Putting aside my views on the proposal itself, I think I can state with near 100% certainty that the city state government is not going to respect the will of the people in this instance.
The reason referendum results are always way more left wing than the policies of the city government is that while you can’t bribe the whole populace, you can certainly bribe any representative government.
Well, sure, the Berlin government doesn't have the funds to do this, so voting that it happen isn't exactly going to move the needle. The problem here is that the voters are stuck between the two pincers of Germany's obsession that debt is evil with Germany's law abiding tendencies.
To be legal they would need to purchase the houses at market prices and in our current low IR world, those prices are high.
At ~5,000 euros per square meter[1], and say 50 sq meters the average flat size, that's 250K euros per flat. Berlin has 2 million flats. To purchase only 10% of them and hand them over to politically-connected households would cost 50 Billion Euros, and you'd still have 90% of flats in private hands. To get 50% of flats in public hands and make things more democratic would be 250 B euros. Berlin's entire budget is ~30B, and here you have Germany's fear of taking on debt working against them, but even in the US, most people would agree it's a terrible time to get into the real estate investment business.
But even if it wanted to, Berlin, being a mere city government, is not able to void things like property rights and so must pay market prices. Berlin, also being a mere city government, is not able to borrow at risk free rates like the Federal government and is wary of taking on debt. Thus this is something that requires the support and financing of the Federal government, which isn't going to happen no matter how many resolutions the people of the city of Berlin pass. Because this is not fundamentally a city-specific issue, it is a national issue, and individual cities can't really go their own way on this except in very small token gestures.
Just like land can be aquired this way to build a highway.
And just like whole towns have been expropriated for surface coal mines.
It feels like liberians only take offence in expropriation when it affects companies for the benefit of the people, but never vice versa (see https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/landespolitik/braunkohle-rwe...)
And please, spare us Godwin's law.
Maybe Germany has a similar postulate in its Constitution, maybe not. Still, it feels absurd to me that the voters feel it's ok to decide to carry a vote to expropriate some people. Maybe the article is simply misrepresenting what happened there, and maybe the "expropriation" is actually appropriation with fair compensation. But if it's simply expropriation, this is just a small step on a slippery slope.
