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A major victory for renters in Berlin today:

Berliners have backed one of Europe’s most radical responses to gentrification: seizing property from so-called mega landlords. In a referendum timed to coincide with Germany’s general election on Sunday, locals supported expropriation by 56% to 39%.

“It’s nearly impossible to describe this feeling,” Kalle Kunkel, an activist for Berlin’s Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen campaign, told Euronews. “For many of us, it feels like the end of a four-year marathon. Or at the very least, we’ve reached a major high point.”

The campaign is named after Deutsche Wohnen, a private landlord that held more than 110,000 apartments in Berlin.

Kunkel sees the referendum victory as the culmination of years of campaigning against skyrocketing housing and rental prices. The vote could see private landlords that hold more than 3,000 units having them expropriated and folded into the city’s affordable housing stock. This would socialise more than 240,000 apartments.

“It was an incredibly clear victory,” Kunkel added. “A majority of Berliners in all but two (of 12) districts supported the initiative. Which means the whole city said: ‘We don’t want speculators to have a say in our housing’. And that’s a decision that political leaders simply can’t ignore.”

Unfortunately, it looks like Berliners’ just and democratic demands may be quashed by a constitutional court. But the fact that this referendum passed, primarily with the support of The Left party and a coalition of mostly younger renters in Berlin, shows that voters are increasingly convinced that deep-reaching systemic change is necessary to correct course. It is a big step toward a more just order.