181–190 of 594 posts
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> Homeopathy is GAINING popularity Citation please.
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/gesundheit/diagnose/homoeopathie-in-d... [2] https://www.bah-bonn.de/bah/?type=565&file=redakteur_filesys... Sorry for the german sources.
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As a person living in New York who thinks rent stabilization has been largely more successful than not at achieving its goals, I disagree.
People who disagree with rent control largely disagree with the goals, which is to keep existing residents where they are. It’s effective at that until landlords abuse the loopholes, which you have to keep closing through legislative whack-a-mole.
You could also phrase that as making it hard for people to move in, making it hard for young families to stay in their neighborhood when their housing needs increase, making it hard for older people to downsize. It's really benefitting the residents who are lucky enough to already be in an apartment of the size they need, at the cost of everybody else.
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Nope. New buildings are exempt.
Would you use your savings to build property in a city with policies like this? How long will new property be exempt? 5 years? What then? Nearly no one will build anything anymore.
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I wasn't aware the Soviet Union allowed rich investors to buy up chunks of the housing supply and rent them out as hotels without a business license, while also bypassing the numerous regulations that hotels have to abide by.
No, they just declared housing to be affordable (in the $20/month ballpark region) and people had to apply 10 years in advance to move to a larger apartment. This is my parent's experience in east Germany, should be similar to Soviet Union.
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I think there could be a better way to regulate how rents are determined, for example: One symptom is that current tenants are subject to arbitrarily high rent increases, masquaraded as "market rate" But when they finally evict, the landlord has to actually change the rent to something different until someone bites. Often times it is much lower or has some other concession. If there were some way to regulate this beh…
> Often times it is much lower or has some other concession. No, it's going to become higher than a rent increase would allow (those have a limit by law, new contracts don't (yet)), that's the problem. As long as you stay put you're mostly fine but if you have to move.. urgh.
Yes I get that
But there are ALSO circumstances where a landlord TRIES to have a much higher increase as new contracts don't have a limit, but they go way above what actual participants in the market would bite at.
There are also circumstances where EXISTING tenants don't have a limit on increases
This observation is not just about Berlin.
As a person born and raised in Soviet Union, I strongly believe that whoever thinks that a proper economic response to raising prices is literally to order them to stop raising , is a lunatic.
Anyone who looks at regulations like this and sees the Soviet Union is themselves a lunatic. This is not a planned economy, and people do not need to profit from housing to build it, and housing should be a human right.
Can you explain? Even if I were to build my own house, I would myself profit because the enjoyment I got out of the new house would be greater than the enjoyment I'd have had without it, thus my 'profit' is the cost of the enjoyment of my new shelter.
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To be fair, this isn't their first or only response. They're building housing as fast as possible. Within a 5 minute walk from my apartment in the last year there has been 5 brand new housing towers built. They've also introduced laws to stop people from buying up apartments to rent out via Airbnb. Considering even with the law that limits how much they can raise their prices, they're just doing unneeded renovations…
People buying apartments to rent out via Airbnb is not inherently a bad thing - it just indicates there is existing unsatisfied demand for short term rentals, which cannot be fulfilled by hotel industry. And guess what - hotel industry is another example of an industry heavily regulated by government (zoning laws, construction permits etc.). So the Airbnb problem most likely has the same underlying root cause.
This may be all well and true, but cities have no obligation to accommodate such demand. For residents, short-term visitors are annoying, since they rarely stay long enough for their behavior to warrant more than a warning from the police, they have no interest in maintaining the neighborhood during their stay, and their economic power is mostly used on things that local residents have no interest in or actively dislike.
You could "solve" this problem by providing more short-term rentals, but unlike housing I find it hard to believe that city residents actually want it resolved that way.
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Anyone who looks at regulations like this and sees the Soviet Union is themselves a lunatic. This is not a planned economy, and people do not need to profit from housing to build it, and housing should be a human right.
> people do not need to profit from housing to build it People do need to profit from something to do it in a capitalist society.
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I wasn't aware the Soviet Union allowed rich investors to buy up chunks of the housing supply and rent them out as hotels without a business license, while also bypassing the numerous regulations that hotels have to abide by.
Even if it was sooooo what? people are able to leverage the property and earn more money on it, because it's worth more because somebody is going to pay it. Of course they are going to do that one way or another despite regulation. And they should they are creating more for the economy. If you can't afford to live/work somewhere that's life ? Why on Earth should somebody else subsidize your costs to live there. That…