Well, at the very least, will be an interesting economic experiment.
This has been tried before in a number of different flavors. Most leave people worse off. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-01-18/yup-re...
I'm a bit confused, this article seems to only look in depth at rent control in San Francisco? San Francisco and any city in California is a major anomaly compared to other cities in the world. For example, rent control in Montreal works fairly well for renters and has kept the city affordable for the middle class while residential construction still booms.
If there is a 'market abberation' find it, and deal with it. For example, if tons of foreigners are buying homes, this might be a problem. Regulate it. If tons of people are buying 2-3 homes and renting, thereby driving a wedge between home-owners/non-home-owners, regulate that. If the issue is low interest rates, which are necessary for the regular economy, consider building in housing prices into the inflationary i…
another interesting area: regulations on building which drive the costs upward. case in point: Los Angeles requires that new construction include parking for a certain number of cars per housing unit. usually this means placing the new building on top of a subterranean parking structure, which costs a lot more than a building on a normal foundation. and new construction must also include a certain amount of outdoor s…
I was at a city council meeting for my specific city and that requirement for parking spaces per unit does not fully support all tenants. So street parking goes way up on a traditionally quiet street. It happening more and more as they start erecting these new "luxury" apartments.
As much as I can sympathise with the predicament, this decision, and the Berlin housing market in general, absolutely baffles me. When I moved here I was warned of 100 people turning up to a flat viewing, and laughed it off as some hyperbole. Only later did I find out that it actually happens , albeit the maximum viewing I went to was around a meagre 50. Having come from the UK, I found the situation in Berlin to be…
> I found the situation in Berlin to be absolutely ridiculous. I totally agree with this assessment. I've never seen a city where you struggle to get a flat even if you have the money or can pay more. The market is absolutely broken with literally everyone competing for the same pool of flats.
It seems to me that Stockholm is even worse and has been for quite some time.
Freezing rents is not meant to be a solution for a lack of housing. It’s a solution to the explosive increase of rents of existing ones. There are lots of people where the rents of their current apartment have increased so much, that they had to move out. This solution is trying to fix that. Also freezing rents doesn’t mean Berlin will stop building new houses. If there is big demand for housing in a city one needs b…
Pretty much every western nation has systemically failed to recognize or support the insanely high demand for high density living in the 21st century. That is where the future of economics is, where the future of humanity in general pretty much is, and every democracy is consistently demonstrating the total inability for legislatures to sacrifice the advantage of those lucky enough to inhabit cities as they exist now…
Agreed. I'm still shocked about how pervasive it is. New York, San Francisco, Denver, Austin, Vancouver, Montreal, London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw. It seems like a complete binary: cities are either dying or in the midst of a "housing crisis".
As much as I can sympathise with the predicament, this decision, and the Berlin housing market in general, absolutely baffles me. When I moved here I was warned of 100 people turning up to a flat viewing, and laughed it off as some hyperbole. Only later did I find out that it actually happens , albeit the maximum viewing I went to was around a meagre 50. Having come from the UK, I found the situation in Berlin to be…
The solution is to build houses,
It's one option among many.
And by itself -- most likely not a sufficient solution (or any kind of a game changer).
I just don't understand this stance at all.
Basically the main reason this "stance" is that the locals know better: that simply allowing newer (unregulated) construction isn't going to bring their rents down -- or that is to say: do something about availability in their income brackets, and not just yours and mine -- anytime soon.
As much as I can sympathise with the predicament, this decision, and the Berlin housing market in general, absolutely baffles me. When I moved here I was warned of 100 people turning up to a flat viewing, and laughed it off as some hyperbole. Only later did I find out that it actually happens , albeit the maximum viewing I went to was around a meagre 50. Having come from the UK, I found the situation in Berlin to be…
Rent control never works, but that never dissuades governments from trying it again and again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_regulation
It works fairly well in NYC, too.
Not without tradeoffs, mind you. But it does basically work.
It works reasonably well in the rest of Germany. As for it not working in Berlin, I have a hard time to come up with _anything_ that works there, so my hunch would be that the housing market in Berlin is broken not because of rent control, but because it's Berlin.
It "works" (in that it doesn't cause problems like rationing by other means like queueing, under the table payments, subletting, or any one of the myriad other problems rent control produces) because it actually does nothing - it results in rents which are equal to what the open market price would have been. Ultimately, if you want to reduce rents AND have a functioning market, you have two options (or a combination…
It results in rents which are equal to what the open market price would have been.
This is a pretty strong claim to make. Can you provide data to substantiate?
I think most people with an understanding of economics would agree that more supply is needed. The problem is, zoning laws are made by the cities themselves, which means they are ultimately made by the people who already live there. People who already live there don't want their neighborhoods bulldozed for luxury high rises, which is what happens when zoning is abolished. Then, there is the problem of the suburbs. A…
I wish someone with a deeper understanding would go to Japan and study how they got this so right. Their zoning laws don't separate uses, only nuisance levels, so you often see residential in commercial areas and small shops in residential neighborhoods. It's amazingly effective at reducing how far you need to go to get places, and gives the whole city a much more organic feel. Plus, there is actually housing if ther…
This is spot-on. Completely agree. Tokyo is an incredibly comfortable, quiet city. Preparing for a three-week trip, I expected it to be like New York — crowded, expensive, uncomfortable — but it completely blew my mind. I had never thought that the constellation of density, quiet, reasonable rent, and a first-class city were collectively possible.
There are a lot of factors at play here: 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 sch…
> Berlin at its peak (1944) had still more than half a million more people. Yes, with 2 - 3 times more flats per every floor in a building. And with whole multi-generational families living in every one of them. Don't forget sharing one bathroom between all this families and sometimes toilets just being wooden huts outside. Try visiting Mitte Museum in Gesundbrunnen, you'd see how miserable pre-war housing was, yes e…
The notion that Kotti or Alex are dangerous by any coherent metric can only be understood as satirical.
Why should we exclude some people from living in attractive cities? Being less wealthy doesn’t mean a job is less valuable. Police officers, firefighters, bakers, artists, nurses… currently struggle living in attractive cities because they cannot afford it. This makes these cities less liveable for everyone.
This seems like a problem that is naturally solved by market forces, supply and demand. If some job is sufficiently valued in a city, then businesses and government will pay whatever wage is necessary to hire people to perform that job. If people who are doing some job cannot afford to live in a city, then they will move away or find a different job. This will cause a shortage of people performing the job. If there i…
What are you talking about? Nurses, teachers and public sector workers all critical for the functioning of cities are claiming welfare. Some nurses in the NHS are eating patients' left-over food. The logic of the market is to drive wages to the bottom and replace workers when they break. It leads to the destruction of service quality, social cohesion and increased deaths in our hospitals. Please stay off the Ayn Rand methamphetamine.