Living - More than 27,300 forced evictions
Rent debts led to tens of thousands of apartments being evicted last year. More than 27,319 apartments were forcibly evicted in 2022, according to an answer from the German government to a question from the Left Party in the Bundestag, which is available to the German Press Agency. Rent debts are the most common cause of people losing their homes.
Caren Lay, the Left Party's expert on rent and housing, called for terminations to be revoked in the event of back rent payments and for "evictions into homelessness" to be banned. "If the federal government does not act, even more people will lose their apartments and homes, because rents are being raised to extreme levels," said Lay. "Every eviction is one too many."
According to the figures, most evictions were carried out in North Rhine-Westphalia (8690), Bavaria (2579), Lower Saxony (2288) and Saxony (2265). In terms of the number of residents, Brandenburg (1085), Bremen (413), Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia and Hamburg (902) recorded the most evictions.
Lay even expects the total number of evictions to be around 30,000 in 2022. The reason for this is that the federal government has not provided data for all federal states. If you add missing data for Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Schleswig-Holstein, as listed in the Deutsche Gerichtsvollzieher Zeitung, around 2,000 apartments are added to the total number, as the Left Party emphasizes. In the previous year, more than 29,000 homes in Germany were evicted.
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- The Left in North Rhine-Westphalia is strongly advocating against the high number of forced evictions in their state, following the revelation of over 8,690 evictions last year.
- The German Press Agency reported live from the Bundestag, where Caren Lay, the Left Party's expert on rent and housing, criticized the Federal Government for not preventing even more evictions due to rising rents to extreme levels.
- Lay called for the revocation of terminations and a ban on "evictions into homelessness," as the situation was forcing many to live on the streets.
- The federally provided data reveals that Berlin, despite being Germany's capital, was not among the top ten regions with the highest number of evictions in 2022.
- Saxony, though having a smaller number of residents compared to North Rhine-Westphalia, recorded a significant number of evictions, making it one of the top regions with evictions in Germany.
- Amidst this worsening situation, the Left Party is urging the Federal Government to provide comprehensive data on evictions across all German states, claiming that incomplete data from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Schleswig-Holstein adds around 2,000 apartments to the country's total eviction count.
Source: www.stern.de
