10 Comments

What is "weekend property"? Just a small house you are expected only to want to spend one or two nights a week in, or are you actually banned from being their during the week?

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It can actually be both depending on where you buy. Some areas are actually zoned as weekend house and you can't live there permanently. They have less strict building regulations too.

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Do you prefer your substack subscribers to your patreon ones? I prefer patreon since it's all in one place, but I don't always see notices there when things fail so.

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We actually prefer Substack for the same reason -- it keeps everything in one place (for us). But patreon is still there!

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Imagine if Berlin made housing a human right. Oh wait the United Nations did.

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BTW, did you pass your German exam, Andrew?

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I actually did not. I'm appealing it however, as there were more issues then I discussed in my post.

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Is it just me or are the garden allotments such a waste of space in a time when there is a severe housing shortage? I think they could be redeveloped and provide so much housing and public green space.

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Nah, this viewpoint has bothered me for years and I've never really known why. This morning I realized that Kleingartenanlage are an important subculture just like Spätis or even a Zehlendorf Yacht Club and sacrificing yet another subculture in the name of gentrification just contributes to the dumbing down of Berlin. There are far better solutions than destroying often decades and generations of social capital.

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I had the same thought the other day. A few of these areas have been developed in recent years, to much resistance. If they tried it on a mass scale there would be civil war.

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