Berlin plans new mass accommodation for refugees

On a quiet residential street in Berlin's district of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf stands the sprawling office complex that Berlin's State Office for Refugee Affairs (LAF) intends to convert into an accommodation facility for up to 1,500 refugees. The building is located on Soorstrasse in Westend, home to about 20,000 residents, and one of the capital's most affluent neighborhoods, where tree-lined boulevards are strewn with opulent villas, embassy buildings and well-maintained apartment blocks.

"It doesn't bother me really," says a young father out with his baby when asked about the plans, "I just think it would be better for them to be spread out and not in one place."

"I'm not against it," says a middle-aged man who has lived in the area for 24 years, "I just think putting so many people under one roof is going to lead to problems."

Sitting on the terrace at the nearby Ulme35 neighborhood cultural center where a German lesson for Ukrainian schoolchildren is underway, Amei von Hülsen-Poensgen, from the "Willkommen im Westend" alliance that supports refugees in the area, says she "totally shares" the concerns of local residents. "Housing 1,500 people in a former office block is a stupid idea, I'm sorry," she exclaims, adding that she doesn't trust some of the big operators contracted to run refugee accommodation facilities.

Over 30,000 refugees in Berlin are living in accommodation facilities run by the LAF. Many have already had their asylum claims approved but are stuck in state-run facilities because they can't find affordable accommodation on the capital's fiercely competitive real estate market. It is particularly hard for families with more than one child because there simply aren't enough apartments with a suitable number of rooms, so there are disproportionately large numbers of children stuck in refugee facilities. 

Germany's heated debate over the right to asylum

With the success of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), a party that secured just over 30% of the vote in recent state elections in Saxony and Thuringia, immigration has become a hot-button issue. A fatal knife attack in which three people were killed and eight more wounded in the west German city of Solingen on August 23, suspected to have been carried out by a Syrian national who had managed to avoid deportation, has led to cross-party talks on the issue. 

The rightward shift on immigration has been an "extremely frightening development" within German politics, says Nihad El-Kayed, an expert on integration and migration at Berlin's Humboldt University. "I find it alarming that nobody is really taking a stand for an open and progressive asylum policy because I think you also have to keep that in mind: 70% in Saxony and Thuringia did not vote for the AfD and only a small portion of the German population lives there. So it is also anti-democratic to focus on the 30% — which are of course still very alarming."

At the end of 2023, 3.78 million residents were registered in Berlin, according to Germany's Federal Statistical Office.  The LAF reports that in 2023 Berlin took in 16,762 asylum seekers and an additional 15,144 fleeing the war in Ukraine. So far this year the numbers of new arrivals are slightly down: Almost 5,000 new asylum seekers were registered in Berlin in the first six months of 2024, the majority from Turkey, Afghanistan, and Syria. About the same number of war refugees arrived from Ukraine.

Little enthusiasm for the new centralized housing system

Refugees in Berlin are allocated to districts in the city according to their month of birth, but the districts often send them back to the LAF because they don't have the places either. To stop the merry-go-round, the Berlin Senate recently announced plans to take responsibility away from individual district authorities and turn the LAF into a centralized, state-wide authority for housing refugees and the homeless. 

Hülsen-Poensgen says that while a centralized system could solve the problem of districts bidding against each other for accommodation and driving up prices, she doesn't really think much of the plans because the LAF is already failing. "There are people who know they can make a lot of money out of the situation unchecked. So there's a lot of abuse going on, and the quality of life in state-run shelters is often unspeakably bad," she says. 

Research shows that when it comes to successful social and economic integration for refugees, a decisive factor is having a home of their own in an area where there is good support infrastructure, according to El-Kayed. Berlin may have the infrastructure, but it doesn't have the homes. "You can already see a tension between the infrastructure that urban spaces can offer and the failure of policymakers in almost all urban areas in Germany in recent years and decades to actually secure affordable housing," she told DW. 

Berlin's Senate Department for Urban Development, Building and Housing estimates that the city currently needs over 100,000 new apartments to meet demand, in particular for low and middle-income households. Added to this is the need for additional apartments for the 200,000 more people predicted to move to the capital by 2040.

Short-term planning worsens the problem

To help ease part of the problem, the LAF is in the process of building more and more refugee accommodation facilities like the one touted for Soorstrasse, as well as expanding the temporary accommodation available at Berlin's largest and most controversial refugee facility at the former Tegel airport. The site already houses around 5,000 people in what are essentially shared tents in aircraft hangers.

Berlin's senator for integration, Cansel Kiziltepe of the center-left SPD, had announced in August that she wants to reduce the size of the refugee accommodation facility at Tegel, citing the high costs and the problems it creates for residents and integration. The plan is to move refugees to new container villages and medium-sized facilities, including the one planned for Soorstrasse. 

However, Kiziltepe was quickly contradicted by the center-right Christian Democrat (CDU) state parliamentary group leader Dirk Stettner who told the German Press Agency: "As long as the federal government does not change its asylum policy and does not stop or at least significantly reduce the high influx of asylum seekers, we will continue to need large-scale accommodation."

In fact, the LAF currently plans to expand the Tegel facility to make room for 8,000 refugees, but that will only be possible until 2025 when the plan is to turn the site into a technology research park for companies and scientific institutions.

Edited by: Rina Goldenberg

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