521–530 of 594 posts
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The rental freeze does not apply for new housing. (Wohnungsneubau wird vom Gesetz gänzlich ausgenommen.) https://www.berlin.de/rbmskzl/aktuelles/pressemitteilungen/2...
This time. When the next freeze takes place, your residential construction won't be "new" anymore.
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If the city wants something the market can't provide the solution is to do it yourself. Berlin is partially doing that. The "Wohnungsbaugesellschaft Berlin-Mitte" is a housing association owned by the City of Berlin that builds and rents out apartments. They more or less act like other investors, just with more focus on social factors than on high profits.
> just with more focus on social factors than on high profits Which is basically a political issue, because they will say "some people are more equal than others". Personally, I prefer naked capitalism over this "you need to know somebody in the party to get a good flat"-stuff.
is what you get in naked or even non-naked capitalism.
> you need to know somebody in the party to get a good flat
The SED dictatorship has been abolished 30 years ago. We don't have much of a corruption problem.
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Isn't the black market that occurs a form of naked capitalism? Here in Stockholm a lot of the public good properties have been sold out which have left precious little for too many to contend. Prices of labour and land are so expensive that, allegedly, profit margins are not good enough. The "know somebody" bit goes for plain hard capitalism as well, but is less in effect in a society that actually focus on the socia…
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, too, like it when a group a part of gets privileges.
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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 don't know, I've always liked the "if you have money, you can buy it" part of capitalism. I, too, like it when a group a part of gets privileges.
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> just with more focus on social factors than on high profits Which is basically a political issue, because they will say "some people are more equal than others". Personally, I prefer naked capitalism over this "you need to know somebody in the party to get a good flat"-stuff.
> some people are more equal than others is what you get in naked or even non-naked capitalism. > you need to know somebody in the party to get a good flat The SED dictatorship has been abolished 30 years ago. We don't have much of a corruption problem.
Yeah, but naked capitalism is closer to meritocracy, albeit not nearly there.
> The SED dictatorship has been abolished 30 years ago. We don't have much of a corruption problem.
It's still there, just not to the same extent, and more subtle. The market economy helps because it provides mostly unbiased. You're not required to know people, but it still helps enormously if you do.
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So you hope for expropriation and irrationally behaving financial investors. I wanted to say I have a bridge to sell to you, but you already got the Airport... it just hurts that I'm paying for the punchline.
I'm not hoping for anything, but if a bad actor is playing with people's lives, I also don't have a problem that they get punished for it. Now the only issue with expropriation would be the panic it cause in the markets, because otherwise who cares whether residential property company #201f exists or not. Setting some rules around renting, like the government has been and is doing, to prevent abuse and speculation is…
Low supply. You are not fixing that with a rent-freeze, you are making it worse.
> Last I read about it these companies had record profits and now you and others are complaining that they won't build any more because they can't get profits? How's that work, mate?
These companies, especially Vonovia, will continue to make a profit for their shareholders, even if they take a hit because their assets in Berlin devaluate. They just will not invest further in Berlin, won't build/buy&renovate housing.
If I were a shareholder in Vonovia i'd be pretty concerned of them taking such a risk, I wouldn't want them to invest in Venezuela either.
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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…
> 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. I don't buy any of this. Growing up, everyone around me saw the suburbs as somewhere you begrudgingly went out of necessity and only lived there if…
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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…
It's so strange - the promise of the "information super-highway" in the 90s was that proximity wouldn't matter as much. But if anything it matters more, since every minute spent idle (e.g. travelling to meet someone) has a higher associated cost due to the opportunity cost of lost productivity. So we tend to clump and cluster.
Which sounds like another vote for remote work instead of clumping and clustering. Why care about proximity and the time it takes to travel when everyone you'd want to meet, regardless of location, is a message, call or video conference away and reachable from your home, favorite coffee shop or local office?
And no, I'm not saying that this has to replace all face to face interaction, but I think it should become the default for work environments that are compatible with this approach.
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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…
Well, there are two solutions, either make the voters less influential or change the behavior of the voters.
If you want to do something useful. Do infrastructure building and make more of the surounding area accessable for large scale building programs.
Make regulations for building easier to handle when building new houses. Meaning allow to build higher and so on. I bet there are 100s of unnessary regulations that have accumelated over the last 50 years.