So, who owns Wellington?

‘‘Rents have nearly doubled over the last decade.’’ ‘‘First-time buyers crowded out of booming housing market.’’ ‘‘Nearly 1800 people turn out for a single flat viewing.’’

The headlines above will be painfully familiar to Wellington renters, who bear the financial and physic toll of the city’s housing crisis like no-one else.

But they don’t correspond to stories from the pages of The Dominion Post. They don’t even correspond to stories about Wellington.

Instead, they describe the housing market in Berlin, where roughly 85 per cent of residents rent, and some 243,000 rentals are owned by an exclusive group of private mega landlords. But not for much longer, perhaps, if a radical non-binding referendum to seize property and create an egalitarian city succeeds.

‘‘Investors basically bought Berlin,’’ housing activist Katya Graf told City Monitor last November. ‘‘The situation was very hard, and a lot of people struggled to find affordable flats. There were a lot of evictions.’’

Graf is a member of Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co, an antigentrification tenants’ rights organisation,

which has led the charge to expropriate Berlin’s mega landlords. A referendum passed in September – with 56 per cent of the vote – but is not legally binding and faces substantial roadblocks, most crucially, a reluctant Berlin Senate.

It could see properties seized from large-scale landlords who own more than 3000 of them. An estimated 226,000 apartments would be repurposed and turned into affordable housing, owned in perpetuity by the people of the city.

Renters United might be the Wellington equivalent of Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co. The New Zealand group advocates for renters’ rights and radical housing reform. Spokesperson Ashok Jacob said Berlin was dealing with a ‘‘specific set of circumstances’’: a small number of mega landlords.

‘‘We don’t really have that problem here,’’ Jacob said. ‘‘The problem we have is there are so many landlords that can’t afford to be landlords – people who bought an investment property in the 1980s by over-leveraging their existing property.’’

Expropriation was an ‘‘elegant – if drastic – remedy to a housing shortage’’ but the market in Wellington was much more fragmented, Jacob said.

The narrative that mum and dad investors own our housing stock has been pervasive, but data released this week suggests more than 22,100 homes are owned by an elite class of large investors, each owning more than 20 apiece.

Infometrics principal economist Brad Olsen said while the numbers weren’t on the same scale as Berlin, they did challenge the common narrative about small investors.

‘‘Again and again we make those refrains, but we also know there’s a lot of property here being held by an increasingly concentrated group,’’ Olsen said.

In particular, a conversation was needed about the growing professionalisation of owners, as their activities affected a considerable number of people.

In Wellington, for instance, an enigmatic landlord owns or co-owns at least 79 properties, equivalent to roughly a quarter of Ō whiro Bay, or 4 per cent of Wellington Central.

Even so, the numbers were not quite comparable to Berlin where the prospective sale of one mega landlord to another could see 150,000 rentals owned by a single company. If the sale went ahead, 7 per cent of Berliners would rent from a single landlord.

Jacob would love to see ‘‘terrible landlords’’ stripped of their property portfolios, but no political party was likely to back such a policy. ‘‘It would be more a catharsis than a great solution, anyway,’’ he said.

Housing researcher Lucy TelfarBarnard tends to agree. There were fewer renters in New Zealand than Berlin – about a third of New Zealanders rent – and that often gave homeowners right of veto over progressive housing policies. ‘‘Because there are so many of them, effectively they have more political power as a group,’’ Telfar-Barnard said.

Instead, Wellington’s own housing revolution might be based in the bipartisan housing accord, which could see 105,000 new homes built throughout New Zealand over the next eight years.

‘‘If there were an oversupply of rental properties, then landlords would need to compete on price and quality – which they don’t currently, they just compete on location and number of bedrooms,’’ she said.

‘‘The new changes should – in time – mean that the sort of measures that Berlin needs are not quite not so needed here.’’

The Berlin model could, however, provide inspiration in other ways: a renewed focus on public housing, and the impetus to ask important questions.

Walk around the streets of the German capital for long enough, and you’ll be confronted with a question, often spray-painted on an apartment block: ‘‘Who owns Berlin?’’

It’s question that we don’t ask enough in Wellington, Olsen said.

‘‘Who owns Wellington? I’m not sure. What this highlights is a need for more publicly available information about these issues.’’