After WW2 all European countries had massive housing shortages. It was not capitalism that solved it but heavy government involvement. In a span a few decades millions of people were re-housed.
The free market is remarkably terrible at pumping out houses fast.
Yet in the US, it was developers following the Levittown model that resulted in tons and tons of single family homes, so I fail to see how the free market is terrible at "pumping out houses fast"?
Well, think whether the market conditions that lead to it could be recreated today, and then you'll see how the free market fails to deliver a lot of housing fast. Developers have long ago realized it's better for them to pump out fewer houses with more profit margin slower, than lots of houses with little profit margins. They get a planning permission on a giant site for a 1000 houses but only build 50 a year to not disrupt the high prices they can charge for each unit. That's free market for you right now.
This is such a fundamental misunderstanding of how the housing market works, and totally ignores apartments/midrises/highrises. The problem with housing in the US lies with overregulation (mostly in the form of zoning). I know this well, as someone who has attended numerous planning meetings in Chicago, I have seen many buildings reduced in unit count solely due to NIMBYs (mostly retired people, as these meetings are often during the day or the immediately 5-7pm time when many people are still commuting home from work).
The market is not terrible pumping out houses fast, but the current market conditions mean that said houses/apartments are not affordable for most people.
The average rent in Berlin (and other German cities) is not very high but that's because a lot of flats still run on a very old contract. If you're moving to Berlin, finding an apartment is incredibly difficult, even if you're willing to spend a lot of money. My grandmother lives by herself in a 90sqm flat in a really nice area and pays 400 Euros a month. In the last 10 years she tried to find a smaller flat (30-40 sqm) for herself but the cheapest she could find was 750. So she stays where she is and just doesn't use 2 of the rooms she has except for storage. In the meantime, a friend of mine moved to Berlin and couldn't find a decent 60sqm flat for less than 1400 Euros. The only way to get those affordable rents is either knowing someone who is moving out or getting super lucky by finding and getting it through a public ad.
Massenbesichtigung (mass viewings) are not uncommon. The agent will publish a public timeslot and literally hundreds of people lined around the block will show up to view a single flat.
The main reason new housing is extremely expensive has to do with regulations themselves.
It costs a lot of money to build a new apartment building because land where you are allowed to build is regulated by the State. Also the State requires many regulations that increase unnecessarily the costs, and most of all in the name of the ideology.
For example, housing standards of Japan and the US, which are way cheaper and still serve two of the richest countries in the world, would never be allowed in Germany. That makes housing unaffordable and drives people into poverty.
But it does. There’s immense amount of houses that are unused because they’re part of speculation, and it’s easier to leave them empty than to deal with tenants and their rights. This is an extremely well documented, systemic issue in large European metropolis and especially in Berlin.
Forcing existing property to be used immediately adds supply, and it also lowers prices. Exactly the things large property developers do not want. But I don’t give a shit what they want. I want affordable rent.
immense amount of houses that are unused because they’re part of speculation, ... This is an extremely well documented, systemic issue in large European metropolis and especially in Berlin.
Source?
Deutschlandatlas says that Berlin has whole 2 percent of empty apartments for all reasons, which is less then half of German average [0]
Some of those apartments are being remodeled, some are just in the period where the previous tenant moved out and the next moved in.
There are 16 thousand long-term empty apartments, which looks like a huge number, but it is only 0.8 percent of the total. [1]
Even if those 16 thousand apartments could be all put to market (some have legal barriers, like being part of a complicated litigation), that easing would not last even for a single mayor's tenure. Last year alone, Berlin grew up by 17 thousand people. [2] It was not an extraordinary year.
ALL that money that the Linke wants to sink into old housing should be spent to build new one, just to accomodate the arrivals.
Thanks for actually proving my point! 2% of 2.07 million residential buildings is 54 thousand empty buildings. Let’s say an average number of 2 people per building. Hey, we could house 100 thousand people today. I think that would solve the annual 17 thousand growth for the coming years. And you’ve done nothing, spent nearly no money, no planning involved. Just a single law to force people to rent, and everyone will have housing.
Hmm, crazy isn’t it?
