This Weekend in Hamburg

Somewhere along the Saint Pauli district of Hamburg here in Germany....lays the "Esso" houses.

They got their name mostly from being next door to a Esso gas station.  It might be an indicator of the world status of the obsolete buildings.

For roughly twenty years, there's been an effort to go ahead and admit the buildings are in bad shape as apartment buildings, and tear them down.  The general belief though.....is that once torn down....they'd be rebuilt as office buildings or commercial real estate.

All of this figures into a issue that will pop up this weekend in Hamburg, with massive rallies expected and radicals out in force.  The cops are keen on planning a safe weekend....and have basically gotten several hundred additional cops from around Germany to come up and stay the weekend....to keep a eye on trouble-makers.

The house issue?  Just one of a dozen issues playing into the radical agenda for the area.  There's some foreign folks trying to get resident status in the city, and the city council isn't buying off on that idea.

The Esso houses?  Well....it's generally been said by the media that no real improvements have been made over the years.  A number of the apartments have simply been taken over by radicals.....no rent apparently.....and simply squatting on the property.

Over the last week or two....someone called up the cops and spoke of the building shaking, and there's some hint of a imminent collapse.  This suggestion got an engineer crew out, and they kinda agreed....there's some big issues with the building.  So they evacuated at least one of the buildings last Saturday.

You can sense that there's no one much in the city government or real estate market who cares much for the buildings.  Structurally, by the time you add up what it costs to bring the buildings to code....it probably equals the same amount to build new buildings.  The city government likely knows that, and will simply wait patiently for some event to occur....giving them a chance to clear the buildings and knock them down.

What's all this lead to?  Well....this weekend will be a fairly hostile weekend in Hamburg.  At least five hundred cops will be out in force during the evening hours.  You can expect the news media to cover it and note the destruction done by the radical elements in the city.