A House for Eighty-Eight Cents a Year

Imagine walking up to your landlord and saying: I'll pay you less than one euro. For the whole year. And he nods. Because that is how it has worked here for five hundred years.

This is the German city of Augsburg, and a quarter called the Fuggerei. It is not a tour-guide legend. It is a working lease.

You might think the landlord died long ago, and everyone forgot to update the price. But the bills go out every single year, for one Rhenish guilder, which today comes to less than a euro. Nobody forgot. The number was frozen on purpose, like a monument to the man who set it.

His name was Jakob Fugger, called the Rich. A banker whose money helped get Charles the Fifth elected Holy Roman Emperor. He started as a wool trader and ended up lending to half of Europe. And in fifteen twenty-one, in his home town, he opened a quarter for people who had fallen into poverty through no fault of their own.

There were rules. You had to have lived in Augsburg at least two years. You had to be free of debt. You had to be Catholic. And besides the guilder, you paid in prayer: three a day, for the souls of Fugger and his descendants.

What did you get? Sixty-seven houses, one hundred forty-seven apartments, each between forty-five and sixty-five square metres. A kitchen, a living room, a bedroom, a storeroom. Its own church, Saint Mark's. Its own streets with lamps, and gates that lock at night. Many residents work right there, as gardeners, as watchmen, even selling tickets in the quarter's museum. It is one of the oldest lived-in housing quarters on the planet. And it runs on give and take, not on handouts.

So why charge a guilder at all? Why not make it free? Because Fugger wasn't building a shelter. He was building a system. Help, on the condition that a person gets back on their feet, instead of getting used to living on someone else's money. That is why the place outlived its founder by half a millennium, instead of closing the day he died.

One early tenant was a mason named Franz Mozart, the great-grandfather of the composer. He moved in in sixteen eighty-one and lived there until he died in sixteen ninety-four. A plaque inside the quarter tells you so. Without it, nobody would link a craftsman's cheap flat with the symphonies of his great-grandson.

Now meet Ilona Barber. A former circus performer, and a singer with a military band. She waited two years for her apartment. Her pension is small, and rents in the city have passed eight hundred fifty euros a month. That is nearly the whole pension. One month of that rent is close to a thousand times what a year costs here. She calls herself very lucky. But it isn't luck so much as a queue. There are always more people who want to live here for less than a euro a year than there are free apartments.

Then, on the night of the twenty-sixth of February, nineteen forty-four, British aircraft bombed Augsburg. Nearly seventy percent of the Fuggerei was reduced to ruins.

Could a tradition that old end in a single night? Almost everything had to be rebuilt from scratch. But on the first of March, nineteen forty-four, the Fugger family council decided in writing to rebuild. The money did not come from outside handouts. It came from selling timber from the family's own forests. The work dragged on into the nineteen seventies. But the streets, the gates and Saint Mark's church came back to exactly where they had stood.

Today about a hundred and fifty people live in the Fuggerei, and almost two hundred thousand tourists come through every year. They wander between the houses, peering at other people's daily lives. Meanwhile the real residents lock the gates behind them in the evening, and say three prayers for a man who died five centuries ago. That is the rent here. Not only money, but a memory that, somehow, still works.

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