It is not buildings, but apartments. And you completely la-la-ed your way around what I wrote and considered them ALL as long-term speculatively withheld apartments, while only about a THIRD of them are. Which means that only about two years' growth could be accomodated like this. Then, what? Given that the city has spent all its money on buying out old stock?
Zero unoccupied housing is unachievable anywhere but in a dilapidated slum, because apartments must get remodeled from time to time. If you remodel an apartment every 15 years and it takes three months (a rather optimistic timeline), you already have 1,6 per cent of the housing stock out of the market inevitably, because 3 months is 1/60th of 15 years. If anything, only 2 per cent of the Berlin apartments being out of the market indicates that they already don't get enough maintenance!
Then you have pauses between tenants. If an average tenant stays for 8 years and it takes about a month to fix the most basic things once he moves out, and find new people, then you have 1 per cent of the housing stock momentarily unoccupied just due to this. Again, Berlin having only 2 per cent of the stock out of the market indicates that the changing of tenants is already overoptimized, with not enough time to vet new ones and fix smaller things: one moves in on the heels of another.
Then you have a certain small percentage of apartments being part of litigations, either commercial or inheritance-related. Inevitable. Companies split, people die, and not everyone has their papers in Ordnung.
You seem to be claiming that all those mechanisms can be compressed to zero, and that all the apartments that are unoccupied due to them can be put on the market by fiat. How? Will you ban apartment remodeling? That's the way to produce - fully occupied - ghettoes.
Berlin already has fines against letting an apartment sit empty without reason, if they're empty, they're empty for a reason or eating the fine is cheaper than the cost of renting it out.
I just bought a house in Germany. It will remain unused for around 6 months due to renovation. It is naive to believe that any empty house is empty due to speculation.
My grandmother died some years ago, my family wanted to sell the house as they didn’t need it. It took 3 years to sell it because it’s in a location with no demand plus 6-12 months to arrange the inheritance legal details. You would say, the price was too high then! It was sold for €30K, a garden farmhouse with 6 bedrooms, garden and garage.
It’s inevitable that some houses are out of the market for some time due to many different reasons.
I don't know what you're trying to achieve by comparing it to the total. It's not about the proportion of empty houses to full ones, it's about the proportion of empty houses and people with no house. The full ones are a problem already solved, there's no point in pulling that into the comparison.
We’ve established how many empty houses there are and how much further demand there will be, and guesstimated that with the current empty apartments, we can cover almost 6 years of the cities growth.
That is, if you do absolutely nothing but to force people to rent their homes.
Now in reality, we’ll do more than that. Both the government and public sector are and will continue to build houses. But those are just projections. The existing houses, well, exist. So let’s make sure we use them.
Whenever this argument comes up people get extremely defensive for no good reason whatever. It will make a significant impact to the housing market if we force stalled housing to become available. Sure, we can and must do more than just that, but why not start with the cheapest and easiest thing we can today? Because it’s someone’s private property and we can’t even demand they rent it out in a housing crisis????
Come on now. Stop the madness.
Levittowns are six large suburban housing developments, three of which are actually named "Levittown." They were created in the United States (including one in Puerto Rico) by William J. Levitt and his company Levitt & Sons. Built after World War II for returning white veterans and their new families, the communities offered attractive alternatives to cramped central city locations and apartments. The Veterans Administration and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) guaranteed builders that qualified veterans could buy housing for a fraction of rental costs. Under Levitt & Sons, Levittown housing would maintain racial covenants that excluded non-White would-be buyers.
Italics added. Seems the government was somewhat involved in the US too. Of course, now the reason "the free market is terrible at pumping out houses" is government regulation too....
Germany doe not have a housing shortage problem, it's another set of problems. (Edit: these are economic problems, productivity, bureaucracy, and all sorts of other things showing up as housing problems)
They will have to wail until after WW3 because Russia is openly threatening action, European governments are trying to prepare their citizens, German populists want to return to 'normal relations' with Russia, which means 'use our money to invade and kill everyone to the East of us, just not us'.
Germany and Europe is in for a very rough ride.
Were it not for the war situation, then we could say this is 'healthy political turmoil' - but this is at a time when outside parties will take advantage of European disunity.
It's wrong to suggest that vacancy rates are are necessarily sign of housing dysfunction.
Areas that are attractive to live always have low vacancy rates, because there's a reason that people want to live there.
