An Interview with Caterina Lobenstein
Rents are rising in Germany, and there is a shortage of hundreds of thousands of apartments. This is true not only in major cities like Berlin, but also in smaller cities such as Paderborn, Rostock, and Tübingen.
Image gallery
Caterina Lobenstein
Ironically, the very people who keep these cities running can barely afford to live there anymore: bus and subway drivers, caregivers and cleaning staff, waitstaff, police officers, early childhood educators, and artists.
The housing crisis is therefore no longer a marginal social issue. It determines who can live in a city and who cannot. And, more recently, it has also been deciding elections.
What political proposals are on the table? And what might a housing policy look like that not only manages the crisis but actually solves it?
Dr. Andrej Holm is a social scientist at Humboldt University in Berlin and works in the Department of Urban and Regional Sociology. His research focuses on gentrification, housing provision, and housing policy. In addition, he is actively involved in the fight for the right to housing in Berlin. He has been active in numerous urban and rent policy initiatives since the early 1990s and regularly contributes his expertise to housing policy debates in Berlin.
Additional information
Dates
September 2026
| Mo | Tu | We | Th | Fr | Sa | Su |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1
|
2
|
3
|
4
|
5
|
6
| |
7
|
8
|
9
|
10
|
11
|
12
|
13
|
14
|
15
|
16
|
17
|
18
|
19
|
20
|
21
|
22
|
23
|
24
|
25
|
26
|
27
|
28
|
29
|
30
|
