Christliches Immobiliengeschäft: Profitgier und Verdrängung. Wie die westdeutschen Bistümer Sozialsiedlungen ausbeuten.

In the organizer's words:

Lecture and discussion with Ralf Hutter
The fact that the two large churches are among the largest private landowners in Germany - perhaps even the largest - is relatively well known. This refers to the feudal past and relates primarily to land, i.e. including fields and forests. However, there is one area of ecclesiastical real estate where hardly anything is known: the rental of apartments. This is probably mainly due to a lack of journalistic research. There are apparently no publications on the letting practices of church and church-related institutions at a national level, at least not from the recent past. Books on church finances do contain information on one or two church housing companies, but no concrete conflicts with tenants.
The journalist Ralf Hutter has presented the first major, nationwide investigation into the antisocial behavior of various church and quasi-church real estate players towards tenants. He has devoted most of his attention to the Aachener Siedlungs- und Wohnungsgesellschaft, the largest housing company of the Catholic Church based in Cologne. This company has paid out more and more money to its six West German dioceses - including two of the richest in the world - over the last 15 years in parallel with the growth of the German housing crisis. The profits are generated, among other things, from former social housing estates in Cologne and Düsseldorf, where Aachen often neglects maintenance, sometimes causing people existential hardship. This is also a declared future focus of the company's activities, which further exacerbates the situation: the energy modernization of old houses, which households have to pay for, even if the savings achieved do not outweigh the costs by far. In Düsseldorf, this led to protests in the Kissinger Straße estate in the Eller district in 2021. However, construction work continued there until the end and affected many people. Current conflicts like these will also be discussed in this Humanist Salon.

Ralf Hutter studied sociology. He works in Berlin as a freelance journalist for public radio and for various magazines, newspapers and online media. The book accompanying the lecture was published by Alibri Verlag in 2023 and can be ordered here.

A cooperation event of DA! and IBKA.

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