The Squatters

A struggle for shelter spreads

An unusual and painful environmental epidemic is sweeping West Germany. In Bremen last week a crowd of demonstrators stoned the town hall and had to be dispersed with tear gas and water cannons. In Hamburg, police moved into a march of 5,000 youthful protesters and made rune arrests for rock throwing. In West Berlin, young people barricaded themselves in buildings and hung out Signs: HERE WE LIVE AND HERE WE STAY --WE SHALL OVERCOME.

The police and the demonstrators were at war over squatting, the illegal takeover of unused housing. Squatting is not a new phenomenon in the major cities of housing-short Western Europe, but it has been gathering force in recent months, particularly in West Germany. Arrests of squatters have led to more demonstrations and begun to spill over into a broader, ill-defined protest against everything from materialism and technology to authority in general. Officials in Bonn fear the squatters' movement could become politicized or even develop links with terrorists.

West Germany's severe housing shortage touched off the current wave of squatting about two years ago, first among students, then among young professionals, academics and workers seeking housing at any affordable price. In West Berlin, 75,000 people are looking for apartments; only 7,000 are available at inflated prices (up to $600 a month for a dilapidated two-bedroom unit in a rundown neighborhood).

Not surprisingly, house hunters turned to the city's 800 empty buildings, most of them awaiting the wrecker's ball. About 2,000 squatters have moved into 120 such structures, many of them in the city's old Kreuzberg district. At first, comparatively sympathetic police looked the other way, more or less leaving the squatters alone. But the settlement situation turned acrimonious last December when police, ordered by judges to enforce property rights of landlords, raided a squatters' building in Kreuzberg. Violent protests flared. Three consecutive weekends of street battles left 150 demonstrators and 100 police injured and caused $500,000 in damage. Similar disorders suddenly flared in other European cities, most notably Amsterdam and Zurich. The squatters put much of the blame on local housing authorities for an inability to cope with social change--not only population increases and the influx of foreign workers but such variables as more divorces, which create double housing requirements.

"What is really criminal," says a 24year-old mechanic who lives with his wife and three children in a rundown building in Kreuzberg's Oranienstrasse, "is not that we are breaking the law, which we are, but that shelter is going unused." Another young, illegal Oranienstrasse resident recalls the travail of walking Berlin streets for a year looking for a place to live. Says she: "It was a nightmare. If you came across a place by chance, the owner would demand $5,000 in key money. Who can afford that?"

In an attempt to cope with the pressures and hold down the price of new housing, West Berlin authorities have recently shifted from a policy of leveling old housing to make room for new, to one of gutting structures for interior rehabilitation. Other legislative efforts are under way to make some squatting legal, and even to provide low-rent leases. Meanwhile the squatters are digging in for a long fight. Their defiant mood is plain from a banner draped from a balcony of one building in West Berlin: PRISON SOLVES THE HOUSING PROBLEM. qed

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