Five years ago Jörn Wiemann, a pharmaceutical company manager, decided it was time to buy his own apartment. He was 33, had saved up some money and knew he wanted to stay in Hamburg, Germany. Wiemann visited 40 flats but prices were too high in most neighbourhoods he liked. That’s when he started looking in St Pauli, the area encompassing Hamburg’s famous red light district. Here he found a two-bedroom apartment for just €135,000.
Granted, the place was so run down that it took him almost a year and €70,000 to renovate. He installed new electricity cables, gas pipes and plaster, added a balcony and replaced the former resident’s plastic shower module with an elegant bathroom with a slate floor. But, in his view, the apartment was still a bargain. “I wouldn’t get it for a similar price today,” he says. Indeed, in the years since his house hunting began, St Pauli, a neighbourhood that was once solely a stomping ground for prostitutes and carousers, has become a target for developers wooing young professionals and families.
Even to local residents, the speed of the revaluation is surprising. Since medieval times the area has been a haven for society’s outsiders. In the 18th century prostitution in the area was so rampant that the local council decided to forbid it. But it didn’t help. Over the centuries the Reeperbahn, the area’s main thoroughfare, became known as Hamburg’s “mile of sin”.
By the 1960s St Pauli was diversifying a bit – becoming a centre for pop culture. The Beatles played there for several months early in their career. “I might have been born in Liverpool but I grew up in Hamburg,” John Lennon once said.
Still, middle-class Hamburgers continued to avoid the area. Wiemann remembers that, as a child, he was afraid of passing through the run down zone, which also had drug dealers and gangs. Aged 18, he started to work in a nearby hotel but recalls that “at the time, there were only two decent middle-class hotels here”.
A turning point came in 1986 when out-of-town visitors were forced to brave the riff-raff to see Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats at the Operettenhaus, a theatre on the Reeperbahn . Soon mainstream bars, clubs and theatres began opening and the sex industry slowly retreated. There were about a thousand prostitutes registered in St Pauli in the 1980s but today there are less than 400.
The Reeperbahn is now the main party venue of Hamburg – like London’s Soho or Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Between 20m and 25m people visit the area each year and fast food restaurants, tourist shops and tattoo parlours compete for their attention. A marathon, a cycling race and different music parades pass through. And in 2006 a screen was installed at the Spielbudenplatz, the neighbourhood’s main square, to show World Cup football matches.
The property market has taken off in tandem. There are new developments scattered through the area and, from 2003 to 2008, prices for condominiums rose by 22.9 per cent. An apartment complex crowned by a €2m penthouse now stands next to the Hafenstrasse, where, in the 1980s, famous squats stood. And even older properties are drawing newcomers, such as Sibylle, a 34-year-old assistant at a small film company.
When, two years ago, she and her photographer boyfriend were looking at buying a flat in St Pauli, close to the Reeperbahn, her parents were shocked. But, after a visit, they came round to the idea. The city centre, the river Elbe and a subway station are in walking distance. Supermarkets are open on Sundays and late at night – still unusual in Germany, where shop hours are still restricted by the government. And Sibylle sometimes socialises in the local clubs.
That said, she hasn’t adjusted completely to the neighbourhood’s downsides: the sight of homeless people, the occasional fights outside the bar in front of her flat and the drunken partygoers she meets in the mornings on her way to work. Her flat was also burgled in her first year of living there, which is why she doesn’t want her surname printed.
In spite of St Pauli’s work-in-progress status, property professionals are increasingly bullish on the area. Kai-Michael Dudda, co-owner of development company Gesa Bau, decided five years ago to invest in the neighbourhood, building apartments on a plot in Seilerstrasse, a street parallel to the Reeperbahn. “We were one of the first developers to move in,“ he says, as we tour a €400,000 duplex penthouse with a two-level balcony and glass walls. “At the time our competitors thought we were crazy but we were ready to take a risk.” It paid off. Although asking prices ranged from €2,900 to €3,200 per sq metre – mid- to high-end for Hamburg – the flats quickly sold out.
This spring Gesa Bau started construction on a second complex next to the old one, where the average price is €3,700 per sq metre, with a 222 sq metre penthouse costing nearly €1.2m. Two apartments have already sold. “For families the Reeperbahn might not be the ideal environment but most of our apartments are for well-off singles,” says Dudda.
Perhaps the most obvious sign of change in St Pauli is the €350m complex on a former brewery site south of the Reeperbahn that comprises two office towers, 250 apartments and the Empire Riverside, a sleek, 20-storey hotel designed by the British architect David Chipperfield. But this development, more than any other, has provoked anger among locals who have lived in St Pauli for decades.
“This architecture looks as if it’s from another neighbourhood,” says Ute Determann, 55, a 30-year resident, unemployed social worker and political activist. Horrified at how quickly the area’s character is disappearing, she and friends have organised protests and worked on a documentary film showing how gentrification is driving poor families out of homes they’ve had for generations. Sensing the tension between old and new residents, local politicians last month decided to see whether steps could be taken to protect low-income and long-time renters.
Kai Nielsen understands such worries. A lawyer, he lives in an apartment that borders a street with an outreach clinic for drug users and where, after 8pm, prostitutes wait on the pavement for clients. But “on the other side of the street there’s a lifestyle hotel,” he says. “You can’t get harsher contrasts than that. No wonder locals feel overwhelmed.”
He pays about €700 for rent – not a lot for a professional with a steady income but too much for many St Pauli residents – and most of his neighbours are well-off thirtysomethings. Yet he says he is working to build community. When he heard about the documentary Determann and her friends had made, he invited them over for a talk and a screening.
There is a model for St Pauli – the well-off neighbourhood of Schanzenviertel, just to the north, which was gentrified in the 1990s when internet and advertising companies started taking advantage of relatively cheap office space. Maik Spliethoff, who based his architecture firm in the area at the time, is now working on an apartment block in the northern part of St Pauli, where units cost about €3,000 per sq metre and four out of 10 are already sold.
He sees similarities between the two neighbourhoods and initially considered moving into the new building himself. “It’s only a few hundred metres from the Schanzenviertel,” he explains. But he decided against it to avoid switching his children’s schools. And he thinks it will be some time before St Pauli is completely made over. “It still has a lot of old housing blocks and most of them are not going to be renovated any time soon,” he says.
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Estate agency
Thadenstrasse 25, tel: +49 403-9997 612, www.thadenstrasse25.de
Developer
Gesa Bau, tel: +49 407-001930, www.gesabau.de
