Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Berlin rent cap overturned by Germany's top court

dw.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 370 posts

Re: Berlin rent cap overturned by Germany's top court

#221

Post by pantalaimon »

mschuster91 wrote: post #39
adrianN wrote: post #11

I wish Berlin would just build more housing instead. For example when I cross the street there is a supermarket. It's a single story building with a huge parking lot around it. Why not make it a multistory building with apartments on top of the supermarket and skip the parking space or put it underground? Why does the city give out building permits for such buildings? There could easily be room for thirty families on…

> I wish Berlin would just build more housing instead. The problem is: Berlin can't . There is not much free space for new construction in Berlin proper, with the exception of "Nachverdichtung" such as you propose with apartments over parking lots - and these have the downside that they are horribly expensive, simply because it costs potential developers a lot of money to acquire the land! The solution would be to bu…

What about Tempelhofer Feld? What about all the Kleingartenkolonien inside and by the Ring?

Re: Berlin rent cap overturned by Germany's top court

#223

Post by goodpoint »

jurip wrote: post #107
Asmod4n wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are building a massive amount of houses, but they are too expensive for the average Berlin citizen.

I don't know the details of the Berlin situation, but as long as someone lives in those new apartments (who would have lived in Berlin anyway), it helps with the housing shortage and prices. Someone moves to the new, most expensive apartment in the city, someone else moves to their now vacant slightly less expensive apartment, etc. At some point in the chain that means there's cheaper housing available. This is a con…

> but as long as someone lives in those new apartments (who would have lived in Berlin anyway), it helps with the housing shortage and prices.

> At some point in the chain that means there's cheaper housing available.

Not at all: if you tear down a cheap apartment and replace it with a more expensive one the overall availability of cheap apartments decreases.

Re: Berlin rent cap overturned by Germany's top court

#224

Post by that_guy_iain »

corty wrote: post #191
that_guy_iain wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, it's not he people in power it's the construction companies. The amount of workers on a building site in Germany is way lower than in other places. And then you get the ones where they put 2-3 people for 2-3 weeks every 6 months.

Depends. Public construction is very different from private and industrial construction. As the industry pays well, on time and demands results, their construction sites are staffed to the fullest amount possible and complete astonishingly fast. Public construction on the other hand goes with the cheapest bidder, so doesn't pay that well. Also, the state will only pay after a lengthy process of inspections and trying…

> As the industry pays well, on time and demands results, their construction sites are staffed to the fullest amount possible and complete astonishingly fast.

In my opinion, compared to other countries things that would be built within 8-12 months take 2 years.

Re: Berlin rent cap overturned by Germany's top court

#225

Post by mattmanser »

llampx wrote: post #211
mattmanser wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So here in the UK, our councils used to build social housing. 300,000 per year. And then Thatcher made it illegal and said privately owned housing associations would fill the gap. In the 30 years since then, the most they've ever managed is 30,000. It's not in private landowner's interest to build cheap social housing. It reduces rents, it suppresses property values. So they don't get built. If they do build anything…

Thatcher has been out of office since decades. If this was important to the people they would vote for people who promise to bring it back. Or politicians are corrupt and Thatcher is a good excuse. Take your pick.

That's not how politics works in the UK. We have first past-the-post, so individual policies mean very little.

On top of that, the Conservatives made an election pledge to build 200,000 starter homes in 2015 election and apparently failed to build a single one. It's easy to claim you'll build houses and then do nothing, like it's easy to claim you'll reduce immigration but it just keeps going up.

The last election in 2019 was mainly about Brexit and the general public's perception that Corbyn was unsuited to being the Prime Minister.

Re: Berlin rent cap overturned by Germany's top court

#226

Post by nicbou »

dathinab wrote: post #220
nicbou wrote: post #145

Without judging the outcome, here are a few things HN readers might not be aware of: - The supply of rental apartments dropped by 40-60% after the Mietendeckel came in effect. It became even harder to find an apartment in Berlin. Landlords were holding their breaths. - The supply of housing for sale also dwindled. If I'm not mistaken, sellers were waiting for the court judgement to rent/sell. - The Mietendeckel also…

Also, and maybe most important: In the majority(?) of cases it did not work. Landlords found absurd ways to work around it. Many not necessary fully legal but only in a way that if no one who is "hurt" by it sues the state can not act. There where enough people which where open to pay the de-facto increased "not so legal" Rent, and as such would definitely not sure. A common trick was to pair the rent contract with R…

> A common trick was to pair the rent contract with Renting some token furniture for completely unreasonable

That's a problem with the Mietpreisbremse, but not so much with the Mietendeckel, which also sets limits on furnished flats. You also can't just throw in an IKEA BILLY shelf and call it furnished (in the words of my lawyer).

