Berlin's refugee shelters nearly full despite fewer arrivals

Berlin is receiving fewer refugees than it has in years, yet its shelters are almost fully occupied. The Berliner Zeitung asks how that can be, but the full explanation is behind a paywall and is not covered here.

The article opens with the city's newest shelter, a nine-storey office building on Hasenheide in Kreuzberg. It formerly housed the Deutsche Rentenversicherung, the German pension insurance body, and has 921 places. The first residents, about a dozen people, were due to move in at the beginning of October. After that, 30 to 40 more are meant to arrive each day. Each resident is supposed to stay no longer than six months.

The state of Berlin has not said what the conversion cost, citing business secrecy as the reason.

The report notes that a new large facility in the middle of a residential neighbourhood sounds like an emergency, with full gymnasiums and echoes of 2015 or 2022. According to the article, however, the situation today is different, because arrivals in Berlin are at their lowest in years while the shelters remain nearly full.