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Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets

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Re: Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets

#601

Post by csunbird »

u678u wrote: post #436
csunbird wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved to Berlin two years ago and the finding a house was incredibly exhausting. As the article mentions, there are two categories, rent capped apartments and non rent capped apartments. For the first category, there are 2000+ applicants per day per apartment, making it impossible to actually have a chance to get the apartment. The odds getting that apartment as a foreigner that do not speak German is non existent,…

> stupid amounts of rent for small apartments (1100 - 1200 cold rent for 50sqm Wow that's cheap, London you'd pay double or triple that.

You also earn more in London. The main problem here is the rent increases are always higher than the wage increases in Berlin.

Re: Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets

#602

Post by blub »

jboog wrote: post #506
lutoma wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proponents of nuclear power labelling everyone who does not unequivocally support it "science deniers" is such infuriating populism. Nuclear power obviously has immense benefits, but there are also undeniable risks associated with it. It's entirely possible to be in favor or against it while considering the exact same scientific facts depending on which of these you consider more important, no "scientific denialism"…

Coal kills thousands of people a year in the US (13,000 if you believe the extreme estimates) Less than 20 people have died in Nuclear related accidents in the history of this technologies use. And almost every single one of those were unrelated to the nuclear technology itself (electrocution, other workplace accidents that could happen in any power plant) If you want to lump in Chernobyl and Fukushima we are still o…

In complex systems accidents do not tell the whole story, one has to also look at incidents and the "safety culture" of the organization (i.e. ~ how they avoid failure and how they react to failure).

Aviation for example has The Aviation Herald, where one can see that there's in fact quite many incidents that almost never result in accidents. There's lots of literature on safety engineering in aviation.

What's the equivalent for the nuclear industry? I was admittedly not very interested in this topic, so I'm only aware of the descriptions from Perrow's "Normal Accidents" book where he reported on several incidents which were actually published by the involved organizations. They didn't inspire confidence at all, on the contrary they were downright scary (and much scarier than one can find on the Av Herald).

Maybe the nuclear industry grew up, but it's absolutely necessary to have transparency here. Looking at global accidents is like trying to map a castle through a keyhole.

Re: Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets

#603

Post by zpeti »

el_nahual wrote: post #152

An issue that many commenters here are missing is that the problem with rent control will manifest more sharply in the future. Sure, the impact today seems relatively equitable: a windfall for people that rent today coupled with a small drop in supply. But fast forward 10 or 20 years and the situation looks far worse: everyone who got a windfall today is still living in the same apartment, whereas anyone trying to en…

But politicians need votes within 4-5 years. So who really cares. At least the young people getting apartments now are getting a good deal. Who cares about the future??

Re: Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets

#604

Post by blub »

porb121 wrote: post #539
skohan wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, what's the alternative? I live in Berlin, and my neighbours are in their 70's. Should they be forced to find a new flat way outside the city because the rent triples over the course of a few years so young tech workers relocating from London can have a place in the cool part of town? The rental market is different in Germany than it is in other countries: less people own their homes, and getting a housi…

> Should they be forced to find a new flat way outside the city because the rent triples over the course of a few years so young tech workers relocating from London can have a place in the cool part of town? yes why should they get to stay in berlin and have their housing subsidized?

Because they lived there half if not all their lives and want to continue to live there. It's as easy as that and it's a legitimate reason.

In the end, the Senate of Berlin is looking out at least in theory for the people of Berlin, not nomad developers or other people looking to move there.

Re: Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets

#605

Post by blub »

porb121 wrote: post #580
kelnos wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because civilization requires compassion, empathy, and meeting people's basic needs in a stable manner.

i don't find it particularly compassionate or empathetic to subsidize someone's apartment just because they were living in it when a rent control bill was passed. yes, that person has a claim to some kind of housing, but why should they have a claim to the exact same kind of housing in perpetuity?

Supporting pushing them out while not offering any solution besides saying they have "a claim to some kind of housing" is essentially supporting throwing them out on the street in their 70s period.

Re: Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets

#606

Post by blub »

germanier wrote: post #273
throwaway85858 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

perhaps, but if MietenWoG is struck down that leaves only the BGB. yes you're right, two months not one.

