Berlin has extensive rent control. So it likely the same situation as San Francisco: a significant portion of renters enjoy a privileged rent price and aren't affected by rising housing costs. While people in non-rent controlled cities like Seattle accept development, people in rent controlled cities oppose development because they don't want their neighborhood to change and they are insulated from rising rents.
The situation in both Seattle and San Francisco is effed-up big time, and that's because of Big Tech. There's no comparison yet with Berlin, and Berliners simply showed that social cohesion still counts. It's a fight against tone deaf giants that can't see themselves doing any harm ever in the name of progress.
What happened to Google in Berlin was the best possible outcome.
The situation in San Francisco is mostly due to NIMBYism and a refusal to build housing. Tech jobs don't magically make housing prices rise - shortages of housing make housing prices rise. Seattle is handling this better than SF, in large part because SF had messed with the natural interaction of supply and demand. Given what the above commenter wrote, Berlin looks like it is in the same situation as SF: trying to solve a housing shortage by discouraging demand rather than increasing supply.
Have you ever been here in Berlin? Baustelle (working sites) everywhere. Right now a huge complex for rich people is being built close to Alexanderplatz, while a Plattenbau (sort of prefab building) for good affordable housing is being built in front of it. There's a lot of space and a lot of socially oriented development. What you call, wrongly, Nimby-ism is purely the acknowledgement that we don't need to tear apart the fabric of social cohesion by letting random flying saucers (like Google's campus) land in areas which are not fit for properly welcoming them. There's plenty of places in still central but more depressed areas of the city where the Google Campus could have made much much more sense.
