I like the shops closed on Sunday. A holiday-like silence sets in and I like it. Capitalism doesn’t always have to win.
So many shops are now open at nearby train stations that a Sunday grocery emergency is now just an inconvenience. You need 10,000 steps anyway.
Speaking of shops: Maurice and I always give two tips for places or things we like in Berlin in the Bear’s Knees segment on the 20 Percent Berlin podcast — this week’s is out now and it’s a lot of election talk (plus me recommending Emmy scooters and Maurice a Mitte brasserie).
Have a good weekend!
Andrew
Train talk: Hannover-Berlin
A train trip to Hanover will now take 80 minutes longer as Deutsche Bahn overhauls the stretch amidst a nationwide infrastructure upgrade to clear its name. Trains will detour over Braunschweig and Magdeburg for the next 14 months until the work is complete, according to Der Spiegel. That deadline will likely be extended — a similar project on the line between Hamburg and Berlin wasn’t completed on time. DB is now doing blitz-upgrades where they redo everything from tracks to stations to related infrastructure at the same time because work with adjacent operations proved to be both costly and lengthy.
Coalition talks, criminal links
Die Linke, the SPD and Die Grüne met Thursday to talk about entering coalition talks to rule Berlin and will meet again this weekend after the initial chat yielded little, according to rbb24. The trio met in the newly renovated Haus der Statistik on Alexanderplatz and discussed how to approach the accusations of antisemitism within Die Linke as well as the party’s potential links to Berlin crime families. Issa Remmo, the patriarch of Berlin’s most famous crime family, got thrown out of Die Linke’s election party and later told Der Spiegel journalists he was just there to ask a woman for a date, not curry political favor. Linke politician Ferat Kocak also stepped down from his position on the federal interior committee after Issa’s son Firo published chats between him and the politician, who said his connection to the family was related to the donation of mobile phones for politically active youth.
Election mistake
What would a Berlin election be without a mistake? At least this time it’s not fatal. Officials in Spandau reported the wrong numbers on the phone on election night, and an audit means Berlin’s next Abgeordnetenhaus (parliament) will now be five seats smaller for reasons I vaguely understand. The AfD’s Tommy Tabor was directly elected to a seat in the Berlin parliament for Spandau, not the CDU’s Bettina Meißner, as initially reported, according to rbb24. Voters in Berlin have two votes — one for a party and one for a local candidate. Parties create lists of candidates who get seats based on the first vote but those elected by the second vote get the seat regardless. However, sometimes a party gets more seats via direct election than their party would have had, which are then known as Uberhangmandate (bonus seats) and they have to be offset with seats for other parties. Since Meißner was a bonus seat, now that she’s out, so are the related offset seats. I hope nobody gave quit their jobs thinking they were now parliamentarians.
Rents up for public housing renters
Berlin’s public housing companies are raising rents for 90,000 renters by between €15 and €30 per month, according to the Morgenpost, to offset a 93% jump in maintenance costs between 2016 and 2025. Die Linke officials said the move was political since it has pledged to institute a strict rent cap at the seven companies and suspect the companies hope to sneak in the raise in case Die Linke becomes the senior coalition partner. A spokesman for the companies said that was Quatsch — the companies have so far only raised rents 22% between 2016 and 2025.
The darker the red, the older the head. I’m a journalist, not a poet. Graphic: BB Stats Office
I guess it depends on your definition of young: Berlin is Germany’s second-youngest state with an average age of 42.8 years, according to the Berlin-Brandenburg stats folks. Only Hamburg is younger at an average 42.3 years while Saxony-Anhalt is the oldest at 48.4, which maybe explains their problem. I’m picturing an old man shaking his fist and screaming in Saxony-Anhaltish : “You immigrants get off my grass!” Mitte and Kreuzberg-F-Hain are the youngest Berlin hoods at an average 39.5 while Steglitz-Zehlendorf is the oldest at 46.7.
OK, so they raised rents only 22% in a period where maintenance went up 96%, but what proportion of the rents go to maintenance? If that's only 5% of the rents, then 22% is plenty. But what about taxes, have those gone up? I expect they are making SOME kind of profit on that 22% rise, but who knows how much? Apartment prices have sure gone up more than 22% in the last 10 years, right? I'm pretty confused about who to feel sorry for.
OK, so they raised rents only 22% in a period where maintenance went up 96%, but what proportion of the rents go to maintenance? If that's only 5% of the rents, then 22% is plenty. But what about taxes, have those gone up? I expect they are making SOME kind of profit on that 22% rise, but who knows how much? Apartment prices have sure gone up more than 22% in the last 10 years, right? I'm pretty confused about who to feel sorry for.
The political parties govern, or administer. They are not king and do not rule over anything.