Germany's rental market is broken (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 21 Dec 2018)

• Germany's rental market is broken

• Original headline in German: Deutschlands Mietmarkt ist kaputt

• By Hannah Beitzer, Sabrina Ebitsch, Christian Endt, Thomas Öchsner, Martina Schories and Moritz Zajonz. Published in Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) on 21 December 2018

• https://projekte.sueddeutsche.de/artikel/wirtschaft/miete-wohnen-in-der-krise-e687627/

• Summary from Google Translate:

  • The housing market has gotten out of joint, not only in Hamburg or Munich. Real estate prices and rents have risen at an insane pace in many German cities in recent years and have made living the crucial social issue of our time.

  • This is one of the reasons why 57,000 people took part in the SZ project #MeineMiete and filled out a comprehensive questionnaire. Although the results now available are not representative, they nevertheless show how broken the rental market in Germany is - and not just in numbers, but also in fate. In addition to the standardized answers in the survey, almost 3,000 people sent us their stories. Taken together, these stories paint a depressing picture of the German housing market.

• Keywords: Germany, rental markets, affordability, crowdsourcing

This is a really interesting research and reporting project by the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany because of the methodology. The newspaper crowdsourced data and 3,000 personal stories on their rental housing situation from a total of 57,000 people across the country. As the paper states, this can't be seen as a scientific study, but by being transparent about the methodology, the SZ manages to paint an accurate picture of what the housing situation is like for a large number of people in Germany.