> I'm not speculating at all. The article has the data to back the facts : house prices went down in Berlin.
but supply has dropped as well. Freezing food prices would also drop food prices, but won't stop bread lines.
>Yes, homes can go up on speculation alone, but this is a bubble that will pop. In North America, rising rents act as a backstop that prevent the bubble from popping, because of guaranteed rental incomes that protect you.
Not exactly. Price-to-rent ratios are above 30 in major north american cities, reaching as high as 50 in SF. While future cashflows might provide some backstop in terms of your investment, that's really not much of a consolation when you can be doubling your money roughly every 20 years with stocks.
>In the real world, free markets lead to rent increasing right up until the level where too many people are in poverty due to high rent. That's because the natural increase in rent is simply too high to be counterbalanced by supply.
>The only solution is to make real estate a barely profitable or depreciating asset. This is done here by aggressive rent control. As renting stops being so affordable, apartments are sold, homeownership increases, and renting becomes something you do to prevent depreciation, not to make profit.
I'm not sure how rent control fixes this. If you have 1M families but only 100,000 plots of land, they're going bid up the price until enough people can't afford it. This dynamic is in play regardless of whether there are landlords or not.