We’ve been looking for a new apartment for some months here, and it’s quite a different predicament than it is in the US. Here’s my experience and a little bit of commentary on what its like being a foreigner looking for an apartment in Germany.

In the US, looking for an apartment is usually a process involving a newspaper, a phone, and some form-filling. Not too hard, but you’ve got to prove that you’re financially able and might even have to go through a credit check. In fact, a credit check is becoming quite normal to get an apartment in a complex or not-so-cheap area. So, you could easily say that getting an apartment in the US is biased against people with bad credit – meaning you might have to settle for a place in a worse neighborhood, or that is much older, etc etc. While not being allowed legally to be prejudiced against a person because of race, age, religion, and all of that other crap – a landlord can be prejudiced against you because of your credit history.

Now on to what it is like in Germany.

The system here works quite alot different. First of all, many times apartments in apartment buildings are owned. In the US, the opposite is often true: a building or complex can be owned by one company (or group), and you rent from them. Here, it is usual to rent from an individual owner.

So what? Well, what happens is that the owner gets to be highly selective when picking a new tenant. Highly selective – yes, selective is the right word, although others would work just as well.

This basically means this: if the owner doesn’t like you, forget it. If you’re a foreigner and the landlord doesn’t like the policies of your country, forget it. If you look funny, forget it. If you don’t have a proper job (or what the landlord would consider as such), forget it. If you’re having a bad day and spilled coffee all over your white shirt, forget it. There are plenty of “less obtrusive” people that he’ll get to meet to approve of.

The system works something like this:

If the tenants want to get out of the lease early, which often happens, they usually take responsibility for getting new tenants. So they place an ad, and take the calls, and get a dozen or so interested applicants. And they ask some probing questions, which will give the landlord some ideas about where the person is from, what they do, how old they are, if they have children, pets, etc etc. Then the landlord can filter out the ones that he/she doesn’t want (no kids, pick the age group you want, if the last name looks funny then they’re probably foreigners).

Next, the landlord interviews the potential new tenants. Yes, like a job interview.

If they notice you’re not German (which is often the case for me), then you’re automatically put into a category – which, in my case, was eloquently put by one lady as being “not so bad”.

Moral of the story? Well, I guess I’m getting a feeling for what it’s like to be discriminated against, probably for the first time in my life (except when I wanted to apply for a job at the FBI once when I was at a job fair, and the recruiter told me I wasn’t black or a woman so I’d do a lot better to look somewhere else.. but I wouldn’t really call that discrimination, he was just telling me the truth). Even when I was young, we were the only white family in a large black neighborhood for a long time. Even getting treated a little bit different then wasn’t really the same as this. This is more like you have to pretend to be something that will please someone else, just so you can get what you want, which often times you don’t.

And if you’re a foreigner, it can be damn hard to get something as simple as a place to live without someone else helping you along the way.