641–650 of 724 posts
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We're talking about Berlin.
"I'd like to move out of my rent-controlled apartment in Spandau because my job is in Eberswalde, but I don't want to walk away from this rate."
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A counterexample is Vienna, which utilizes a well balanced system of rent-control and social housing to have incredibly low rents and still a stable supply of flats. One tweak they apply is that rent-control does not apply to new developments, so creating new flats is more lucrative than turning old buildings into luxury developments. The city also acts as a competitor, driving prices down by offering cheap flats. Th…
Rent control only exists for one reason: to keep tenants in their apartments. It's not a tool that is solving a shortage of housing but lots of politicians will insist that new housing isn't needed. You just need to manipulate the useful fiction that is the market and fake everything. At least that's what the politicians think. Even if it means that the market is no longer useful.
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> 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 incom…
Nowhere does it say that supply has dropped. If renting is less profitable, then supply of houses to be sold will actually go up. The ability to rent is not the primary driver of speculation. But it drastically lowers downside risk, which gives less incentive for anyone to pop the bubble. >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…
You wrongly assume that the landlord gets to make this choice. In this situation, the landlord does not - the tenant does. If renting is made more attractive by rent control, then fewer renters move out and supply is thus lessened.
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You get what you pay for. If the tenant here wanted to live with slum like pricing, tenant should get slum like conditions.
When I moved in, the pricing was fair, if not a bit high. Over the years, cost of living increases for whatever reasons and now the rent I'm paying seems low. Maybe the solution is to allow landlords to have larger increases that match changes in COL, but that is effectively the same as getting rid of rent control.
Your proposed solution is now to get rid of rent control, which is what they had supposedly already done. But I agree. Seems like (actually) getting rid of rent control would have been a good move.
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Housing can at most grow as l^3, population can grow as e^n. If you want to be withing t hours of place x then you need transport systems that travel at l/t km/h. Until people have two children or less population will always outpace housing. Anything else is wishful thinking.
that's funny because many cities have a replacement rate less than 2, not counting immigration. And even with population growth at e^n, the constants matter in the analysis. l^3 growth may be enough until humans reach space faring.
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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.
being enabled to continue doing something (at the cost of others!) just because you want to keep doing it is not a particularly legitimate reason also, if people move to Berlin, they also become the people of Berlin.
"I want to move to Berlin", on the other hand, is not a particularly legitimate reason to kick out a current resident for a newcomer.
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Kicking people out of their homes doesn't solve the supply problem, because it doesn't create new housing. It just shuffles around who lives in existing houses. If you have a housing problem, and you want to solve it, you need to do two things. 1. Not kick people out of housing that they have. (Because it is incredibly disruptive to people's lives.) 2. Build new housing, until demand is met. Rent control accomplishes…
The major flaw in your argument is that you can't do #2 with rent control in the picture. From the economist[0]: > Rent controls are a textbook example of a well-intentioned policy that does not work. They deter the supply of good-quality rental housing. With rents capped, building new homes becomes less profitable. Even maintaining existing properties is discouraged because landlords see no return for their investme…
At least in Berlin, the rent control doesn't apply to newly built apartments (leading to the "split" market the title refers to), so this argument shouldn't apply.
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How are you defining "luxury" here? The land in SF is inherently expensive; any newly constructed apartment building is likely to have rents meeting your definition of "luxury". The land is expensive and so too is building buildings on top of it! The granite countertops and stainless steel appliances are a tiny fraction of the overall cost.
If we're using rents to define luxury, then most of the westside is luxury.
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Not quite true. California passed statewide rent control at inflation + 5% in 2019. Now some have moved the goalposts and called that rent stabilization instead of control because it allow rents to increase. New construction is exempt, though.
I thought that was the difference between rent control and rent stabilization. https://www.apartmentguide.com/blog/rent-control-vs-rent-sta... https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/resources/faqs/... Yep, those are the definitions. It looks like rent stabilization policies are frequently mis-termed "rent control", though.
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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/magazin…