The ghost floor at Q216: Berlin Tenants’ Union against landlord fraud
The story of Q216, a former office building turned “affordable housing” project in Berlin, could have been a tale of urban renewal. Instead, it has become a case study in the creative cruelty of the modern landlord class — where rents are hiked, tenants are ignored, and entire chunks of square footage are invented out of thin air. The Q216, located on Frankfurter Allee in Lichtenberg, Berlin, was meant to provide young people with small, affordable apartments after years of the building sitting vacant. That was the pitch. The reality however is a rapidly deteriorating structure where tenants face everything from cockroach infestations to non-responsive management and inexplicably high rents for the supposed social and affordable advertised apartments.
We, the Berlin Tenants’ Union, formed in response to these conditions, and made eight simple demands: a reduction of the base rent to €8 per square meter, adjustments to reflect actual apartment sizes, security improvements, pest control, a faster response time from property management, and the removal of bizarre and offensive hallway decorations. The landlords’ response? Silence, legal threats, and more denial.
After we delivered the demands to their office, we managed to negotiate with the Landlords from Ulrich & Lakomski Real Estate GmbH face-to-face, were they agreed to meet all of our demands by a handshake. Not long after, they stonewalled us and consequently we helped tenants to measure their own apartments. What we found was predictable but new as in a new way of exploiting tenants: every single unit we measured was smaller than the size listed in the contract, some by as much as 19% and most at least by 10%.
Legally, rental contracts can use vague terms like “around 25 sqm,” which provides landlords with leeway. But there’s a hard legal line: if an apartment is more than 10% smaller than advertised, tenants are entitled to demand rent reductions by the maintenance costs and rent increases must be based on actual size.
So what does a 10% size reduction mean in a building of 463 apartments? We estimate that the missing space adds up to an entire floor that doesn’t exist. That’s right, crucially tenants are collectively paying rent on an entire ghost floor. We don not find this to be just some sort of incompetence, it seems more like a deliberate and systemic “mistake” that always goes into the benefit of the landlords.
When confronted with this evidence, the landlords didn’t attempt to refute it. Instead, they increased their aggression. The property managers, Lutz Lakomski & Arndt Ulrich, funnelled all communication through a law firm, sending us an expensive looking threatening letter full of empty accusations, which looks likely to have cost them around €500 per page to draft.
At first, the landlords dodged, denied, and dismissed our Union and the tenant’s rights to a lower rent by the German law of the “Mietpreisbremse” — Rent Control Index, which is a regulatory measure that limits the amount of by which rent can be increased for new tenancy agreements. The crux however is that Landlords deliberately exploit this law or ignore it as there are no direct consequences of taking a too high rent, as tenant’s usually have to work individually with a lawyer to demand a rent decrease — Then, they turned to absurd legal threats. Among their demands: tenants should not be allowed to hold picnics outside the building. That’s right — picnics. Even more ridiculous, they threatened to ban tenants from entering the building, the same tenants who live there. It’s a remarkable level of arrogance, akin to a feudal lord forgetting that peasants still hold the keys to their own homes.
An archived advertisement from 2012, showing a real estate manager holding a sign of the true size and cost of an apartment in the Q216 building: 31 sqm, 306,70€ rent plus maintenance cost, in total 378€. As of now such an apartment is rented out as 35 sqm for to 695€.
One of the stranger battles in this fight has been over the hallway artwork. For years, the walls of Q216 were lined with images that ranged from sexist depictions of naked female bodies to Coca-Cola advertisements to a photograph of the Twin Towers under attack — Nothing says “welcome home” quite like a disaster tourism exhibit in your hallway. After the tenant’s demanded their removal, the landlords complied, but in a display of breathtaking cynicism, first they told us through their lawyers to go to an Andy Warhol exhibition to better understand their sexist hallway depictions, only to replace them later on with what seemed to be their own holiday photos.
“It’s nice that you made it here. Before we get into the content today, I’d like to summarize why we’re here in the first place. Not only do we all live in this beautiful, charming house, we also have to deal with these nice gentlemen here who have been surprising us with new vacation photos in the hallways for weeks now. I don’t know whether they are making an awkward attempt to create a kind of closeness or whether they want to brazenly show us what our rent is being spent on.” — Resident of the Q216 at one of our Tenant Union meetings.
Among them: one of landlords Arndt Ulrich dining with what appears to be his sons in a fancy restaurant, all wearing caricatured hats, where one of them wears a disrespectful stereotype “Chinese” hat (see the cover Photo). The message was clear: “This building is ours, and we can put whatever we want on the walls, because we don’t care what you think”.
Further into the fight of the Q216, we also began to notice that long-term tenants, those who have lived in Q216 for 8 to 10 years, are facing aggressive legal action to force them out. Why? Because they still pay relatively low rents compared to the inflated prices newer tenants are being charged. The pattern is clear: push out older tenants, jack up the rent, and repeat. In many cases, these evictions don’t hold up in court, but the goal isn’t necessarily to win; it’s to exhaust tenants into submission and indulge an arbitrary fear that targets individuals to give up their apartments.
Despite all these tactics, the union is gaining ground. Regular meetings are held with tenants to share knowledge, legal strategies, and updates on the landlords’ latest tricks. The goal is not just to push back against Q216’s landlords but to expose the larger structural problem: Berlin’s housing market is being run like a fraud operation, with landlords extracting maximum profit from tenants who are given poorly functioning rights, filled with loopholes.
If negotiations don’t move forward, the next step is legally withholding maintenance costs. German law forbids landlords from profiting off of maintenance charges. Yet, at Q216, these costs are calculated based on the false apartment sizes — meaning tenants are being overcharged. Legally, tenants can challenge these fees by demanding full transparency on the actual costs incurred. If the landlords fail to provide that, tenants have the right to withhold payments. This is a fairly powerful tool to legally confront the landlords with their own inadequate bureaucratic demands. A partial rent strike does not only expose them to a broader public by drawing a lot of attention to their questionable business model, but also affects their financial planning. It is supposed to hit them where it hurts, to take our negotiation offers more serious. In this case we see no other option than to take this step to bring the landlords to the negotiating table.
The problem tenant’s face in here, and increasingly worldwide isn’t just about this one building. Berlin is experiencing a new form of tenant exploitation. Landlords pose as social-minded developers while charging up to €695 for a small one room, with an open kitchen, apartment that is often much smaller than that than initially specified which as we now know. They weaponize legal threats to scare tenants into submission. They seem to manipulate maintenance costs to extract extra rent. And they try to create bureaucratic nightmares to exhaust anyone who resists.
But we, the tenant’s of the Q216 building and the Tenant’s Union are refusing to let them play their game. We continuously expose what appears to be their fraudulent operation, and organize the neighbours, which are fighting back. The power of Organizing and door-to-door conversations has shown us over and over again, that we can and will win this fight. We laugh at the landlords attempt to label their own tenant’s as illegal aliens in the building they pay them (a too high) rent. The landlords may own the building — though as united tenant’s we show, over and over again, that we own the power to expose them, and to force them to negotiate with us.