Re: Berlin rent cap overturned by Germany's top court

#227

Post by qayxc »

throwaway85858 wrote: post #187

An example of how bad the government in Berlin is would be the Pankower Tor project: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/froschlurch-muss-umgesied... 34 hectars (>90 acres) of waste land in a prime location can't be bulldozed to build 2000 new apartments because a rare species of toad was found to be living there, which can't be relocated because no state agency is responsible. The court case has been running for over…

A few years ago I would've agreed.

Today I'm leaning more towards - "so what?".

As long as there's obviously enough space to waste on detached houses and land speculation in the middle of the city, it can't be all that bad.

If it was really such a big deal, "someone" would've paid "somebody" already to relocate the animals "after business hours", if you catch my drift. There's more going on behind the scenes for sure that we just don't know about.

Re: Berlin rent cap overturned by Germany's top court

#228

Post by corty »

0xfaded wrote: post #202
killtimeatwork wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always baffled by stories like this. If there's indeed so much interest in an apartment, why not increase the price to the point where 90% of contenders lose interest? The owner must have been in a huge hurry, or doesn't care about money?

Equally, why not build more housing until there is a 4% vacancy rate? This seems to have worked wonders in SF.

NIMBYism, environmental regulations, building codes and lack of money and interest by the state.

Berlin had the nice example of a few square kilometers of the Tempelhof airport field being available. Public demanded to make it a park instead of constructing housing.

Almost anything with a tree on it is impossible to build on, and even if there is a building permit for the housing, attaching it to public transports like the S-Bahn or Subway is next to impossible nowadays.

Building codes in Berlin are not much weirder than in the rest of Germany, but they also serve to make constructing housing harder. E.g. there is a strict limit to building height, which limits buildings to 5 storeys (iirc) even in high-demand high-density areas.

Money is especially tight for the state of Berlin, while they get subsidized with lots of money from the other states (Länderfinanzausgleich), they still cannot afford to construct much of the necessary housing or the associated infrastructure themselves. Private investment usually will go elsewhere because the political environment in Berlin is poor. If there is rent control in Berlin and no rent control in Hamburg, of course money will go to Hamburg first.

There is also no political will to fix the above.

Re: Berlin rent cap overturned by Germany's top court

#229

Post by goodpoint »

EdwinLarkin wrote: post #160
gjulianm wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Idealizing... People can't live without housing so demand is not elastic. Plus the housing market is special regarding spatial location. Applying regular market rules as if the housing market behaved the same as, say, the screwdrivers market, does not make sense at all.

In 99% cases it's the government/zoning rules that prevent increasing the supply of housing not private investors not wanting to build enough.

Absolutely not. Investors fight with tooth and nails to keep the prices up because it's more profitable than building.

Re: Berlin rent cap overturned by Germany's top court

#230

Post by calaphos »

tonyjstark wrote: post #59
adrianN wrote: post #11

I wish Berlin would just build more housing instead. For example when I cross the street there is a supermarket. It's a single story building with a huge parking lot around it. Why not make it a multistory building with apartments on top of the supermarket and skip the parking space or put it underground? Why does the city give out building permits for such buildings? There could easily be room for thirty families on…

Same here. The city itself should build as many cheap rental apartments as possible, also in more higher-priced areas to keep the pricing there in check. Building more housing is the only way out of this soaring pricing. EDIT: not only rental apartments of course but more housing in general. A second step would be, to make sure that rental housing is used for that instead of AirBNB or any other investment. It would a…

High mandated standards on Fire/Noise Protection, Insulation, accessibility on new buildings make it really hard to build "cheap" rental apartments. With the mandated standards in place there is little to no cost difference between high cost and low cost residential buildings.

Those standards obviously have their benefits or are unavoidable (fire protection) and result in new housing being high quality. But they make it hard to address housing shortages in a non long term way.

Post reply on HN