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In our latest research spotlight, we’re featuring Dr Sarah Klosterkamp’s research, published in Transactions, on justice in the German housing market.

Mouldy homes are more than an inconvenience, they are dangerous. If you live in a home impacted by mould, you are more likely to suffer from respiratory illness, allergies, and asthma. For tenants in rental properties, mould can become a source of tension in landlord relations. In Germany, tenants are legally allowed to withhold rent payments for up to two months if severe mould is present in their home. However, after this time, they can be taken to court for eviction proceedings.

Dr Sarah Klosterkamp, based at the University of Frankfurt, has researched eviction practices in district courts across Germany and has found that mould is often central to these disputes. Sarah’s work contributes to the growing field of legal geography which highlights how the law unfolds across various spaces of our daily lives.

She discusses how mould can be seen as a 'legal object' that must be proven in court with evidence; something which is often challenging given the propensity for mould to grow and disappear in different conditions. These shifting properties are difficult to capture within rigid legal procedures raising questions around who is believed and what counts as evidence. We spoke to Sarah to find out more.

Injustice in the courtroom

Across Germany, Sarah and her team sat in on over 200 eviction court cases, a process that revealed the significance of mould in landlord-tenant disputes. Many landlords blamed tenants’ behaviour for the presence of mould rather than structural or maintenance issues.

While the law is designed to support tenants in mouldy homes, they found that in reality mould became a battleground of evidence, expertise and blame. Photographs and testimony from tenants frequently carried less weight than expensive expert reports, the costs of which are typically out of reach for tenants. This fundamentally shapes who is believed, meaning many tenants lose legal disputes.

Mould is just not just a housing problem, but a justice problem. People think of mould mainly as a maintenance issue, but my research shows that once disputes enter the legal system, mould becomes something that must be proven. Access to justice depends not only on living with damp housing, but also on producing the right kinds of evidence.Sarah

In a courtroom in Cologne, a tenant described how she had reduced her rent due to the spread of mould in her home. She shared photographs of the mould, yet the landlord’s lawyer assigned the blame to her poor ventilation of the property.

In the absence of an expert report to prove otherwise, the tenant was advised to vacate the apartment 'voluntarily'. Unable to prove who caused the mould, this tenant was forced to relocate. While tenants are protected by tenancy law, this doesn’t translate in practice if they lack the financial means to afford an expert report. Unequal access to expertise leads to unequal access to legal justice. 

The racial and social background of tenants also affects their risk of eviction. In Frankfurt am Main, the team observed how a single mother from a migrant background was blamed for the presence of mould in her home. The landlord’s lawyer argued that mould was present due to the 'cooking habits' of this tenant, and the steam produced by her 'cultural cooking'.

This tenant was also told that she must leave her home. The prevalence of similar incidents observed by the team reveal the racial biases of the justice system which influence how blame is assigned in the courtroom.  

We see that cultural blaming is happening with cultural stereotypes popping up, meaning that people are perceived as someone who might not know how to properly heat a ‘German environment’. Tenants come to feel misrepresented and misheard, and so the courtroom becomes a very emotional space.Sarah

The realities of rental law  

What Sarah and her team observed in these court cases was a process that they describe as “de-tenanting”. Whilst tenants may be legally entitled to reduce their rent when defects arise, if a landlord challenges the reduction and rent arrears accumulate, they can face an eviction claim. Once tenants are evicted, landlords often renovate properties and increase rent. 

The legal system is not equally accessible for everyone. Courtrooms appear as neutral, but tenants and landlords rarely arrive with the same resources. Landlords have legal representatives and technical experience, while many tenants appear alone or under financial pressure or with limited knowledge of legal procedures.Sarah

In Germany, a lawyer’s fee is tied to the financial value of the case, meaning that cases involving comparatively low rents are less attractive to lawyers. As a result, tenants in lower rent properties may struggle to find legal representation despite financial assistance being available for legal costs.

Sarah’s research showed that tenants appearing in court without a lawyer are much less likely to win their case compared with those who are represented. For Sarah, this is part of a broader access-to-justice problem which extends beyond mould disputes.

With eviction cases, the courtroom primarily deals with a contractual claim between landlord and tenant. But the circumstances that bring people there are often much broader. Rent arrears, poor housing conditions and housing insecurity are social problems as well as legal ones. If we want to prevent displacement, we need to think not only about what rights exist on paper, but about whether people actually have the resources to exercise them.Sarah 

Next steps

Sarah is continuing her exploration of housing precarity in Germany, working with bailiffs to explore what happens when tenants are evicted from their homes. She hopes to expand this work across Europe to explore how people navigate debt and eviction in a variety of contexts. Read the paper explored in this blog. 

This spotlight was written by Safia Bailey (Cardiff University).

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