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Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

reuters.com

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Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#541

Post by anoncake »

luckylion wrote: post #525
anoncake wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> > some people are more equal than others > is what you get in naked or even non-naked capitalism. 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 requi…

> Yeah, but naked capitalism is closer to meritocracy, albeit not nearly there.

But just as far from equality.

> It's still there, just not to the same extent, and more subtle.

"not much of a"

> The market economy helps because it provides mostly unbiased. You're not required to know people, but it still helps enormously if you do.

A market economy is by design biased towards wealthy people. A democratic state with rule of law is mostly unbiased.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#542

Post by travisoneill1 »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #117
vtail wrote: post #3

As a person born and raised in Soviet Union, I strongly believe that whoever thinks that a proper economic response to raising prices is literally to order them to stop raising , is a lunatic.

That's true for, say, bread . Or really any fungible good where labor makes up most of the price of the product. If you artificially suppress those prices, there isn't enough money to pay the farmers and bakers, and no bread will be made. This freeze actually exempts new construction, so the whole problem is mood. But it's still interesting to think it through, and the result is different than simple economics may ma…

The cost of a housing unit will be (land value + construction cost) / density. The idea is that you can simultaneously increase land value and decrease housing cost by increasing density.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#543

Post by nec4b »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #468
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…

> 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…

He wasn't talking about suburbs which technically are a part of a city and not of the countryside.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#544

Post by DocTomoe »

MickerNews wrote: post #390
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…

>The solution is to build houses, but what kind of investor is going to throw their money at Berlin, where their opportunity to make a return on their investment is severely hampered? Uh, the state. It's strange to me that someone can honestly ask this question. The free market has failed as is its wont in these matters, this failure always needs to be addressed by the state. Where were you for the last global econom…

> Uh, the state.

This is Berlin, which actually used the slogan "arm aber sexy" (roughly: impovershed, but sexy).

They don´t have the cash to start building flats with no ROI.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#545

Post by DocTomoe »

jordanbeiber wrote: post #331
zanny wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is pretty basic and was proven to work for centuries before extreme zoning intervention by governments happened at the behest of property owners wanting their gentrification. To fund the program you institute luxury property taxes on units larger than what you want your average citizen to afford and actually property tax businesses (which many cities do not do, because they bribed companies to locate the…

Thank you for such a thorough reply and your perspective. Can you name a capital city that have a non dysfunctional system in place? I seem to remember reading about Wienna having an interesting model in play.

Tokyo, but that´s mostly because of zoning laws.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#546

Post by DocTomoe »

pessimizer wrote: post #457
seunosewa wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who can afford to pay higher rents are generally the most productive. They have important skills that employers are willing to pay high salaries for. They also pay more taxes and spend more money. If I ran a city, I would want more of those highly skilled workers in my city.

> If I ran a city, I would want more of those highly skilled workers in my city. Why, exactly? Does the person who runs the city with the highest per capita tax receipts get some sort of award? I assume his/her rent would get driven up with the rest.

People with higher capita tax receipts are also less likely to be ill, less likely to indulge in violent crime, less likely to hold extremist views, less likely to litter or cause other trouble.

If you want to manage a liveable city instead of a slum, you want that kind of people.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#547

Post by DocTomoe »

pessimizer wrote: post #454
seunosewa wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that the problem is that too many people want to live in Berlin, the solution is for a large fraction of those people to choose to live elsewhere, and the rising rents would have been a good way to achieve that outcome.

Another way to do it would be to turn new entrants away, unless people who were already there chose to leave. To the people living in Berlin, it's arguably not at all a problem that too many people want to live in Berlin until the rents rise as a result.

Or we could just limit rent rises and allow rent contracts to be limited to 5 years. After all, why does anyone have a higher "right" to live in their preferred place?

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#548

Post by someguydave »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #436
MickerNews wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The solution is to build houses, but what kind of investor is going to throw their money at Berlin, where their opportunity to make a return on their investment is severely hampered? Uh, the state. It's strange to me that someone can honestly ask this question. The free market has failed as is its wont in these matters, this failure always needs to be addressed by the state. Where were you for the last global econom…

The last global financial crisis was created by the world's largest Central Bank. It had absolutely nothing to do with the free market when the largest banks were dealing with government-guaranteed securities and were speculating on a government created bubble. In a free market, all those who poured billions into the bubble would have gone bankrupt and all of their real assets would have been sold off in bankruptcy p…

https://www.idiosyncraticwhisk.com/2016/10/housing-part-183-...

Kevin Erdmann agrees with you. Here is his blog post about the housing shortage associated with the 2008 bust

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#549

Post by moate »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #387
moate wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, except they don't. It's higher than rural areas, but that doesn't mean it's in line with the general cost of living in the area. I promise you, if you go to any major world city there are people living there who are poor and barely scraping by.

That is the trade-off they are making in exchange for things such as access to more employers. At some point though, they will demand more money or move out, assuming their quality of life relative to other places they can live drops to a sufficiently low level. There are people who are poor and scraping by everywhere, not just cities. Low paying jobs are low paying because the demand is not high enough relative to t…

Also this cute "demand more more or move out" idea isn't even close to reality. You just said there's poor people everywhere. Why move out of a city to be poor when you're just going to be poor somewhere else? To be away from what support network you might have? Because you feel like incurring all the costs associated with moving?

Also, your original post implied that the city doesn't "need" these jobs. People need janitors and food service workers for their companies. Why these people aren't paid wages where they can afford to exist is a whole rats nest of economic theory that we don't really need to get into.

I'm just pointing out, that the idea that a single individual will be able to demand more money if their job is "important" runs contrary to what we've seen historically.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#550

Post by hnick »

thirdsun wrote: post #528
hnick wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. 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…

I totally agree. I'm just trying to get my head around why it seems that our promised decentralisation never came to be. Maybe old habits just die hard.
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