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

281–290 of 370 posts

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

#281

Post by campl3r »

killtimeatwork wrote: post #148
lqet wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not make it a multistory building with apartments on top of the supermarket and skip the parking space or put it underground? That's exactly what they are doing at a few places in my city (also with a massive housing problem). We recently found a new apartment here, the process was as follows: (1) We found the apartment online. It was online for exactly 6 hours, listed by an estate agent. (2) Inside the listing…

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?

because, sadly that's illegal in all of germany.

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

#282

Post by llampx »

DangerousPie wrote: post #251
yladiz wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It led to a huge decrease in rental supply. This was artificial though, as landlords were waiting to know the outcome of this ruling. It's not like the apartments just vanished from existence.

Sure, but I don't think it would have gone back to 100% if this law hadn't been overturned, since the law made it much more attractive to keep a property empty in order to sell it at some point.

Empty apartments are more attractive for buyers but if your intention is to rent it anyway, it wouldn't have made a difference, as the Mietendeckel ensured you couldn't rent it for more than what the previous tenant was paying.

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

#283

Post by pharmakom »

southerntofu wrote: post #195
pharmakom wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why collect rent when the property price keeps increasing regardless? Because then you get the property price gains and the rental income on top! I don’t doubt this is happening, I’m just trying to wrap my head around it.

As an individual person with a heart, it's hard to wrap one's head around. But the problem is landowners are usually very rich and soulless, when not actual corporations who have nothing human at all. To them, an empty apartment is just a line in a spreadsheet that will bring them money sooner or later. Renting the apartments would be more trouble for them, despite bringing in a little more money.

Seems like a market opportunity. Take on the rental risk and management costs for some fraction of the rent payments. Insurance can be used to hedge against damages.

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

#284

Post by durnygbur »

jashmatthews wrote: post #276
durnygbur wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 80k+ salaries. Last time I intensively job searched in Berlin there was a clear salary ceiling at 70-75k EUR annually for software roles.

Startups with no money yes but places like Zalando pay ~100k total comp. People working for places like Microsoft or GitHub more like ~150k. https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Berlin-Ger...

I was pulled through so many hopeless recruitment processes, tests, take home assignments, teasing sessions that I simply have no reason to believe these amounts. No promise will make me sacrifice even an hour more. Like literally - email me already an employment contract with this amount on it.

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

#285

Post by tootahe45 »

grecht wrote: post #89

This is great. I also want affordable housing for everyone, but capping rents does not deal with the core problem: There's not enough supply. I am baffled how some people do not understand this. Also, for many people in Germany buying e.g. a single apartment is an investment for their later retirement. It's not all big and evil real estate companies.

Everybody understands this, except people taking part in movements hijacked by the wealthy to block any new developments. Here in New Zealand they are using indigenous groups to achieve the goal of blocking new builds, in Germany it's the green movements.

Something tells me governments are also interested in real estate prices going up.

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

#286

Post by llampx »

amelius wrote: post #82
durnygbur wrote: post #17

Housing situation in Germany for anyone born after 1980 is so fucked.

It's like joining a game of Monopoly after a few rounds have already been played.

EXACTLY. This is how I feel as a millennial who hasn't started on the ground floor and doesn't have rich parents who did.

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

#287

Post by llampx »

bellyfullofbac wrote: post #169
f6v wrote: post #126

Berlin is a weird place. If you're an art student working as a barista, I don't think you can expect to live in a hip neighbourhood. Certainly not 15 minutes away from Alexanderplatz(city centre). And you certainly can't expect that if the city is a self-proclaimed "startup capital", with thousands of tech workers who enjoy 80k+ salaries.

Good old gentrification... "Look at that hip area with the art students working as baristas, let's live there.". A few years later, the neighborhood cafe is just full of tech workers coding the frontend framework for the next food delivery app and you wonder where the soul went.

Yeah, millennials coding apps are the problem. Not the ones owning the cafe, the building it resides in and the apartments everyone lives in.

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

#288

Post by CryptoPunk »

https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html

>The Effects of Rent Control

>Economists are virtually unanimous in concluding that rent controls are destructive. In a 1990 poll of 464 economists published in the May 1992 issue of the American Economic Review, 93 percent of U.S. respondents agreed, either completely or with provisos, that “a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.”1 Similarly, another study reported that more than 95 percent of the Canadian economists polled agreed with the statement.2 The agreement cuts across the usual political spectrum, ranging all the way from Nobel Prize winners milton friedman and friedrich hayek on the “right” to their fellow Nobel laureate gunnar myrdal, an important architect of the Swedish Labor Party’s welfare state, on the “left.” Myrdal stated, “Rent control has in certain Western countries constituted, maybe, the worst example of poor planning by governments lacking courage and vision.”3 His fellow Swedish economist (and socialist) Assar Lindbeck asserted, “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”4 That cities like New York have clearly not been destroyed by rent control is due to the fact that rent control has been relaxed over the years.5 Rent stabilization, for example, which took the place of rent control for newer buildings, is less restrictive than the old rent control. Also, the decades-long boom in the New York City housing market is not in rent-controlled or rent-stabilized units, but in condominiums and cooperative housing. But these two forms of housing ownership grew important as a way of getting around rent control.

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

#289

Post by yokaze »

southerntofu wrote: post #246
yokaze wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, then the lack of housing.

If you have statistics, i'm interested, but to my knowledge there is no housing shortage in Berlin. If anything, there's more housing than ever before, it's just trapped in the hands of landlords who want to speculate on it.

The point is, it wouldn't matter if it is trapped in the hands of landlords who want to speculate, if there is enough housing to go around, because they couldn't determine the market.

It is illegal to keep an apartment empty for more then three months. So if you are aware of any empty housing, feel free to denounce it (https://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/wohnen/zweckentfremdu...). In 2018, 1,9% of the flats in Mitte were subject to an ongoing official procedure on those grounds. The owner can simply claim, they are reforming, but I presume there are limits to that too.

How many flats are really empty is unclear.

I've read that according to the Senat,

- there is an estimated 0.8%-2% of the flats unoccupied

- down from 3.5% in 2011

- ideally, it would be between 2-3%.

The Taz is not particularly strong on keeping opinion from facts separated, but that's where I got it from: (https://taz.de/Spekulativer-Leerstand-in-Berlin/!5749397/)

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

#290

Post by CryptoPunk »

llampx wrote: post #217
kokey wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a point when you run out of people who are willing to spend millions on the empty investment vehicles so I'm hoping even those properties will help with supply when the tide eventually do go out. Unfortunately it could take a very long time before this happens.

There are millions of chinese and other people who want safe investment vehicles. If the government does nothing, land and housing in a big capital can easily be usurped by investors who then take massive tax breaks.

Investors will profit most by renting out their property. Allowing the profit motive to work to increase supply is an effective way to reduce the price consumers pay in every industry, including the rental market.

Profit is just an emergent form of social compensation for addressing a shortage. That society enacts laws to prevent the profit motive from working, and incentivizing socially beneficial behavior, is a tragedy.

Post reply on HN