Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets

> I almost want to agree with you on the displacement point, but the problem is that building on empty land is how we got Phoenix. The ROI on dense buildings isn't great unless you're closer to the center of an already developed city, and then all the problems with displacement and NIMBYs apply. Also, building out to avoid zoning laws isn't great for the local environment.

I think you misunderstood my point. What I meant is that are many empty/available lots ready for development in the city, which could be redeveloped with minimal to no displacement. The problem is that zoning laws (and in many places like SF, community reviews/objections) prevent building there.

For example, in Sunnyvale, a developer bought a empty mall, so they could redevelop it into housing/offices. However, that project took years to get started because of lawsuits and red tape. In New York City, a proposal to replace a parking lot with 300 units of housing in South Seaport was rejected for not fitting the character of the community. Why worry about displacement if projects without displacement take forever to build, or are not allowed?

More generally, most cities have plenty of neighbourhoods that are currently zoned for single family housing. Increasing density there would lead to minimal displacement, because the density is so low that you'd displace on the order of 10s of people per project, which is not a massive amount to deal with.

And if we redefine displacement as being forced to leave against your will (which I think is what left-NIMBYs and I really care about), you could probably get that number down to 0, because I'm sure there are many owner-occupiers who would be willing to sell their property to a developer and move out; they just can't because zoning law forbids increasing density.

> then implement policies to ameliorate that pain while still promoting density

Many efforts to increase density take this into account, and are designed to minimize displacement. For example, the upzoning bill in CA (SB 50) disallowed rebuilding properties that had renters occupying it for the past 5 years, which means that only owner occupied units would be rebuilt (and thus causing no displacement under the definition I used above).

Eventually, we'll run out of empty lots and owner occupied properties in cities to upzone, at which time, we'll have to decide how to make the hard tradeoffs around displacement. But right now, we're not close to that point, so there's no need to muddle the waters with future concerns. Let's just build.

> Just dismissing left-NIMBYs as crypto-Trumpist won't dismiss their otherwise valid concerns

I think left NIMBYs do have valid concerns, and I don't think they're "crypto-Trumpists". My opinion is that they're just "useful idiots" [0] for existing property owners and landlords, because they don't have a good understanding of land economics and how their proposed policies will interact in the real world, which just leads to homeowners and landlords getting richer at the expense of those without property.

[0] - Sorry for the harsh phrasing. I don't mean this in a super derogatory way, I just can't think of another word for this.

Even without Prop 13, this problem still applies, and is inherent to real estate.

Buying land is essentially buying a monopoly (since land is in fixed supply), and getting access to its rents for perpetuity. Prop 13 gives you even more of the rents, but in places with Prop 13, property taxes are low enough that most of the rents still go to the landowner.

You can compare land to taxi medallions, and see that all the reasons taxi medallions are bad also apply to land. Allowing indefinite ownership of the rents from a scarce resource essentially gives a slice of the future productivity of the community to those who were lucky to buy early enough.

You don't need the slightly racist comment, biggest problem imho is that house ownership is very low in berlin (last time I read about it was around only 15% of people live on their owned houses) and really hard to change that. You have to think that everytime you're looking at buying a place you're competing with Blackrock, Deutsche Wohne and other not so nice funds with much more room for negotiation than you. That's why even if you and your partner makes top 10% salary you're probably not rich enough to own a house.

And on top of that germany has very strict laws about transparency of home ownership so there's no clear way to know the distribution of home ownership or who are the biggest landlords and where they got their money from. Which is bad because there's a lot of shady people buying whole complexes, but it's also working as intended as a lot of politicians are also big landlords.

Indian living in Berlin. Can confirm. Finding a new apartment is almost impossible and the rents on unregulated apartments is now through the roof. An apartment that would cost ~800 EUR for rent is now atleast 1100-1200 (even for a good developer salary, this is insane).

Berlin is the SF of Europe at the moment. Unless you want to spend 6 months at a minimum hunting apartments I would avoid this city.

Once I get comfortable with German, I am thinking of moving to cheaper, smaller cities , probably in the south and working full time remote.

I'm not a nuclear engineer, although I have a couple friends that are and have assured me the risk is incredibly low. The scientific literature backs this up.

What annoys me is climate change activists that paint nuclear power as some terrible boogeyman we must never use lest we irradiate the entire United States.

They will never ever "show their work" and do the cost/benefit analysis of the ongoing thousands who die from coal and other carbon energy sources or the potential millions who will die from climate change.

No, no it's all just alarmist BS about nuclear being "dangerous" so let's just not use literally the only power generating technology that can replace almost every single fossil fuel plant in the US. Not even solar and wind can claim that!

So I think it's accurate to describe this view as "anti-science" at least for those who want to abolish the use of nuclear altogether (Green new deal types)