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Apartment blocks in Berlin
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According to a study, almost 1.1 million households in Germany have less than the subsistence level left to live on after rent has been deducted.
This means that almost 13 percent of tenant households in major German cities are in a precarious economic situation, according to a study by the Berlin Humboldt University, which was funded by the union-affiliated Hans Böckler Foundation.
A total of around 2.1 million people live in the households affected.
Single parents are particularly affected: every fourth single parent had less money available after paying the rental costs than is stipulated in the unemployment law as a standard requirement.
According to the Böckler Foundation, the high housing costs continue to intensify economic inequality: Before deducting rent and ancillary costs, the richest households recently had 4.4 times the monthly net income of a household in the lowest income class, according to the study.
After deducting rent and ancillary costs, this factor rose to 6.7.
According to the Böckler Foundation, the reason is that poorer households have to spend a significantly larger proportion of their income on rent.
Nevertheless, they lived on average in significantly less living space and in poorly equipped apartments.
"The housing conditions are not only an expression, but also a factor of social inequality in our cities," the authors of the study write.
"The already existing polarization of income is intensified by the rent payment."
For the study, researchers led by urban sociologist Andrej Holm evaluated housing data from the 2018 microcensus.
The official household survey collects data on the housing situation of households in Germany every four years.
The Federal Statistical Office had also analyzed the burden on households with housing costs.
According to these data, in 2019 almost 14 percent of the population (around 11.4 million people) lived in households that were financially overburdened by high housing costs.
The statistics authority sees an overload of housing costs when a household spends more than 40 percent of its disposable income on housing - regardless of whether the person concerned is renting or living in their own four walls and paying off a loan, for example.
Read more details about the study and an overview of the cities in which the problem of high rents is greatest.
mmq / AFP / Reuters / dpa