NoBNQ is a neighbourhood initiative.

Interviewee: Margit Czenki

It is incredibly silly to call a project NoBNQ, but the word actually stems from the investors. Local politicians and the investors Köhler & von Bargen wanted to build a new quarter in a traditional urban area, where we ourselves live, between the Bernhard-Nocht-Straße and Erichstraße in the south of St Pauli, and they christened it the BNQ – the Bernhard-Nocht-Quarter. BNQ sounds so pretentious that the response could only be NoBNQ! The first meetings of the NoBNQ neighbourhood initiative were all about simply ensuring that residents weren’t thrown out of their flats. And that didn’t happen. We fought tooth and nail for 10-year lease agreements at the old prices for excellently renovated flats…so that part turned out well! The investors relented once they realised just how strong the groundswell of opposition was. After that was achieved however, some of those involved stopped coming to the meetings. While they recognised that the planned freehold flats, an integral part of the restructuring and gentrification plans for the quarter, were a problem, it was not enough to keep them involved.