Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze • Hacker News Board

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#561

Post by majewsky » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:24 PM UTC

thirdsun wrote: post #528

hnick wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so strange - the promise of the "information super-highway" in the 90s was that proximity wouldn't matter as much. But if anything it matters more, since every minute spent idle (e.g. travelling to meet someone) has a higher associated cost due to the opportunity cost of lost productivity. So we tend to clump and cluster.

> But if anything it matters more, since every minute spent idle (e.g. travelling to meet someone) has a higher associated cost due to the opportunity cost of lost productivity. Which sounds like another vote for remote work instead of clumping and clustering. Why care about proximity and the time it takes to travel when everyone you'd want to meet, regardless of location, is a message, call or video conference away…

Speaking as a German, a big part of why this decentralization isn't happening is that Germany's internet infrastructure is a fucking joke. I'm sometimes even having trouble with getting consistent 3G coverage in large city centers. When driving around the countryside, it's frequently 2G or no service at all. And it's looking similarly bad for broadband internet access in homes. My parents don't have any broadband service whatsoever. They use a 4G hotspot to go online, and get an average connection speed of 170 KB/s. This is par for the course in rural Germany.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#562

Post by majewsky » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:29 PM UTC

v7p1Qbt1im wrote: post #536

jimmaswell wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy any of this. Growing up everyone around me saw the city as somewhere you begrudgingly went out of necessity and only lived there if you had no choice, and I'm inclined to agree. In virtually every aspect I find more countryside-ish living much more pleasant. Consider virtual reality and remote work. I imagine much of the workforce will move to virtual offices in the near to medium-far future when corporat…

I was living in Berlin in 2015/2016 and believe me in no way at all are people coming here begrudgingly. Pretty much everyone between 20 and 35 wants to live here. And I can't blame them. I wanted to go and I still love the city to bits. There is nothing you can't to there. Tons of very interesting people to collaborate on projects with. Extremely good food and cultural attractions. Pretty much the most progressive p…

> Pretty much everyone between 20 and 35 wants to live here.

Well, since you were in Berlin, that's probably survivorship bias. I live in Dresden, a city of 500k inhabitants about 200km south of Berlin. To me, Dresden is just the right size. Not as vast as Berlin, where it can easily take over one hour to get to the other side for a meetup, but still large enough to have enough interesting stuff going on in it.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#563

Post by fredm-de » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:39 PM UTC

oytis wrote: post #535

People are bringing in the supply-demand curve from their school economy classes. The problem is it doesn't work that way with housing. There is zero incentive to build affordable housing when you can build a luxury house. On the contrary, landlords in Berlin "renovate" all the time, to make normal apartments into luxury ones. So without regulation, the supply for affordable housing is diminishing. To increase the su…

Luxury housing, too, does create supply. Prohibiting the construction of luxury apartments will just end with rich people paying luxury money for standard apartments thus raising prices and people with less financial means will be priced out.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#564

Post by fredm-de » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

tmalsburg2 wrote: post #5

vtail wrote: post #3

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.

Genuinely curious: what do you think would be a better response?

Modernize public transit to better connect the outer quarters. Build new apartments on these outer areas.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#565

Post by blub » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 6:35 PM UTC

Roritharr wrote: post #526

blub wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not hoping for anything, but if a bad actor is playing with people's lives, I also don't have a problem that they get punished for it. Now the only issue with expropriation would be the panic it cause in the markets, because otherwise who cares whether residential property company #201f exists or not. Setting some rules around renting, like the government has been and is doing, to prevent abuse and speculation is…

> Why is it so hard to get an apartment in Berlin that people resort to bribing the landlords? Why does one have to "compete" against dozens of other people, with zero ability to negotiate and having to sacrifice their financial privacy? Low supply. You are not fixing that with a rent-freeze, you are making it worse. > Last I read about it these companies had record profits and now you and others are complaining that…

Yeah that's what I was hinting at (one has to read the entire paragraph): rent control or no rent control, the situation already sucks both for existing tenants and people that are looking for new apartments. Might as well protect existing tenants, since new tenants are screwed anyway.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#566

