Bar Syndikat takes on global real estate capital

On a misty, overcast day, I shuffle my way through Neukölln, Berlin’s most recent epicenter of gentrification, where I meet Christian, one of the owners of the bar Syndikat.

He’s a tall and deep-voiced German with tousled dirty-blonde hair. He greets me and invites me in, offering something to drink. “You can let your dog run around, no worries,” he says.

Syndikat looks like your usual lefty dive bar. The wall is plastered with anti-fascist and radical queer stickers, and posters and signs for community protests, events, and workshops.

Since September 2018, Syndikat has been fighting for its life. A shell company owned by Pears Global, a massive UK-based player in global real estate, bought up the entire building, including its apartments, and terminated the bar’s rental contract. For the owners of the bar, it’s essentially a death sentence for their way of life. Christian himself lives in the building and also fears that the residents will be forced out at some point.

The bar, owned as a collective, has been an integral part of the neighborhood for 34 years. “I moved here from Cologne some 12 years ago and this was the first bar I ever visited,” recounts Christian. He remembers being nonchalant about Pears Global’s purchase. “We thought, ok, it’s just shifting the building from one tax paradise to the next. At first, we didn’t think anything of it since we had our rental contract and nothing changed with the building. No rent raises, nothing more or less done for the building either. We had no idea that the buyer, Fuhrmann Properties, was simply a shell company for the global real estate player Pears Global.”

Syndikat’s contract was due to expire at the end of 2018, but Fuhrmann Properties instead sent them an early cancellation notice — with the addendum that they would rather negotiate a new contract.

Fuhrmann ignored Syndikat’s requests to talk and negotiate, and sent them an eviction notice on 11 September 2018, setting a deadline for the last day of the year.

“We kept trying to contact them, to no avail. Then we decided to see exactly who these people were,” Christian continues. Christian and the other owners asked a friend who lives in Luxembourg to visit the company’s office. The friend reported back that it was in a six-floor building for letterbox companies perched above a tanning salon and shoe store.

Down the rabbit hole of legal documents, the bar owners followed the trail of ownership to Denmark, which requires companies to disclose the real owner, rather than listing CEOs like in Luxembourg. That’s how Christian discovered one of the Pears brothers is an owner. They followed the trail back to Pears Global itself, owned and operated by a trio of brothers.

“The net just kept getting larger and larger. Eventually, we discovered Pears Global had an office in Berlin. We called them repeatedly, trying to negotiate the lease, but always the same answer: we’re not responsible for any rental matters.” Absurdly enough, Pears Global’s Berlin office simply referred back to the companies in Luxembourg. “We were continually told that the picture we had of the letterbox was proof that this company existed.”

Syndikat’s situation illustrates the nefariously abstracted financial nature of real estate. Companies like Pears Global are landlords only in name. They don’t maintain properties or serve their tenants. They work to turn property into financial products with an interest yield that is generally higher than most bonds.

However, what throws a wrench in these cool calculations is the social character of the property. In Syndikat’s case, Pears Global encountered a cooperatively owned business that blurs the lines between private, communal, and neighborhood property. Christian sees such spaces like Syndikat as central to Berlin’s neighborhoods.

“Here is where a lot of organizers who stopped the luxury development of Tempelhofer field first met and organized. We see ourselves as an integral and open place for the neighborhood and the city,” says Christian.

It’s no wonder that companies want establishments like Syndikat evicted. Unlike an enterprise such as Starbucks, which will return an expected yield, Syndikat isn’t raking in money and can’t pay exorbitant rent. Syndikat’s own model isn’t extraction from its customers — it’s based on a strong anchoring in the community around it, rather than overcharging for Moscow Mules. As Rolnik explains in Urban Warfare: Housing Under the Empire of Finance, it is “not by chance that dispossession is also a machine for the material and symbolic annihilation of lifestyles.”

Christian feels the same way and fears having to make space for a more corporate establishment. “There’s something wrong when an investor can come in and put a Starbucks where 99 percent of the neighborhood would rather have us stay,” he laments.

Despite the looming catastrophe, Syndikat is exemplary for its ability to foster several spaces at once. It functions as an open space for the renter’s movement, hosting regularly bi-weekly consultations, and the community. It is a product of and has generated the inherent bottom-up power that is beginning to win against real-estate capital.

That said, they aren’t satisfied with remaining a local phenomenon. Looking determined, Christian explains, “We decided that if Pears Global wouldn’t speak with us that we’d go to London where their corporate headquarters are. We got in contact with local renter activists, painted some signs, and organized a demo at their office. To this day, though, we never got an answer from Pears Global. Our eviction trial is in October this year.”

In the back of the bar hangs a garishly yellow poster with purple text: “Fight speculation: Expropriate Pears Global.” It’s the motto of our campaign adapted to fit their own corporate landlord who would also be expropriated if the campaign is successful.

Syndikat realizes that to fight speculative capital, its avenues of accumulation need to be cut off. That starts high up the ladder and may take you to places untraveled, but this resistance remains nonetheless rooted in your surrounding neighborhoods.

We’re building power from the bottom up: the coming referendum

It’s a Tuesday night and we’re packed into a community center in Kreuzberg. The building is rather large, adorned with wooden slats on the outside so that it blends into the surrounding treed courtyard.

