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Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

reuters.com

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Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#511

Post by luckylion »

jordanbeiber wrote: post #509
luckylion wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I've always liked the "if you have money, you can buy it" part of capitalism. You can make money, but you can't change the fundamentals. In a racist white society, having money will not help you if you're black. In a politicized society, having money will not help you if you don't have the right worldview, or were born into the wrong family. In my home town, having money will not help you get into a (pr…

I’m just saying that with capitalism comes politics. Always have, always will. To believe otherwise is a bit naive. Politics can be used to even things out as was done over here from the turn of the century up until, I’d say, 70-80s. The last few decades have been way to market/neoliberal policy wise, and in many ways we’re seeing the effect today. I just think you’re a bit binary here. I come from a struggling famil…

> I’m just saying that with capitalism comes politics.

I don't see that. I'm not with the mainstream politics at all in my country, yet I face very little inconveniences precisely because money determines whether I can buy a phone, not politics.

We might talk about different kind of politics. You want regulation (for example on predatory lending), and I'm fine with that. I don't want "social criteria" (as in "what gender are you?", "what's your political world view?", "are you married?", "did you go to university?" etc) to determine whether I can rent an apartment. I prefer the worst neoliberal unregulated free market system to that, simply because in that terrible market I still have a chance if I'm not part of the "more equal" group. In the other I don't, no matter how hard I work. It's like a feudal society where your class if fixed at birth. I prefer pure capitalism over that.

That's not to say that I prefer pure capitalism over everything, I just believe that even in its shittiest form, it's still more fair than a thoroughly politicized system. Fortunately, we still have a lot of market economy, so we're not anywhere near a place where only politics matter, but whenever somebody asks for "social factors" to play a role in deciding who will get a flat (or a job, or a car, or food), I can't help but see the writing on the wall.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#512

Post by username444 »

max_hoffmann wrote: post #290
username444 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Cities don't want or need more landlords. It needs more landOWNER residents.

What’s so good about owning? Renting is way better, if it’s affordable: - I can move out when my life circumstances change. - I can move out when the district changes. - I don’t need to take a credit just for living somewhere. - I don’t need to worry about people renting my apartments. - I don’t need to worry about maintenance. If you have the money to buy fine, but for most people renting is way better.

It's a completely separate argument than what I was responding to.

I personally agree with you, but thats my specific lifestyle, and I put my money into other investments. But generally, owning a house is a good place to park your assets if you live a "typical" life.

One of the biggest reasons I want more landOWNER residents? So that my neighbours actually care what's happening in the neighborhood+condo, and do something about.

I'm renting from a Chinese investor. He doesn't speak English and doesn't have a clue what's going on around here, and doesn't care to get involved with helping things run better.

I can communicate my issues with the real estate agent who handles the unit for him, but he's just going to shoot off a short email and move on with his day.

Over 50% of this building is this way. The board of directors has a huge accountability issue because of this, and residents and owners are suffering for it.

If you rent, you care what happens locally, but you have no say.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#513

Post by ericd »

WalterBright wrote: post #507
pessimizer wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lottery of having already lived there? Only in the same sense as if I have a doll, you're screwed out of having that doll.

It also nails the feet of the people who live there to the floor, because they know they can't get such a deal again if they move. This is economically and environmentally inefficient, because it traps people in less desirable jobs due to proximity, and prevents them from moving closer to work.

Ah yeah, another huge problem that I forgot to mention. This really kills the liquidity of the market. You see the same dynamic with sales in CA due to Prop 13 - this makes it so that elderly people can’t afford to downsize, because their property taxes would go up 10-20x for many of them if they moved to an equivalent place, and it’s economical for people to sit on extremely valuable undeveloped land and wait for it to appreciate, because there’s next to no holding cost.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#514

Post by 08-15 »

Isn't it amazing how short politicians' memories are?

It's been only 30 years since the GDR (German "Democratic" Republic, aka East Germany) collapsed. In the GDR, all rent was regulated to a "fair" level. The result was a universal scarcity of housing, and existing houses were decaying, because nobody would invest any amount of money into maintenance. The best housing available in the 1980s were those ugly and uncomfortable apartment buildings made from mass produced concrete slabs, which everyone just remembers as socialist architecture. And "available" meant you had to wait for many years. Still, the alternative was to live in a house built in 1910-1930 and not maintained since 1950.

