Enough Berlin

A Berlin Georgism Blog

"There is enough, and to spare"

Visualising Berlin land values

If Berlin introduced a land value tax, which areas would be most affected? How would that change over time?

Berlin publishes quite good yearly data on its land values, the Bodenrichtwerte. There's an official tool, BORIS, to view this data, and I've used it plenty on this blog, but it's more geared towards looking up a specific area than seeing trends across the whole city over time. Lars Doucet's recent article on Astral Codex Ten (more on that below) had some much more striking 3D visualisations of US cities, so I made a tool to do similar ones for Berlin. You can use the full tool here, or play with it right here:

Add up every zone and Berlin's building land is worth somewhere between €440 and €600 billion, roughly half a trillion euros.[1] That's down from a 2022 peak of €650–890 billion, but still more than three times what it was in 2002.

Hit play to step through the years, or here's how the values changed from 2010 to 2026:

Base map: © OpenStreetMap contributors, OpenFreeMap.

I find this super interesting! You can see the highest land values are concentrated in a rough east–west band through the middle of the city, from the City West around Zoo and Kurfürstendamm, through Mitte, out to Ostkreuz, more or less following the Stadtbahn (the east–west S-Bahn line). Of the land valued at €5,000/m² or more, 60% is within a kilometre of that line, even though that strip is only 5% of Berlin's building land.[2]

The whole-city view even looks a bit like Berlin's skyline, with one big spike in the middle. Except the spike isn't the TV tower, it's the land value at the Brandenburger Tor: €60,000/m².

You can see the meteoric rise from the mid-2010s: the typical (median) zone was under €200/m² from 2005 to 2013, then more than quadrupled to €850/m² by 2022.[3] Since 2022 it's come back down to €610/m², a drop of almost 30%, and rising interest rates have a lot to do with that. Even so, it's still more than double what it was in 2016.

There's even a button for turning on and off surface parking and vacant lots, so you can see where there's underutilised land. It uses OpenStreetMap, which has over 12,000 surface car parks covering about 10 km², 93% of them on land zoned for building.[4] OpenStreetMap is incomplete, so that's an undercount. Tap a car park to see roughly what the land under it is worth. Here's the area around Checkpoint Charlie, where there are about 40 mapped car parks within 600 metres, 13 of them on land worth €7,000/m² or more. The biggest, a few hundred metres west, is about 5,900 m², very roughly €40 million of land, used to store cars:[5]

It also gives an impression of where a land value tax would make the most difference. Compare two residential areas, one central and one on the edge (open either on the map, then move the year slider):

  • Around Kollwitzplatz in Prenzlauer Berg, land went from €410/m² in 2007 to €7,500/m² in 2022, eighteen times as much in fifteen years. Even after the recent fall it's €5,500/m², nine times its 2002 value.
  • Out in Rudow, on Berlin's southern edge, the same 24 years took land from €240/m² to €570/m², a bit over double.

Put those in euros: since 2002, a 500 m² plot at Kollwitzplatz gained about €2.5 million in land value. The same plot in Rudow gained about €165,000.

That gain isn't down to anything built on the plot. It comes from the city growing around it: new jobs, new neighbours, the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, the cafés and the schools. A land value tax takes a share of exactly that gain back for the city that created it, and the map shows it would fall hardest on the central land that gained the most, rather than on the outskirts. Even a modest 1% a year on Berlin's half a trillion euros of land would raise around €5 billion, about six times what the current property tax brings in (around €860 million), and enough to cover over 10% of Berlin's €45 billion annual budget.

Credits

Lars Doucet was my introduction to land value tax in the first place, through his review of Henry George's Progress and Poverty, so it's fitting that the idea for this came from his latest article. The maps in it are from CivicMapper, 3D land value maps of US cities from the Center for Land Economics. They've also published an open source version, Put It On A Map. The Berlin map borrows their look (the colour scale, and the parking and vacant lot overlay), though it's built separately. A follow-up for me is to try getting Berlin's data into their tools. They've already started on Europe: check out their map of Tallinn, in a country that already has a land value tax.

It was put together with help from Claude Opus 5.5, using:

Privacy

The map is made from public data published by Berlin (land values, addresses) and OpenStreetMap. The address search runs in your browser: it downloads the list of Berlin's streets, then one batch of house numbers for the street you pick, and does the matching on your device. What you type is never sent anywhere, and I don't run any servers; the site is static files on Cloudflare Pages. Like any web map, the background map tiles are downloaded from OpenFreeMap, so their servers see roughly which part of Berlin you're looking at.

I use GoatCounter to count visits. It doesn't use cookies, and it only keeps totals (like "40 visitors used Firefox today"), not IP addresses. On the map page it's only told that someone opened the map, never the address you searched or pinned.

Notes

  1. Each building-land zone's area times its rate, using the 1 January values. Zone outlines include streets, which aren't private land: Berlin has 131 km² of traffic area, so the low end assumes all of it sits inside building-land zones and takes it off at the average rate. Parks, forest and other special-use land are left out; their rates are mostly under €50/m², and from 2022 the dataset's large catch-all special-use zones can't be added up this way. Where an area has several official rates the map uses the highest, which adds about 3%. So it's a rough total, not a valuation. ↩

  2. I drew a line through the Stadtbahn stations from Westkreuz to Ostkreuz and measured how far the centre of each building-land zone is from it, using the 1 January 2026 land values. Zones worth €5,000/m² or more cover 19.5 km², and 60% of that area is in zones whose centre is within 1 km of the line. All the zones within 1 km add up to 5% of Berlin's 493 km² of building land. ↩

  3. The median rate across all building-land zones each year, not weighted by area. Every year's rates are in the Gutachterausschuss's datasets on daten.berlin.de. ↩

  4. From an OpenStreetMap query for surface car parks (amenity=parking with parking=surface, or with no parking tag) inside Berlin's boundary, run on 27 September 2026. After dropping slivers under 20 m², that's 12,325 car parks covering 1,032 hectares, and 93% of them sit in a building-land zone. You can re-run the count yourself (it counts slivers too, and will drift as people map more), and the processed car parks the map uses are here. ↩

  5. Car parks whose centre is within 600 m of the checkpoint: 39 of them, 13 on zones rated €7,000/m² or more. The biggest is this one on OpenStreetMap: 5,931 m² × €7,000/m² ≈ €42 million. Like the map's tooltips, that's a rough guide rather than a valuation: the mapped outline isn't the legal plot, and the zone rate isn't adjusted for the plot. ↩