Striking back with the law: Legal struggles against corporate landlords in Barcelona and Berlin

Abstract

Corporate landlords have emerged as a new powerful actor of the housing crisis. Fuelled by financialised capital and operating simultaneously at a global and local scale, they have increased pressure on the housing markets. Urban social movements and tenants’ unions are reorganising through news strategies to adapt to new challenges. These include combining resistance on the streets with a strategic use of the law. This paper analyses the legal strategies employed by social movements in Barcelona/Catalonia and Berlin, which include promoting new legislation and creatively utilising existing legal frameworks to introduce forms of rent control and re-municipalisation of social and public housing and to force corporate landlords to offer social rents to vulnerable families instead of evicting them. In Catalonia, we focus on two laws developed by social movements and passed by the Catalan Parliament and Government: Law 24/2015, which introduced mechanisms to avoid evictions, deal with over-indebtedness problems and expand the public housing stock. Law 11/2020, which created a form of rent control, applied to several Catalan cities. In Berlin, we focus on the campaign Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen, DWE, which proposed the use of Art. 15 of the German Constitution to ‘socialize’ (i.e. to expropriate and re-municipalise) housing owned by corporate landlords. Focusing on these case studies we intend to critically investigate the impact and results of these new laws and policies. Through this analysis, we aim to contribute to academic and activist debates on the effectiveness, potential and limits of legal strategies for progressive urban change.