#209: Allowing higher rents, Berliners driving less, no more Galeries Lafayette?
And Schönefeld flies off into the sunset
Hey 20 Percent!
I’m writing this at the end of my summer vacation so I’ll keep the intro brief so I can get back to hiking in the Rocky Mountains, eating fire bagels and enjoying fast internet. Oh, and lots of Mexican food.
Back to the usual snark and some much-needed updates to our burgeoning media company next week.
Have a good weekend!
Andrew
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Department store or library?
It’s one of the weirder news stories in a weird city: Culture senator Joe Chialo (CDU) wants to move and consolidate the city-state’s official library, the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek, or ZLB, into the glass and steel building currently occupied by Galeries Lafayette when the French über-department store’s lease expires at the end of next year. The library is currently housed at Blücherplatz alongside the Amerika Gedenkbibliothek in Kreuzberg as well as on Breitestraße on Mitte’s Museum Island. The move would cost about €500 million, though no funds have yet been set aside, according to RBB. The weird part? Galeries Lafayettes says it isn’t planning on leaving the site and wants to extend the lease. Even weirder: US landlord Tishman Speyer told the Morgenpost (paywall) it never offered to extend the lease — and won’t. It’s like the most useless stretch of Friedrichstraße can’t bear to not be in the news.
More cars, less Fahrvergnügen
And is it weird that Berliners appear to be driving their cars less within the Hauptstadt even though there are more cars than possibly ever here? Magazine Der Spiegel counted cars at 143 sites (paywall) within Berlin in 2019 and then again this year and discovered that traffic is down between 10.2% and 17.3% depending on the day. Most of the credit is being given to working from home though it’s believed bikes and public transport play a role. It supports efforts to convert some roads into bike paths and some parking spots into parking for everything but cars — may I suggest between 10.2% and 17.3% of roads and parking spaces? Weirdly, Berliners have more cars than ever — 1.23 million, which is 8% more than a decade ago, according to Tagesspiegel, though population growth has outpaced automotive growth.
Public landlords to raise rents too
Not so weird is the clarity we now have on the new coalition’s plans for the city-state’s six housing companies — Gewobag, WBM, degewo, Gesobau, Howoge, and Stadt und Land. Finance minister Stefan Evers (CDU) said he wants to lift a 2022 moratorium on rent increases at the landlords next year to help fund the construction of new apartments, according to Tagesspiegel. He said he doesn’t want to stretch renters’ pocketbooks but also doesn’t want to rob the companies of economic flexibility as politicians hope for 20,000 new apartments per year. The companies are also expected to buy existing flats to expand their portfolio to a collective 500,000 flats from 352,000 currently. Would he force landlords to sell, à la the Deutsche Wohnen enteignen referendum? No, he said.
Factoid
September 2 is the official good-bye party for Schönefeld airport, where so many of us boarded discount airlines to head off to parts unknown before BER opened years and years too late. The former airport was renamed Terminal 5 after the new airport began operations. Easyjet had hoped to call it its own but the corona air travel slump led the company that operates BER to abandon the building. The area is to become a new neighborhood in the village of Schönefeld, which is celebrating its 20th birthday simultaneously. You can meander through the old building starting at noon and then dance in the parking lot until 1am. Tschüss Schönefeld!
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The party seems to be on Sat, Sep 02, not Friday
I wonder if this library project has anything to do wiith the coonversino of a lot f stores on Freidrichstrasse into art galleries? Are they going to replace the whole street with something? And what about Russia Haus? BTW Unter den Linden looks like it was way cooler before cars https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palais_Kurland#/media/Datei:Inventarnummer_51063.jpg