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The Causes and Consequences of Berlin’s Rapid Gentrification | The New Yorker

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The city’s reputation as a place where artists and creative types can afford to live as they please is eroding.

Save this story Save this story Last New Year’s Eve was my first in Berlin. We live at the edge of Wedding, a neighborhood just north of the city center that, counter to what its name evokes, is gritty and sprawling, studded with public housing and betting parlors. A photo of our block from August, 1961, when it was part of West Berlin and the East Germans began construction of the wall, shows a squat row of cinder blocks beneath a canopy of barbed wire, running perpendicular to our street. The wall, still in its earliest stage, is only about chin high, and a flock of G.D.R. troops riding in a

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