Who is looking for where we live?
I have been living in Berlin’s socially strongly mixed neighborhoods for a long time. What some find charming is explicitly desirable for others – and for the next one no go area. However, we quickly forget that most residents simply have no choice. I already had the wildest discussions. I know the arguments of the unavailed feeling in the park and old syringes in the sandpit. But I also know the complaining about the new, hip café around the corner and the increased rental price. The relationships are often as abstract as they are obvious and illuminating it closer to the frame. Nevertheless: Tenant X or coffee house Y is rarely to blame, but more often the victims.
Capitalism makes that we cannot decide where we live.
Factors such as social capital, economic capital but also the market (now very shortened) are decisive. So I live in social mix because it is a financial compromise for me. Here I can still afford as a big city family without working completely broken. And what is a very unknown neighborhood or no go area for many is a living space for others and my family. The square meter will cost us € 10.50 in the future. This is significantly below the Berliner and just below the German average. So I don’t complain anyway. Why too, I found an apartment. Hurray! There are daycare centers, green, playgrounds and a lot of contrast program. Like many families, we literally fell out of the Berlin Ring in the process of finding an apartment … which does not represent a problem for everyone and does not mean the same in every direction, but means that they do not decide with less income where or how they live.
This is nothing new for our ears per se, only we have to get used to the fact that this income boundary will move further and further into the middle class. So -called problem children are those with many reported crimes, a lot of unemployment, migration stories. The definition is known. Social mixing: more and more difficult. Yes, sometimes it seems to me almost as if many liked to banish all the others from their neighborhood. The drug addicts, who are not German mother tongues, the others. And I? I have to be honest and always admit what kind of luck I am to find different realities in life in front of my threshold. So I feel regularly like an intruder with my freelance, but usually above -average income. And fight against inner demons, while secretly I want a nice restaurant and a second cafe. Yes, it drips from ambivalence and contradiction.
3 rooms, kitchen, bathroom – what does my child need?
Accompanied by a claim to me excessive by social media, but also my four walls, we have just managed to be invited to four apartment visits, all of which were created exclusively via private contacts. Social capital, clear. One was too expensive, one was too small. One was unprofitable and another on the ground floor. Nothing for us. Unfortunately, as a little social media mouse, I got a problem with my job:
My eye is conditioned on extremely beautiful and well -furnished old buildings.
Full with designer furniture, herringbone parquet and one or the other extra square meter and thinks you can see the normal life here … For a long time I tried to talk myself that this was my taste. Today I know that not only many of my friends, but also most people I follow on Tik Tok or Instagram, simply earn more than me, who have been wonderfully tolerated with their laminate for four years. There are no heirs in the apartment or a saved Bolia sofa. While many have learned to stay with themselves when looking at it, I quickly weather the measure of all things, the right thing in the wrong, another point on the Wish List for the all-round carefree package as a family. As if I were doing better with all of these things and above all: as if it were an expression of true love for my child and my partner. What I am currently trying to develop in therapy is a form of upward comparison that has disguised itself as my taste.
I now think I know which refrigerator you need if you cook a small child at the age of 30 and look like children’s rooms 2023. And the apartment can also fit in this scheme. With a distorted worldview, one is not so horny and not so easy. But now I practice to stay and to weight my Love Language differently. Who wants to work more to buy more things?
We were this family that really tried it in every way.
We had printed notices in our favorite neighborhoods well before the Immoscout profile was. When it was clear that that was by no means enough, I became a member, and as with a part -time job, I had planned fixed times for the search on the cell phone and spent hours with it to fill in and correspond to property management. The amount of time was so immense that I had to put my work down in addition to parental leave in order to concentrate on the search for an apartment and still have enough time for my child. In addition, it was a psychological challenge to keep getting involved with a new apartment, being hopeful, in order to be left behind at the end with a deleted offer without an invitation.
After 10 months of the search, I was particularly concerned that the absence of the right offer means to have to leave Berlin sooner or later. Fortunately, we only had internal pressure to take off, were not tied to an termination of the contract or an action for personal needs and only stepped on our feet. Nevertheless, it remains oppressive to realize that it is completely unfree in such a life -changing decision.
Rent, buy, exchange.
If you are traveling on the common portals, you always see exchange offers that have displaced the regular rental apartments from the regular portals. In addition, it is difficult to find an apartment today without being on the end devices without various premium memberships and without 24/7, in order to then consider exchanging the current apartment for something better. The shock followed immediately. The whole exchange apartments with the dream rents in the dream neighborhoods in the really family-friendly house and with the great connection are no potential exchange. These are more and more apartments of people, “who want something new”, need a “change of wallpaper” to whom “the neighborhood has become too boring”. And what used to count as a legitimate reason for a move is in the middle of the crisis stove housing market, there is no reason to venture into the shark tank of the apartment search. So the needy with termination of their own, too small four walls or separation history, they encounter those that do not want to deteriorate in equipment, location and look and still would not find a new apartment so easily … A disappointing mix if you ask me.
“Hey Tom, is our apartment maybe something for you?”, I ask the lawyer in the 90m2 Friedrichshainer Altbau, who has already “lived in the neighborhood for too long”.
“Unfortunately not, but good luck with the search :)” he replies. I am about to proclaim the socialist revolution, but truly to wish Tom that he is sacrificing in Samariterkiez. Does it help to want the foresight of his fellow human beings? I think that you can reflect on how much living space you take or really need when you live in the big city. The frustration grows. The need too. I see offers such as “Who is we exchanging Munich against Berlin?”, Exchange applications “Altona against Kreuzberg”, but also European metropolises such as Barcelona or Paris run into your way again and again.
The location is so tense that nobody can afford to go into the race without an offer.
I am scared and never thought that this is our only key to happiness. And how bent and complicated that comes around the corner.
Our exchange partner is as perplex as we are. Separated for some time, the rent has become too expensive for your current apartment. She may stay in the neighborhood, has a limited budget and her ex as a sub -tenant. Well bravo. Both are not lucky and are co-dependent. When we hear about each other about a girlfriend, she is excited and I skeptically. All of this sounds like a lot of work and even more stress. After a short back and forth we look at the apartment and are thrilled. Schicker than we could have dreamed of, smears in the direct location and in the price hey, we dare. Our property management companies are small and cooperative, our WhatsApp conversations seem to be endless. We write about the upcoming phone calls, on discount payments and some of ourselves on sums, moving days, contractual signings. Everyone is afraid. To terminate fear too early and without standing. Fear that a property management suddenly jumps off. Fear of the day on which two households suddenly have two removals, two decreases, two handed over the stage. Take a deep breath. Ultimately, we stood there for three days with a dismissed rental agreement and without newly signed. That could just be displaced.
We are there now.
And we know that we can no longer move for now. That we will not find anything and the market is so tense that our chances are even worse in the future than last year. I would have endured the search for half a year, after which we should have extended our radius extremely. So far that our home towns would have been meant. So far that the Berlin idea we once had when we moved out of our children’s rooms would suddenly fail because, like so many, we can no longer have a say in where we want to live. Now, so shortly before the move, I often ask myself how the search would have looked like, we would not have such a serious appearance, good Schufa information, the ability to sell, write and shape us. The possibility to look 100 times a day whether there would have been a new offer and then react immediately. The answer cries me.
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Photo: Jonas Denil