Post by jimmaswell » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 6:47 PM UTC

thirdsun wrote: post #531

jimmaswell wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine if it works for you. The point here is there's lots to do outside the city, even a lot of exclusive activities. I'm tired of seeing it said that there's "nothing to do" outside the city. Maybe if your only hobbies are nightclubs and getting mugged. Besides that, people who would prefer to not own any car, rent bicycles instead of owning them if they're a bicyclist, and wouldn't want to own a house if they…

> Maybe if your only hobbies are nightclubs and getting mugged. As someone living in and enjoying rural live with lots of space and quiet I really understand your point, but slightly belittling and disregarding comments like these don't help your argument. It's not that hard to see the attraction of big cities as long as you can imagine that someone might have different interests than you. Of course, this applies to…

I don't think most people would choose not to own a car if there wasn't a concern of money involved. Car ownership can certainly be less economical than sticking to transit/biking in some areas, but I think most people in such situations would still hypothetically prefer having the option of driving available.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#567

Post by jimmaswell » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 6:48 PM UTC

nec4b wrote: post #543

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't buy any of this. Growing up everyone around me saw the city as somewhere you begrudgingly went out of necessity and only lived there if you had no choice, and I'm inclined to agree. In virtually every aspect I find more countryside-ish living much more pleasant. I don't buy any of this. Growing up, everyone around me saw the suburbs as somewhere you begrudgingly went out of necessity and only lived there if…

He wasn't talking about suburbs which technically are a part of a city and not of the countryside.

Suburban and rural can be blurry. I'm not sure what I'd call some of the areas I grew up around where there are both farms/orchards and a lot of cul-de-sacs/other houses. When it comes to that odd pattern of development where there are a bunch of cookie cutter houses really close together with little yards, I'm not a fan of that.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#568

Post by zanny » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

masterofpuppets wrote: post #322

zanny wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is pretty basic and was proven to work for centuries before extreme zoning intervention by governments happened at the behest of property owners wanting their gentrification. To fund the program you institute luxury property taxes on units larger than what you want your average citizen to afford and actually property tax businesses (which many cities do not do, because they bribed companies to locate the…

This all relies on central planning by the city to implement?

You don't build a city without some kind of central planning. Even in the total absence of zoning someone needs to build the infrastructure to link it all together. That is in large part why "just deregulate zoning" alone isn't an answer - cities in large part are in bureaucratic gridlock on developing infrastructure and wouldn't be able to supply new construction adequately. But as a society we simply cannot have private companies bulldozing blocks or razing roads to build rail or bike lanes.

Additionally in the same way public policy hinders development today it could be reversed to help development. Subsidizing density and mixed use would do a lot of good to jump start the much needed urbanization of most western populations.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#569

Post by zanny » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 6:57 PM UTC

oezi wrote: post #430

zanny wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a fad before cities become less popular again The only way this happens is if cities like Berlin putting rent freezes prevent construction that would increase capacity and lower prices to allow people to live in cities. There will be no new economic growth where people are spread thin - all future productivity will only emerge where people are. Any country trying to do anything but centralize their human capital in…

Or technology (self driving cars, remote work) and social change (universal basic income) would not require you to live in a city to work there or work at all that productively.

The point is more than density is an optimization of the marginal cost of maintaining a person. Manufacturing all the autos, maintaining all the roads for them to travel on, and providing supply lines across vast areas of low density are immense ongoing expenses that are hugely reduced when people are centralized in urban areas. As we move towards remote work it should lead to density increases, not the other way around - living denser means more access to more recreation and services, should mean cheaper goods and infrastructure, and can stymie the isolation problem brewing with remote workers across the industrialized world.

Re: Berlin approves 5-year rent freeze

#570

Post by xg15 » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 8:20 PM UTC

DocTomoe wrote: post #546

pessimizer wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I ran a city, I would want more of those highly skilled workers in my city. Why, exactly? Does the person who runs the city with the highest per capita tax receipts get some sort of award? I assume his/her rent would get driven up with the rest.

People with higher capita tax receipts are also less likely to be ill, less likely to indulge in violent crime, less likely to hold extremist views, less likely to litter or cause other trouble. If you want to manage a liveable city instead of a slum, you want that kind of people.

I like how those kind of views eventually reveal how they are actually just social darwinism.