I’d guess the problem is more endemic to their political system.
Berlin for example had a massive bank collapse in 2001 under the Conservative government that ended up placing the state of Berlin into billions of euros worth of debt and financial risk. The succeeding SD/Left/Green triplet coalitions had to fire-sell off many state-held assets like the water utility (that ended up a disaster on its own [2]) and especially a huge amount of residential real estate, which is now contributing to the insane rent explosions in Berlin.
To this day, Berlin hasn't recovered from all the penny-pinching of the last decades.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_Bankenskandal
[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_Wasserbetriebe#Streit...
We have not had anything on the scale of what the GP describes of a city going billions into debt - even Birmingham is orders of magnitude less bad.
The government sold assets, but not at fire sale prices. I do not think selling utilities was a great idea, but its not as bad as either what GP describes, nor the "small town in Michigan" example at the top of this thread (when did you last experience a blackout in the UK?).
They organized and succeeded.
Where was the opposition? Is the entire German environmental movement beholden to the Green Party?