Representatives from the city’s housing movement coalition, including some from our expropriation campaign, are sitting together to discuss a coming protest to support our expropriation referendum and a rent cap. Our expropriation campaign called for the protest, yet as with any direct action for housing in Berlin, it’s never just one initiative that organizes it.

As part of a coalition of renter initiatives, neighborhood groups and tenant associations, our campaign is one brawny arm of the renters’ movement. That’s where the radical expropriation campaign got its start. We are simply one campaign alongside others; even though we may have garnered so much attention this year, it wouldn’t be possible without this base.

By demanding expropriation, we are telling the city to take apartments away from often stock market-listed corporations — with an arsenal of legal resources — for under market value. It’s destined to be a long process that requires the city to write a law if our referendum passes.

Thanks to article 15 of the German constitution, however, we also have good legal footing. Dubbed the socialism clause, it allows for the socialization of land and means of production. By demanding the city to socialize a significant proportion of housing in the city, we are fulfilling the criteria that the drafters had in mind: that collective economic arrangements should be a viable option to stop the excesses of capitalism.

Since the beginning of our campaign, we have been attacked from all angles by the real estate lobby in Berlin and across Germany. Germany’s main federal lobby group for housing companies recently announced a €1.6 million ad campaign against our campaign and other rent cap initiatives. It’s not surprising that we have made enemies with establishment politicians. They have a monied interest in keeping real estate business lucrative.

At the moment, we are waiting on a judicial review of the constitutionality of our referendum. It is taking months despite several legal opinions confirming its legality. But we continue to draw support for demonstrations and protests from this base and we are pushing hard to speed things up.

Within the movement, the consensus remains that this referendum is essential for Berlin’s survival as a place of alternative organization and economy.

When the next round of signature collection begins, necessary to put the referendum up for a vote, we will also look beyond this base. We will lay the groundwork for a more robust demos within the city, keeping it out of the hands of speculative capital for generations.

Berlin as a microcosm for the international real estate market

Berlin shares something with cities around the world: the penetration and dominance of foreign capital. This foreign capital comes in the form of financial management companies masquerading as landlords.

Rolnik names the whole setup “real-estate-financial complex.” It is composed of “income streams” converted into a range of assets that make it easy to swap, buy, and extort extra rent. Investors buy up whole blocks for cheap, due to an indebted municipality or private landlord, and the space is financialized as rents are raised or as buildings are demolished to make way for luxury apartments. Municipalities benefit from this as well because they can easily convert public spaces into quick profits.

Berlin has mortgaged off its spaces to international investors. A quick stroll down the East Side Gallery, once a desolate area along a remnant of the Berlin wall, shows the geospatial development of capital over the past few years. Rows and rows of ubiquitous, soulless, modern luxury apartments — “rich people ghettos,” as one politician calls them — are erected on land once owned by the city. Up until 2013, Berlin law forced the government to sell these incredibly valuable pieces of land to the highest bidder until activists forced them to change course, instead pursuing a policy of leasing land for building, rather than selling.

But developers didn’t miss out before that. From 2001 until 2011, the city sold over 14 million square meters of land to private developers — about 1.5 percent of the city — for around €2 billion.

The real estate financial complex often reveals massive democratic deficits in city politics. Last year, Berlin approved construction for luxury apartments and a hotel on the grounds behind the East Side Gallery. The spot is next to the infamous Living Levels project, a highrise that drew international outcry and high-profile intervention from David Hasselhoff in 2013 after developers removed a portion of the Berlin Wall to accommodate construction. This time around, almost 50,000 people signed an online signature to stop the construction. City politicians ignored the petition and refused to review the construction permit again, allowing the investors to instead build.

Beyond the reckless sale of land, Berlin’s own privatization of public housing has been disastrous for renters in the city. The city government has allowed the number of units in control of mega-landlords (those who own more than 3,000 apartments) to double since 2014, skyrocketing from some 90,000 units to almost 250,000.

Asset management companies bought up massive amounts of foreclosed houses or buildings after the 2008 financial meltdown. As Rolnik explains, “By mobilizing an enormous amount of capital via private equity funds, hedge funds, Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and other financial instruments, capital obtained through shareholders or directly from loans, they were able to buy up deeply undervalued ‘housing stocks’ available in cities.”

In Spain and the US, this dynamic led to the quick and tremendous accumulation of foreclosed homes and buildings. In Berlin, however, it was a kind of municipal foreclosure on public spaces and housing. This is what David Harvey calls accumulation through repossession or destruction.

Technology also plays an important role, as it speeds up the discovery and sourcing of new frontiers of capital and its subsequent flow there. Digital financial products are able to securitize every piece of the housing market — from single apartments to buildings or blocks. A single apartment or building can change owners dozens of times in a day theoretically, making it easier than ever to buy up massive amounts of land and apartments at once.

Berlin is a new frontier for real-estate capital and expansion; here, even the best organized and progressive politics can be quickly put in danger of complete annihilation. That is why it is more essential than ever for activists to build networks beyond their cities and to go to the places of power like Syndikat did with Pears Global.

Having triggered such international attention and winning real concessions, Berlin shows that it pays to go radical and that renters must collectively aim past a turgent body politic that is weighed down by its own economic interests. By leveling up, going neighborhood to neighborhood, there’s real power to be won. And a new city to be formed.

In the end, though, Berlin’s huge corporate landlords themselves provide one hell of an easy target. As Eric Hoffer puts it, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”