Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

I agree, but the same applied for buying a car and other rare goods as well. The whole system was unsustainable. The almost comical dysfunction of it is probably hard to believe if you didn't experience it first hand. 10 years after the wall came down my dad came into the kitchen announcing that today we could have picked up our first car, which was one of those [1], in the late 90s.

[1]: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/No1-4GsQa-g/maxresdefault.jpg

Luxury apartments tend to be more attractive to builders not simply because they can make more money, but because the increased profit result in lower risk.

Something neat I've noticed locally is that condos with high property management fees have proportionally lower selling prices.

If all 2 bedroom units in an area/city are $3000/month and one building had property management fees of $1000 instead of $500, the unit's value is $500/month lower (approx. $100,000 selling price).

I'm not sure how that would be implemented on a city scale though.

For density: If you drastically raise property taxes to be proportional to square footage instead of appraised value, you instantly incentivize higher density building. If you're paying $1000 tax per square foot of ground floor, you can spread that over a single floor, or 40 floors.

Was that your thought?

1.) Supply is inelastic because construction work and building approvals are limited by current capacity. It is not feasible to expect the market to react as quickly as 600,000 new inhabitants over 10 years required.

2.) A lot of policy is still considering this to be a fad before cities become less popular again. Berlin's plans had for instance foreseen falling demand for schools due to demographic change and now rising birthrates (good economic situation) and influx of young people into cities are causing a trend change (for how long?).

3.) Current ECB rates are causing a housing bubble in Germany where many people are buying property for the first time. Because these properties are mostly rented when purchased but renters can't be terminated in Germany, the only way to evict is by raising rent until renters give up. Putting a rent freeze into place makes sense to prevent this and the rampant luxury renovations which don't create more supply.

4.) Berlin at its peak (1944) had still more than half a million more people and is surrounded by mostly empty countryside. It could easily grow to 10m as Paris or London.

> It nonetheless imposes some pretty firm conditions on vacation rentals and makes the penalties for ignoring them far more stringent. All landlords seeking to rent out their home will only be allowed to do so if they get a general permit from their borough, even if they intend only to rent their property out for occasional short stays. While landlords applying for a permit at their primary residency will likely be approved, second home owners may face a more rigorous process. Landlords who leave an apartment untenanted, meanwhile, will need a special permit from the borough to do so after three months of vacancy without having a permanent tenant registered, cutting the current vacancy grace period in half. Most strikingly, the maximum penalty for breaking the rules has been multiplied by five, to a potential fine of €500,000 ($617,000).