyard", not "not in any backyard".

Exactly. The "my" part is operative here.

If I had to guess, a lot of those protestors probably don't care if Google ever opens an office anywhere--but, not being billion-dollar panopticons-as-a-service, they are constrained to act locally rather than globally.

Presumably the residents there use Google services. They likely want Google to exist, but just not in their back yard

"You use the services that have functionally become required for daily life regardless of whether you like them or not, so it is in some way hand-flappingly hypocritical not to let them step on your community too" is not really the winning argument here.

What Google services are required for daily life? Don't they all have competitors?

> What Google services are required for daily life? Don't they all have competitors?

Not really. It's sort of like RMS with open-source hardware: yes there are a handful of modern computers that can be made to work without binary blobs, but it's a lot of trouble and only a few people will actually do that out of principle. It's practically requred to run proprietary binary blobs. Similarly, Bing, Duckduckgo, and OpenStreetMap exist, but Google services are practically required for modern daily life.

For an illustration: a typical local shop is going put the effort into making sure its information is correct on Google Maps and that their website is indexed on Google; but it's going to put zero effort into updating its info on OpenStreetMap or making sure it's indexed by Bing. If you want info about that shop, you're probably going to have to use Google.

> For an illustration: a typical local shop is going put the effort into making sure its information is correct on Google Maps and that their website is indexed on Google; but it's going to put zero effort into updating its info on OpenStreetMap or making sure it's indexed by Bing. If you want info about that shop, you're probably going to have to use Google.

That's a great example, thanks for mentioning it. I'll probably use it from now on.

It's not about whether "they want Google to exist", that's just reducing the whole thing to absurdity. It's not about mere existence. It's about whether they're fine with the approaches taken by the company and whether they're suddenly opposing it when it directly affects them.

Actually a large faction of the protest has been getting local businesses off of google services and educating a thirsty public about alternatives. Most people in kreutzberg already thought of google as evil. their foothold organized people around removing it from their lives, regardless of how impossible that is

Well your not welcome (google in this case) but that doesn't give you the right to deny others who might want to move to berlin and work for google - that sound s like UKip policy in the uk.

And what does having a stock ticker matter presumably you took advantage of the German miracle and the rise of VW and others.

This would go against the interests of the locals, that, frankly, in a community should come before the interests of some programmer that would find a job somewhere else.

They aren't denying Google and it's employees the right to move to Berlin, there's tons of areas in Berlin for tech companies to be, some tolerant of them, some actively trying to get more companies to move in. (and of course Google legally would have been free to move in despite the protests, but choose not to). That's needlessly over-the-top rhetoric for a localized protest.

> This is "you piss in the pool wherever you go, please stay away from our pool." This isn't NIMBY in any meaningful way and the comparison is downright mendacious

It's also the same line of thinking behind Trump's wall and hostility to immigration in general: "people I don't like should stay out."

"you piss in the pool wherever you go, please stay away from our pool."

Several people mentioned something to this effect. Nobody makes clear what they are referring to. Is this just about gentrification?

Resistance from a community is not a "restriction", and characterising this as NIMBYism would be intellectually dishonest if it weren't so ridiculous. Google is not a group, it's a vastly wealthy and powerful corporate entity, and objecting to its presence in a community is not a slippery slope or precedent-setting in the sense which you (again, preposterously) imply.

The idea of a "free society" is a myth. Something perpetuated by neo-liberals who think all that matters is absolute freedom and money. News flash: Culture matters. At least, it matters to people whose only interest is not money.

I do not know Berlin very well, I've only spent a few weeks there, but I get the impression they would have faced a lot less backlash if the announcement had been "hey we're gonna build this awesome new office campus at Aleksanderplatz".

Absolutely! Everyone I spoke with and suggested google move into the newly built and absolutely hated Stadtschloss in the center loved the idea.

Don't know, it has probably more to do with the fact that it's Google trying to open something there.

Otto Bock (market leader in prosthetics and wheelchairs) just bought a old brewery for several hundred million € in Prenzlauer Berg [1] with the goal to convert it into a research center. I don't remember any kind of protest or outrage against that.

1: https://www.ottobock.com/en/press/press-releases/ottobock-re...

1. Prenzlauerberg is known as an upper-middle class/family/“safe” area, not a haven for artists or counterculture.

2. A prosthetics company is a far cry from the omnipresent, omnipotent entity that is Google. Everyone on planet Earth knows what Google is. Many people take issue with their behavior.

1. Without wanting to offend I think it's quite funny that you think so, because before Prenzlauer Berg became what it is today it was one of the most prominent "art districts" in Berlin, and many artists had their workshops there (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenzlauer_Berg). Now as you say it's mostly an area where hip and affluent families live in the many luxuriously renovated old buildings (Altbau). Seems gentrification has progressed so much that people don't even remember what the neighborhood used to be before. That said, the process wasn't triggered by large tech companies setting up shop there, more by the choices of affluent people moving to Berlin from other parts of Germany. Swabians are particularly hated for allegedly moving there in order to live in a big city but then slowly turning that city into the small Swabian town they moved away from in the first place (I don't think it's a very fair judgement though).

2. That's what I said, and I think it's sad that Google won't open the campus there, as I think the area and the city could profit from it.

Also, this is a personal opinion but I think Kreuzberg is far from being a "haven for artists or counterculture". Already now the district has some of the highest rents in Berlin and many flats are being rented out as AirBnBs (often by the same people that complain about companies gentrifying the area). Also, the counterculture that you're describing can be quite snobbish and exclusive as well, at least for people that don't conform to the Berlin "hipster" ideal. I think Berlin really needs more corporations and large enterprises that set up shop there and create jobs, as the startup ecosystem has so far failed to deliver much in terms of well-paying jobs (at least if you don't want to work for Zalando). Just my 2 cents.

> the city could profit from it.

This point of view is precisely the problem and why companies like Google aren't welcome in places like where they tried to open this campus. Money isn't everything.

Absolutely, interesting jobs and opportunities are just as important. Still I don’t think that the presence of a large tech company would per se be detrimental to the quality of life in the city.

... or Adlershof for that matter.

Yeah but XBerg is so hip & happening and whoever lobbied for this move at Google must have loved their stay at one of the many AirBnB apartments in the area! /s

I think it's less likely that Google was unaware of Kreuzberg's identity, and more likely that Googlers still think they're "cool". The sort of people who have offices with built-in slides and ball pits and crud may feel like they "belong" there.

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