As I said, "strike down" usually doesn't mean "transport everyone into a parallel universe where the law has never existed but all people still have acted the same and deal with the fallout no matter how unjust". Rulings are usually much more nuanced than that (and constitutionally required to be that).

This is one more of those "software engineer tries to apply algorithmic thinking to law and gets ridiculous results" situations.

If you continue to be patient and repeat that humanity doesn't function according to algorithms, they'll eventually get the message or get bored and leave to work on the next disruption.

Re: Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets

#607

Post by blub »

gameman144 wrote: post #420
tehjoker wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing a larger point: why should people be forced to move? There's no natural law that says people should be ceaselessly pushed around by market forces.

One could just as easily say that you're missing the opposite point: why should policy prevent new people from moving in? In either scenario, policy will disadvantage one group and advantage another. Any policies that aim to give stability to long-term tenants is liable to disadvantage new and shorter-term tenants. There's no natural law dictating that people should be forced to move out, but there's also no natural…

Insiders almost always have more rights than outsiders.

Berlin has more than enough people living there, they don't need the outsiders and its within their rights to discourage them from moving in. But this isn't even doing that as they're very welcoming, they merely want to protect the people already living there.

Re: Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets

#608

Post by mxfh »

shuckles wrote: post #484
mxfh wrote: post #481

As a tenant living in Berlin, the lede is buried in the last paragraph. To complicate Berlin’s situation further, Germany’s constitutional court is expected in the coming months to decide whether these rent controls are even legal. If the judges nix the legislation, lots of tenants in the formerly regulated sector could get hit by huge and even retroactive increases in their rents. That would create yet more chaos. T…

Can you point me to some evidence that vacancies are a problem in the rental market?

My immediate neigborhood, with quite a few empty appartments?! Even the service workers asked to install the mandated smoke detectors were commenting about this, since they can't access quite a few of appartments even during COVID's stay at home policies.

There is no offical data on this, since it's illegal to keep them vacant for more than 3 months. So they are under "maintenance" or the like.

https://web.de/magazine/politik/schattenmieten-leerstand-ber...

https://www.zeit.de/2020/37/mietendeckel-berlin-immobilienma...

Re: Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets

#609

Post by mxfh »

csomar wrote: post #339

> If the judges nix the legislation, lots of tenants in the formerly regulated sector could get hit by huge and even retroactive increases in their rents. Am I reading this correctly? So, these tenants might find themselves in thousands (maybe dozen of thousands) of euros of debt to their landlord. And I assume they'll be required to pay it up overnight? In this case, the politicians really screwed these "poor" peopl…

This applies to both sides, the so called shadow contracts might also be not enforcable in a lot of cases, be it for legal reason or private persons declaring bankruptcy. This uncertainty is the way bigger driver for the current situation, coming to conclussions from this about the effects of rent control is premature at best. This current situation of legal limbo is a phenomenon on it's own. Not even mentioning COVID.

Re: Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets

#610

Post by blub »

csunbird wrote: post #149
febeling wrote: post #72

The situation in Berlin before the policy change was that the city government had made it very hard to build apartments at all. Each time a project it developed, the developer is blackmailed into supporting various unrelated policies, being it parking space related, maximum stories, etc., and sometimes capriciously denied permission to build. This is how my green-leaning, government-trusting architect friends describ…

I moved to Berlin two years ago and the finding a house was incredibly exhausting. As the article mentions, there are two categories, rent capped apartments and non rent capped apartments. For the first category, there are 2000+ applicants per day per apartment, making it impossible to actually have a chance to get the apartment. The odds getting that apartment as a foreigner that do not speak German is non existent,…

Berlin's a big city and I bet most people don't care about start-ups or expats. Don't confuse what some politicians and companies are saying with the broad opinions of the entire population of Berlin.

Now that we got the alleged need for expats (which isn't) out of the way, let's address some of the other points:

* if you're a foreigner, especially from outside Europe you have less of a shared cultural background with the typical local landlord. Of course they're gonna like someone local more.

* if you don't even speak the local language, you're at a disadvantage in almost every imaginable situation in a foreign country. Some people are nice and make an effort to speak English - that's a courtesy, not something that is owed to you.

It looks like you were sold some fantasy start-up heaven which doesn't exist. Not everything revolves around software and nomad developers, shocking as that may be.

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