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Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

reuters.com

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Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#481

Post by amluto »

baxtr wrote: post #328
2T1Qka0rEiPr wrote: post #22

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 am not sure if building houses is the solution. Wealthy people from around the globe will still buy them to rent them out for a profit or let them just sit there empty to visit for 2 weeks a year. There is even a name for that effect, it is called "induced demand". See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

> Wealthy people from around the globe will still buy them to rent them out for a profit

Thereby increasing rental supply. People can and should arbitrage differences between purchase and rental prices.

> or let them just sit there empty to visit for 2 weeks a year.

Vancouver figured out how to fix this particular problem — tax vacant houses.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#482

Post by jimmaswell »

alisonatwork wrote: post #478
jimmaswell wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "nothing to do"? What is there to do only in the city that's supposed to be so attractive, clubs, modern art galleries? I'm genuinely curious because this never resonated with me. Things to do in the Hudson Valley, the example I have in mind of a non-city area: expansive hiking trails for walking/biking, a river for rafting/skiing/boating/fishing, great family-owned restaurants all over, lots of n…

I think you are missing the kinds of things that city people consider important. For instance, can you walk from your house to the market, and to the theater, and to the hiking trails? I live in an dense city in Asia and I can do this. Many city dwellers do not drive a car and a significant proportion of those never even learned how. Does your rural area support a dockless shared bike scheme? Can teenagers travel ind…

Most people including me don't mind having to drive places, but there actually are a lot of places where you can walk to businesses if you live there. I'd rather have a more private house surrounded by forest on all sides.

You don't need a bikeshare if you have space to store your own bike. Teenagers can get a license at 16, ride bikes around, walk around, use skateboards, lots of options, but I don't see the big deal about getting rides from their parents sometimes. I don't think carbon use of individuals is much of a concern, with mpg getting better all the time and electric vehicles getting more popular.

I don't know anything about clubbing scenes but there probably are some. There are small cities like Poughkeepsie interspersed with the more suburban and rural areas around there. Quick google search shows some nightclubs exist. I could ask you about the availability of a bunch of things the city might lack too like places like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnewaska_State_Park_Preserve

Maybe there are single room apartments around, I haven't checked, but there are definitely some small ones with a few rooms that probably cost a lot less than a single-room in a city anyway. Yes it's possible to rent, do you really think people don't rent outside the city? Honestly I think it's a problem, too much real estate is snatched up by people who then rent it out, making homeownership less available.

What do you mean by cultural center? There are bus stops around of various degrees of private or subsidized, with routes either within the city areas of Poughkeepsie etc or farther-reaching.

24 hour services are less than a city but they're still there. Wal Mart, Dunkin Donuts, various liquor stores, lots of stuff is 24 hours out there.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#483

Post by esoterica »

whymsicalburito wrote: post #469
esoterica wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you tax rent, landlords will pass the tax on to renters. All you are doing is making renting more unaffordable.

But buying will be cheaper than renting, so it seems just fine that rents would go up.

A lot of people cannot afford to buy at any price point.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#484

Post by tarsinge »

zanny wrote: post #269
max_hoffmann wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because the root cause is not always high demand, it’s also speculation. Real Estate is now cool again (just look at investing forums or subreddits), and foreign investor money is flowing.

Look for example at Portland (OR) how the rent increase correlates with the population increase. The current urban hype alone can not explain these numbers.

Also another example since a few years a lot of high earning people in Paris are actively moving to cities with a better quality of life and climate (like Nantes, Bordeaux), in fact as high than 80% would do it if they could [1]. Yet bizarrely this has absolutely no impact on the market.

[1] https://www.lepoint.fr/dossiers/economie/bac8-saut-secteur-p...

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#485

Post by alisonatwork »

jimmaswell wrote: post #482
alisonatwork wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are missing the kinds of things that city people consider important. For instance, can you walk from your house to the market, and to the theater, and to the hiking trails? I live in an dense city in Asia and I can do this. Many city dwellers do not drive a car and a significant proportion of those never even learned how. Does your rural area support a dockless shared bike scheme? Can teenagers travel ind…

Most people including me don't mind having to drive places, but there actually are a lot of places where you can walk to businesses if you live there. I'd rather have a more private house surrounded by forest on all sides. You don't need a bikeshare if you have space to store your own bike. Teenagers can get a license at 16, ride bikes around, walk around, use skateboards, lots of options, but I don't see the big dea…

I have lived and traveled a lot outside of the city, in North America, Australia and Europe. Trust me when I say the vast majority of rural areas do not have public transport that is remotely comparable to what people enjoy in large cities. I am talking buses, trains, bikes, scooters, all available within a few minutes to take you anywhere you want to go. There is a whole expanse of North America - notably west of the Missouri - where you can't even get into or out of the small towns because Greyhound doesn't run there any more and Amtrak never did.

