A German woman is being evicted from her home of 16 years to make room for some of the 800,000 refugees Germany is planning to take in this year.
According to The Telegraph, Bettina Halbey, a 51-year-old nurse living in the town of Nieheim, received a notice from her landlord on September 1 telling her she must move due to the residence being repurposed as a living center for migrants.
Halbey said the letter kicking her out of the apartment she rents hit her hard.
“I was completely taken aback,” the nurse told Die Welt. “I find it impossible to describe how the city has treated me.”
Halbey’s vented her anger on Facebook at the move and that post went on to be shared over 200,000 times.
“I’ve muddled through sorrow and distress, and then I get this notice. It was like a kick in the teeth,” Halbey wrote in the post.
The Telegraph reports that the majority of German citizens rent and laws firmly protect tenants from being evicted for dubious reasons.
However, the mayor of Nieheim is defending the decision to evict Halbey due to the fact that the town’s three facilities being used as refugee shelters had already reached maximum capacity.
“A new residential unit for 30 refugees in Nieheim would cost €30,000 [$33,584]. This solution will cost me nothing,” Mayor Rainer Vidal said to Die Welt.
While the cost for evicting Halbey and other tenants may be zero, the overall cost for sheltering the refugees is staggering for Germany. It’s estimated that each migrant will cost $14,500 to take in. Applying that cost to every one of the 800,000 refugees Germany is wanting to bring in adds up to over $11 billion. (RELATED: Illegal Migrants Don’t Follow The Pope’s Golden Rule)
Besides the cost of sheltering the refugees, there’s also the contested legality of evicting tenants for the benefit of migrants. A spokesman for the German Tenants’ Federation has criticized Halbey’s eviction and stated that “a municipality cannot move into a flat as a legal entity.”