A friend of mine sent me a link to a mainstream article, unfortunately behind a paywall, in which young women talk about why they moved away from Berlin. Instead, they now live in the countryside. I do not need to read the article to discuss the general phenomenon. Berlin is a city I semi-frequently visit. These days the frequency is about once per year, though. In any case, I have seen the city change over the course of about twenty years. I will first talk about these changes and afterwards talk about why young women may leave Berlin, and other big cities, or not even move there in the first place.

I wanted to move to Berlin simply because I wanted to. Without having visited once, I applied to one of the local universities, got accepted, and got on a train. This was in the mid-2000s. Back then, the city was quite dirty and rundown. Yet, you could also see that a lot of money was being invested. Incessantly, people were talking the city up as the place to be. Granted, Berlin is the biggest city in Europe, so why should it not become a major tourist destination in addition to an economic powerhouse? Back then, the appeal of Berlin was that it was amazingly cheap to live there, which I also discussed in a separate article. Hardly anybody had any money, so the nightlife did not cater to big spenders. There was a lot of energy in this city because there were so many young people everywhere, and they came from all over Europe, if not the world.

The appeal of Berlin was not just that it was cheap. You could leave your old life behind, party, pretend to run a startup, or do whatever else you wanted. I know a surprising number of people who idled away two or three years in their 20s and then did a 180 so that they could get their life back on track. Primarily, these were guys who simply postponed graduating. As there were no tuition fees this was easily affordable and back then, employers did not care that much if you graduated a bit late, with few exceptions. Without connections, you most certainly would not have gotten a job at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey if you had needed an additional two years, but the aforementioned kind of guys did not put their careers first anyway. Nonetheless, these were serious people and plenty of them eventually got pretty impressive careers going.

Back then, there were obviously plenty of Middle Eastern immigrants around, mainly Turks. Crime was also an issue. However, you could avoid all of that if you just did not go to certain districts. You could live in your little bohemian bubble, hardly noticing how messed up large parts of the city really are. Sure, there was graffiti on many corners but you could easily tell yourself that this adds to the appeal of the city for tourists and artists. In particular from 2015 onward, Berlin changed tremendously, though. Rents skyrocketed, as a consequence of massively increased demand, thanks to a never-ending influx of third-world rocket scientists. Crime had also become a serious problem. Even in once very laid-back student districts like Friedrichshain there were places people started to avoid. That was also the time when people gained second and sometimes first-hand knowledge of serious crimes, like assault and robbery. A friend of a friend of mine was hit in the neck with a broken bottle and got hospitalized. With a bit of bad luck he could have died. I was told that the guy was lying on the ground, blood spurting out of him, as the assailant pulled off his wrist watch. Probably he really needed the watch to conduct an important physics experiment.

Compared to 2015 or 2016, present-day Berlin is even worse. The city is dirtier than ever before. What is worse, areas that had been gentrified twenty years ago are already in a state of complete urban decay. Luxury residential apartment buildings from the mid-2000s are covered with graffiti from one end to the other. There are also fewer and fewer corners where you can feel really safe. It is often a surprise if you hear any German spoken at all in public. On top, there have been important cultural changes. With jobs being a lot more difficult to come by nowadays than they were in the early to mid 2000s, students take their education a lot more seriously. Now they want to get their degree on time. The party scene itself has changed as well. Here I am not talking as an older guy wistfully thinking back to banging sluts in shady nightclubs. A lot of these nightclubs have closed down. This industry was in decline already before the scamdemic, probably to a large degree because it was no longer feasible to easily get by financially. You now had to make money, and if you need to make money you probably are not able to party from Tuesday to Sunday. During Covid, some clubs shut down. This includes some of the biggest ones like Watergate. Now that the scamdemic is over, clubs are not coming back. Concomitantly, People no longer go out as much, for the aforementioned reasons. Besides, partying is not that much fun if you always need to watch your back.

The big appeal of a city like Berlin was that it was cheap to live there and that the party scene was great. This was not just appealing to guys, obviously. Women also enjoyed that they could bang one dude after another without having to face any social consequences like back home in their small towns. Yet, with handsome losers no longer being able to afford rent and clubs moving out of the city center or closing down altogether, you do not have much more than dating apps left. I do not think that women feel that safe in public anywhere in Berlin. I see shady people in some of the most expensive corners of the city. Thus, it is not in the least surprising that people move away. There are probably also aftershocks of the layoffs in the tech industry, which leads to people leaving, but these are probably mostly foreign men.