I have lived in the country. I don't want that lifestyle. Billions of people around the world do not want that lifestyle. They do not want to own a car. They do not want to own a bicycle. They do not want to own a house. They do not want to maintain a garden or have a forest on all sides. They do not want to go to the one nightclub for miles around. They want to have bars and restaurants and theaters and all those things that you are lucky enough to have in upstate New York, but they want it 5 minutes walk from their front door. And they want to choose from 20 different options. They want to get vegan food or bubble tea or something a little more interesting than Dunkin Donuts at 2am.

I understand that there are people who really appreciate the rural lifestyle, but please also understand there are many people who do not.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#486

Post by souprock »

alisonatwork wrote: post #478
jimmaswell wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "nothing to do"? What is there to do only in the city that's supposed to be so attractive, clubs, modern art galleries? I'm genuinely curious because this never resonated with me. Things to do in the Hudson Valley, the example I have in mind of a non-city area: expansive hiking trails for walking/biking, a river for rafting/skiing/boating/fishing, great family-owned restaurants all over, lots of n…

I think you are missing the kinds of things that city people consider important. For instance, can you walk from your house to the market, and to the theater, and to the hiking trails? I live in an dense city in Asia and I can do this. Many city dwellers do not drive a car and a significant proportion of those never even learned how. Does your rural area support a dockless shared bike scheme? Can teenagers travel ind…

That all sounds like college, with dorms and a campus shuttle and so on.

IMHO, one is expected to grow out of that. The next phase of life awaits.

Much later, when you are widowed and you move into an assisted living facility, you can once again have high-density living with few belongings and a shared means of transportation.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#487

Post by jimmaswell »

alisonatwork wrote: post #485
jimmaswell wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people including me don't mind having to drive places, but there actually are a lot of places where you can walk to businesses if you live there. I'd rather have a more private house surrounded by forest on all sides. You don't need a bikeshare if you have space to store your own bike. Teenagers can get a license at 16, ride bikes around, walk around, use skateboards, lots of options, but I don't see the big dea…

I have lived and traveled a lot outside of the city, in North America, Australia and Europe. Trust me when I say the vast majority of rural areas do not have public transport that is remotely comparable to what people enjoy in large cities. I am talking buses, trains, bikes, scooters, all available within a few minutes to take you anywhere you want to go. There is a whole expanse of North America - notably west of th…

That's fine if it works for you. The point here is there's lots to do outside the city, even a lot of exclusive activities. I'm tired of seeing it said that there's "nothing to do" outside the city. Maybe if your only hobbies are nightclubs and getting mugged.

Besides that, people who would prefer to not own any car, rent bicycles instead of owning them if they're a bicyclist, and wouldn't want to own a house if they had the option sound like a niche minority to me.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#488

Post by nemothekid »

xg15 wrote: post #340
hikarudo wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposite of: "only the rich can get a house" is not "everyone gets a fair chance of getting a house", but "not even the rich can get a house". Think of two families that want to get the same house, both having about the same wealth, but one is desperate to get the house and therefore willing to pay more, say because of health problems, while the second family can wait for another property. You lose a lot when you…

By that logic, there would be no way at all for the poor to get a house.

Yes there is. You _build_ more so that prices go down.

It’s baffling how much “adding more housing” is always a non starter solution. Everyone seems to understand that if flood the market with something like diamonds then the prices of diamonds will go down, but when it comes to housing then basic economics go out the window.

Rent control is an incredibly pro-landlord policy. In high growth cities, land owners can simply sit on property, never invest in that property (they don’t have to compete) and simply watch their value skyrocket as they never have to worry about new supply driving the market down.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#489

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

cyrksoft wrote: post #479
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Through a high tax on the unimproved value of the land: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

That will only push prices even higher. The cost will be pushed to the consumer, like every tax.

That's actually very difficult to do with a tax on the unimproved value of land. The LVT has very interesting properties. In theory, it should drive the cost of land down to zero, eliminate speculation in land, and encourage denser development.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#490

Post by nullwasamistake »

Rent control is almost always a disaster. It benefits current residents at the detriment to everyone else. Look no farther than SF or NYC. I have a friend in NYC paying 2000 a month to be a roommate to a guy paying 1500 for the whole place. Yeah he's paying more than this guy's whole rent, because the apartment is rent controlled.
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