Berlin's new rent cap bill : a controversy dividing the city?

Abstract:   Urbanisation and growing populations are causing a lack of housing in many metropolitan areas such as Berlin, Germany. Especially tenants of rental units are affected by rapidly increasing housing prices that exhaust a growing share of their income. With a large proportion of its population living in rental units, in-creasing housing prices are a prominent challenge in Germany’s capital. To ap-proach this issue, the parliament of the city state of Berlin has passed a rent cap bill in February 2020. It states that rent prices for units built before 2014 are not allowed to be increased for the next five years, including some exceptions. Fur-ther, rents are not allowed to be higher than the average rent level from June 2019. The rent cap bill is controversial and strongly discussed by many stake-holders. Since the housing market is complex and includes many stakeholders with various opinions and motivations, this study aims to understand the differ-ent aspects of the controversy as it relates to this rent cap bill. By using Contro-versy Mapping by Venturini (2010, 2012), this work focuses on the investigation what stakeholder groups exist, which opinions and motivations they have, and if there is a common ground between them. As result, this study discloses actor-network constellations of Berlin’s rental housing market and untangles stake-holders’ opinions and motivations to enable a conversation.