Socialism

There is a subsection of the population mostly made up of pensioniers that occupy flats with ~30-70 year old renting contracts that mean through a web of interdependent laws they pay reasonable accomodation for their dwellings, close to, sometimes under, maybe slightly over upkeep.

That is entirely a privilege of having moved into a state or workers coop-built appartement in the 60s or 70s at the latest though and is entirely irreproducable to anyone born after that fact. Homeownership in germany is not seen as a goal on account of people having given up on a pipedream they'll never reach anyways for the most part. It's basically not possible for large swathes of the population born in the 1980s and onwards.

Incidentally, germany is a hotbed of money laundering and storing for organized crime in the EU because the laws around buying and selling houses are set up in a way that makes it incredibly easy to basically nullify any search and discovery or building enforcement on them because as it stands it pits, if I transliterate to an americanized audience, Cletus the slack jawed Yokel from Nowhere, PA against Shadow Housing Dealings S.A.R.L. (registered to a cyprese postbox that currently resides at the deep end of the mariana trench). Nothing will ever be done about this because the same laws also benefits people like former health minister / organized crime head Jens Spahn when he is gifted a multimillion flat that not even convicted journalists can get info on