Berliners Demonstrate Against 'Rent Sharks' In Fight Over Rising Costs

A skeletal shark wound its way through the streets of Berlin, pursuing unlikely prey – the city's renters.

The makeshift "rent shark" was held aloft by participants in a demonstration against rent increases in Germany's capital city, Berlin, over the weekend.

Thousands attended the march, which was organized by an affordable housing advocacy group in an effort to collect signatures for a proposal that would transfer some of the city's increasingly expensive residential rental properties to public ownership.

If the group gathers enough signatures — about 20,000 — the city's government will have to consider a plan to seize more than 250,000 apartments from their corporate owners, The Associated Press reported.

The proposal would target for-profit companies that own more than 3,000 apartments in Berlin.

"These are companies that are coming in and seeing a really profitable market," Thomas McGath, a spokesperson for the group that organized the campaign, told NPR. "It's not your normal mom and pop landlord."

Under German law, the plan technically could happen. Article 15 of the German Constitution states that "land, natural resources and means of production may, for the purpose of nationalisation, be transferred to public ownership."