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The Berlin Rental Rip-Off: The Housing Crisis Boom in Tiny Rooms
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The Berlin Rental Rip-Off: The Housing Crisis Boom in Tiny Rooms

29 MIN · EN · STATUS: [ STREAMING ]
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Berlin's housing shortage has spawned a business model built entirely around a loophole: Germany's rent caps do not apply to furnished, temporary rooms. The film documents landlords charging 600 euros a month for spaces under 6 square meters, and shows how some go further, installing drywall partitions to carve a four-bedroom apartment into eight separate rentals. Newcomers to the city, often young people with no local contacts and few alternatives, describe getting stuck in these arrangements while searching for anything more stable and affordable. The camera follows tenant activists organizing pushback and tracks how the boroughs of Neukölln and Pankow are responding, tightening room-rental regulations and expanding neighborhood protection measures to target the practice. Interviews with renters, landlords, and officials lay out both sides of the fight: a housing market squeezed tight enough that subdividing apartments has become profitable, and a city trying to decide how much of that profit it will still allow. The result is a close, specific look at what a housing crisis looks like at the level of a single room.