There is no place in the world that could document this failed policy better than Berlin: the contrast between East Berlin (ugly ruins) and West Berlin (nice houses) is striking, even today. But the Berlin senate decides to go with socialist thinking again. However, that was to be expected after the Berliners voted the old Socialist Unified Party (renamed twice, but otherwise unchanged) into the senate.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#515

Post by skgoa »

acchow wrote: post #375
tomatocracy wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actually does nothing - it results in rents which are equal to what the open market price would have been. Lots of people living in rent-controlled apartments around the world would disagree.

With your pithy reply you miss the critical fact that the german version of rent control isn't actually rent control. It just pegs how much rent for any given apartment can increase to how much the rent in that area has recently increased. In practice this means that all rents increase at the same rate as before the "control" was put in place.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#516

Post by ben_w »

pmiller2 wrote: post #510
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…

> 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. The Bay Area has a rather efficient solution to this problem: limit the open house to 15 minutes. I wish I was kidding, but I saw multiple open houses that were literally 15 minutes long, and…

The problem isn’t the number of people showing up, it’s the number of people who want any given apartment. Limiting viewings to 15 minutes may solve disruption to neighbours, but it doesn’t help with the demand-supply ratio.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#517

Post by skgoa »

EliRivers wrote: post #352
jimmaswell wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy any of this. Growing up everyone around me saw the city as somewhere you begrudgingly went out of necessity and only lived there if you had no choice, and I'm inclined to agree. In virtually every aspect I find more countryside-ish living much more pleasant. Consider virtual reality and remote work. I imagine much of the workforce will move to virtual offices in the near to medium-far future when corporat…

Depends on what you want, I suppose. High density humanity simply makes practical and economically viable gatherings, grouping and other activities that just don't work in low-density populations. Classes, meetups, specialist stores, hobbies, clubs, shows, lectures, institutions and just plain bubbling, embryonic interactions; all of it an order of magnitude more intense in a big city. Travel even fifty miles away fr…

Yeah, living in the suburbs of or reasonably close to a large metropolis is where it's at. As soon as you want/need a good or service that goes even slightly outside of the local mainstream, it will almost always be available only in a big city. The bigger the more likely that it will be available.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#518

Post by ben_w »

BowBun wrote: post #280
odiroot wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't know, there's something utopian about what you describe. If the city doesn't have housing for everyone, why should the rich get it first? Leave capitalism at the door, we're talking about a roof over your head for janitors vs. business executives. If an 'ideal' free market means the rich get the houses and the poor are on the street, because developers don't have motivation to build, then I'm happy to see eve…

The rich, as always, have options that aren’t available to the poor.

In the case of Berlin, it is surrounded by Brandenburg. Brandenburg is extremely cheap, and one could easily live there officially (but in practice only on weekends) and only spend weekdays in the city, perhaps in a hotel (the price difference of weekend home in Brandenburg plus hotel in Berlin vs. anything in SanFran makes this look sane). Or you could live a short walk from Leipzig Hbf. and take the high-speed train to Berlin which is only about one hour and thus similar to my tram/bus/U-Bahn/S-Bahn commute to the the city center from just inside the city limits.

My ideal is not a free market either, but rather government built homes. I may however be rose-tinting the past, as my mental model is what the UK used to call “council houses”.

Edit: also, I’m not actually German, I’ve just lived here for 10 months and am still learning about everything.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#519

Post by anoncake »

gwright wrote: post #491
anoncake wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The German construction industry doesn't have any spare capacity as is.

High prices are exactly how the free market attracts additional resources to solve capacity problems. Legislative efforts to limit prices pretty much guarantees that additional capacity will not be forthcoming and that shortages and high prices will continue.

That's how you get an overbuilt construction industry and (even more) unemployed construction workers during the next recession. The "free" market is adequate for allocating resources to consumer goods but not for allocating them to entire industries.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#520

Post by zwaps »

nemothekid wrote: post #488
xg15 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

High price demand is filled before low price demand. In the context of limited space and inability to, say, build high (as in Berlin), what you propose could literally mean that there is no housing for the poor.
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