An Article Of Faith

As the co-inventor of the gentrification model currently reshaping Berlin, Bloomberg.com's views on the subject of rent control activism are inherently biased. Yet neither the site nor its writers seem willing to admit it.

I've just read No City Hates Its Landlords Like Berlin on Bloomberg website. A few things grabbed my attention as being, um, less than impartial about it. Who you wouldn't have guessed from the title, right?

For one thing, it overuses the word "expropriation".

The piece repeatedly uses "expropriation" as a shorthand to describe Berlin's plans to buy back certain properties from its biggest private landlords. "Expropriation" is an archaic word that apparently reached its peak usage around the 1950's. And it definitely seems like Bloomberg has dredged it up to try and revive the frenzied McCarthyist mood of that era, for this piece. 

I'm familiar with a lot of big words but I decided to look up "expropriation", just to be sure that it wasn't appropriate in this case. On Quora, I learned that "Expropriation can be done with the owner's consent and/or with compensation paid."

That isn't what happened in the recent sale of a block of flats by a private landlord to the Berlin government. Those properties were purchased on the open market, as far as I can tell. It wasn't like the land was suddenly converted into public domain and the landlords were forced to vacate, thus necessitating some sort of compensation. It was a sale. And at the moment, we've got no reason to assume that future buy outs would take place under any system apart from the capitalist one that already exists, here.

So basically, Berlin hasn't expropriated land and isn't planning on doing that. Granted, one group may be using the term (Expropriate Deutsche Wohen), but to conflate the term with every resident and MP who believes that rents are too high is disingenuous. The city hasn't suddenly converted to a communist regime (although I think lots of its residents would find that pretty cool. And that would be fair enough, since it's their city, too).

Even if the land was being converted directly into public property instead of being purchased on the open market, the American term for this sort of transaction is 'eminent domain'. In free market terminology, what is happening here is known as a 'buy-out'. The local media calls it 're-nationalization'.

So many better words, and yet Bloomberg's writers chose to stick to the most panic-inducing one that they could find and threw "hate" into the headline, just in case we didn't get the message: be afraid, be very afraid. Is this journalism, or propaganda, I wonder?

The description of Syndikat bar is just plain bad.

Reporters Caroline Winters, Andrew Blackman, have pegged the Syndikat as "... a kind of cigarette-smoke-saturated living room for misfits, students, immigrants, and hard-up neighbors." It's kind of very general and could easily describe any of Berlins thousand or more kneipen but, to me, the use of the word 'immigrants' to describe some of its customers is particularly irksome.

I mean, what did they do: go in there and take a deed poll to figure out how many of Syndikat's clientele came from Berlin, and how many didn't? Survey every person to find out if they were tourists, expats, or just Germans with an unusual accent? No. They made an assumption, and that usually ends badly.

I'm not saying there aren't foreigners hanging out there - I hang out there and I'm an immigrant, right? But this borderline racist term just seem, well, borderline racist. Another panic-button, dog whistle choice. Taken together with the McCarthyist red baiting, it really sets the tone for the whole piece. And that is "antogonistic".

It fails to disclose a potential conflict of interest.

In this sense, the article seems to be keeping with a long-standing Bloomberg tradition.

The Bloomberg website is, of course, owned and operated by a billionaire ex-mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg. As mayor, Bloomberg led a questionable campaign to gentrify New York City at warp speed during the early 2000's. That campaign led to reductions in affordable rents all across the board, and numerous other setbacks for tenants on a standard, working class salary.

According to the New York Times, "living conditions for the system’s 400,000 low-income residents deteriorated ... contributing to the need today for more than $32 billion to replace broken elevators, antiquated boilers and leaky roofs, following years of federal disinvestment. [He] dedicated barely any city funding to the public housing agency, compared with the current mayor, and the backlog of requests that tenants submitted for apartment repairs ballooned to record highs, as residents dealt with leaks and hazardous mold."

The article enumerates other failures of Bloomberg's policies, which were based on a rather naive faith in free market crapitalism's "private-investment-solves-all" maxim. These are failures that he never seems to have admitted to, much less addressed, while he was in office.

The reporters on this piece seem just as averse to admitting that gentrification has failed the masses. Throughout the article, they blame rising populations, the Berlin government and, tacitly, the anti-gentrification activists, for skyrocketing rents. But they spend just 400 of the article's 4000 words on the actual baddies: speculative investors.

"Publicly traded companies aren’t necessarily the worst problem for cities. The larger one is anonymous investors that use loopholes to extract wealth while paying very few taxes," they write. A statement many people in Berlin can agree with, but they barely delve into that aspect, at all.

After painting a damning picture of the rent activist scene in Berlin (nearly half the section on the Mietwahnsinn movement is devoted to two fringe acts of vandalism) Blackman and Winters admit that these activists aren't "entirely wrong" as if that is a exception to their generally rash and reactionary state.

They also play the lame old usual 'housing shortage' card, saying that, "A main cause of the problem is a shortage of housing as a growing number of people move to cities." In fact, whole blocks of flats sit empty in Berlin, just as they do in London and New York, because no one can afford them. 

Bear in mind that all this is in an article hidden behind a soft paywall, where the very people tarnished by its claims can't always read what their antagonists are saying about them. It seems like a pretty apt metaphor for the type of society the Bloombergs of the world want to create.

As mayor, Bloomberg helped to displace countless people, including the already-homeless, and permitted a stunning silence to fall across the city's nightlife scene and cultural hotspots. Entire streets were emptied out for offshore investors. Much the same thing is happening in Berlin now, too.

Publishing a piece that presents a skewed, even biased, perspective of activists who are trying to curb these same types of excesses does seem like it could be a conflict of Bloomberg's financial interests. Maybe some of the landlords referred to in it are even friends of Michael Bloomberg, who knows?

Talk is cheap, but housing keeps getting more expensive in Berlin - and worldwide.

The package of high rents and tasteful upgrades that gentrification offers, unasked for, comes at a pretty high cost. We are basically told to swallow all of it, because it'll "make everything better for everyone." So the mantra goes. Except that's never actually happened. People have been waiting for the big payoff for decades: in New York since the 1970s, in London since the 1980's, in Amsterdam and Berlin since the noughties - and it never arrives. Not for the majority of us, it doesn't. And Bloomberg's mayoral vision for New York was instrumental in forming this model that has been copied everywhere, to the detriment of us all.

Yet, he and the wider business community keep waxing evangelical about how free market capitalism will look after those of us who are worthy, as if it's some all-powerful, all-seeing God, and above reproach. They leave everything to their faith in the free market as they go swaggering across the globe, leaving a glittering trail of overpriced, empty urban wastelands in their wake. The gentrification purists are so like fanatics on a doomed crusade. In this respect, they are a lot like every other regime that came to Berlin before capitalism did.

The international business community increasingly resembles an authoritarian force; by trying to take cities by storm, unasked-for and unelected; by promising glory to the people; by demanding that everyone suspend their disbelief, regardless of the facts. And then there is the fact that free market capitalist media, like Bloomberg's, seems more interested in stifling legitimate criticism and whitewashing than in working with the public, fairly, transparently. Well, Berlin has seen this film before and knows exactly how it ends: with little people picking up the pieces after another overreaching, expansionist regime implodes.

Bloomberg and his ilk might have themselves convinced that gentrification is the way of the future, but the way they deliver it has hues of the authoritarian past. Until that reality changes, no amount of skewed reportage will make this city's resistance go away. Because, if any city knows what oppression in disguise looks like, it's Berlin.