Post is updated near the bottom of post…
We all knew this day would come – we just didn’t know how soon. Germany is now confiscating residential units to rent out migrants living in the city of Hamburg.
Gatestone Institute reports:
Authorities in Hamburg, the second-largest city in Germany, have begun confiscating private dwellings to ease a housing shortage — one that has been acutely exacerbated by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow more than two million migrants into the country in recent years.
City officials have been seizing commercial properties and converting them into migrant shelters since late 2015, when Merkel opened German borders to hundreds of thousands of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Now, however, the city is expropriating residential property units owned by private citizens.
In an unprecedented move, Hamburg authorities recently confiscated six residential units in the Hamm district near the city center. The units, which are owned by a private landlord, are in need of repair and have been vacant since 2012. A trustee appointed by the city is now renovating the properties and will rent them — against the will of the owner — to tenants chosen by the city. District spokeswoman Sorina Weiland said that all renovation costs will be billed to the owner of the properties.
The expropriation is authorized by the Hamburg Housing Protection Act (Hamburger Wohnraumschutzgesetz), a 1982 law that was updated by the city’s Socialist government in May 2013 to enable the city to seize any residential property unit that has been vacant for more than four months.
The forced lease, the first of its kind in Germany, is said to be aimed at pressuring the owners of other vacant residences in the city to make them available for rent. Of the 700,000 rental units in Hamburg, somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 (less than one percent) are believed to be vacant, according an estimate by the Hamburg Senate.
This is truly UNPRECEDENTED! Will Merkel’s madness ever come to an end?
UPDATE: Tim Kukral from Zapp – Dass Medienjagazin sent this update and clarification.
Our research and research by other German media, amongst them the “Hamburger Abendblatt”, the newspaper which first reported on the issue, show that the way you reported the story is not correct. You wrote:
“Germany Is Now Confiscating Homes To Use For Merkel’s Migrants!”, and: “Germany is now confiscating residential units to rent out migrants living in the city of Hamburg.”
In fact, Hamburg authorities (not “Germany”) is withdrawing the disposal of residential units (not “confiscating” them) from the owner for the property management (not any authority or even the German state/”Germany”) to be able to renovate these residential units and then put them back to the free housing market (not “to rent out migrants” or even “Merkel’s Migrants” – in fact, the German chancellor has nothing to do with the local law that allows this practice and her party is the opposition party in Hamburg; and even the Hamburg authorities told us they neither have the intention nor the possibility to use the residential units for migrants – it’s the property manager who will choose the residents).
The major part of your article consists of an excerpt of an article published by the Gatestone Institute (also on May 14th, 2017). While our research shows that the content of this quotation matches the facts, the Gatestone Institute chose to add an incorrect headline to the story. The very few sentences you, The Gateway Pundit, added to the Gatestone Institute’s article seem to be based exclusively on this incorrect headline.
