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SOLD CITY

WHEN HOUSING BECOMES A COMMODITY

The new "FILMS FROM BELOW" by Leslie Franke and Herdolor Lorenz.

Help us to organise hundreds of film showings to show the way to undermine speculation in housing

SOLD CITY – When housing becomes a commodity  126 minutes

 Since the non-profit status of housing has been abolished in Europe, housing is no longer considered a human right. Now the market decides where people live. How will the housing issue be decided in the 21st century? Using Berlin, Paris, Hamburg, Munich, London and Vienna as examples, "SOLD CITY" shows how those affected experience the real estate boom and what options there are to resist it.

For more than a decade, we have been experiencing a unique real estate boom in the world's metropolises. This has a mirror-image flip side: sharply rising rents. Income growth is no longer keeping pace. Low- and normal-income citizens are threatened with displacement from sought-after inner-city locations. A turning point was reached when politicians in Europe decided to end the so-called " non-profit housing system”.

It is no longer the social purpose of housing that is the most important aspect of housing policy, but the return on investment that housing generates. Yield is the profession of the rapidly expanding real estate groups. The real estate companies Vonovia and Deutsche Wohnen, but also LEG, ADO Properties, Covivio, Akelius, TAG Immobilien Grand City Properties, CDC Habitat and others dominate the housing market increasingly all over Europe. They make record profits that industries can't even dream of. The owners are anonymous pension funds and other investment funds from all over the world which - in search of profitable investment opportunities - discovered "concrete gold" for themselves after the 2008 financial crisis. The expectation of a return on investment is changing the urban landscape. It is not only in Paris and London that the city centers are visibly degenerating into a kind of museum for tourists and rich apartment owners. Neighborhoods that have evolved over time are being transformed into up-market very hip districts with the same expensive art and pub culture everywhere. Where working people stream in from the suburbs in the morning and disappear again at night because they can no longer afford the rents there.

"SOLD CITY" not only makes the dangers for urban culture visible. A new social question and an immense danger for democracy can be seen.

The film will explore the question of how people experience the real estate boom, where the rent increases come from and what possibilities there are to resist them. And last but not least, it will also be asked whether it is justified that land, which is finite, with its immense increases in value has been commoditized.

Here you can download the film SOLD CITY