The assumption that 'as many people ought to be able to live in a neighbourhood as should want to live there' - implied by the 'vacancy rate' issue just means 'every attractive area turns into Hong Kong'.
While there can be very good reason for more building as well - socialized housing is almost never the answer to that. It has a role in some situations, but generally not on the aggregate like that.
Usually this will have to do with permits, regulation - and frankly workers. Nobody wants to do the kind of labour necessary to build homes, and it's extremely hard to find workers to do that kind of work, which to anyone paying the least bit of attention should be a pretty big paradox.
'City overflowing with people who want homes to live don't want to make homes in which to live'
Probably there's a lot of bureaucracy to clean out and that's a good place to start.
To add a b it of context. They do not want to confiscate housing. They do want to pay landlords, though below current (very high) rates. Also this would only apply to private real-estate companies not individual owners.
And they can't govern alone, so I think it's unlikely that this plan is actually implemented as originally planned. The likely coalition would contain 3 parties.
The logic is defined by demand. Currently Berlin is under high demand, and that’s why drives prices up. On top of that many rents, around 12% are paid by the job center, which also drives prices up. That’s around 250.000 housing units paid by someone else’s money. That’s the scandal.
Currently Berlin is under high demand, and that’s why drives prices up
Yeah, I know the written logic of all this, but as things stand right now we didn't have homelessness East of the Wall back in the day, while the West had. That should have been reason enough to throw all this capitalist and pervert logic under the bus, but I understand how come the highly paid programmers in here are happy with the current economic system, homelessness be damned. Which is to say, you're telling me nothing new.
Do you know why there was not homelessness in the DDR?
Because it was forbidden by law. You were forced to be put in an institution or directly went to prison. Check Section 249 of the DDR Criminal Code.
And by the way, the DDR suffered from chronic housing shortage. People were cramped in barracks with not bathroom and no heating. Technically housed but in actually povert level of housing. It was an absolute disaster.
Because it was forbidden by law. You were forced to be put in an institution or directly went to prison
Seems like a very good law, don't you think? And this reminded me of how come one of my favorite childhood books from when I was 3 or 4 here in Romania were about DDR constructors building apartment flats, loved that book and loved the spirit behind it.
People were cramped in barracks with not bathroom and no heating
There were? Back in the '70s and '80s? You sure? I don't remember here that way here in Romania back in the '80s, and I know the DDR had much better economic condition that us, Socialist Republic of Romania.
Governments directly, cooperatives or non-profit organizations. The Churches used to be pretty active in that space as well to invest tithes, with rents paying for common-welfare projects.
Who builds all those bridges, roads, power plants, and other public works projects? Maybe them?
Also government formed co-ops. Find people who want a flat and agree on rent before you build it. As the loan is paid off rent becomes substantially cheaper. The second best time to plant a tree is today.
It also doesn't need to be the entire housing stock, just enough to help keep rent low (see Vienna).
Housing should be a commodity. Commodities are fungible, plentiful, and easily tradable.
Housing right now is the opposite of a commodity: it's a boutique investment for individuals whose price is propped up by regulations that artificially limit supply.
The only reason you enjoy cheap food is because of the free market.
Housing in many countries is not part of a free market but part of a monopoly where the government decides how much, how many, the what and the when the houses can be built. If it was a real free market, the issue would have been long solved.
Surely, if we are decommodifying basic needs, our first priority should be food, not housing, right? How has nationalization of agriculture worked in the past?
Most of the affected housing used to be government owned, sold at firesale prices after the CDU Diepgen government thoroughly wrecked the state finances with a banking scandal at the end of the 90s.
The large investor landlords purchased the homes and often didn't even do the bare minimum in upkeep. The real estate nevertheless appreciated massively because of Berlin getting more and more popular.
It therefore makes sense to nationalize this housing stock, and I'd see a value comprised of "original purchase price, upkeep and inflation-plus-3%-tied appreciation" as fair value. Maybe even less because they extracted 20 years worth of rent payments from the properties already.
Still the same companies Deutsche Wohnen and Vonovia but I agree with the second part.
Their yearly profits are capped because of the Mietpreisbremse (rent control) law since all the old buildings that they bought would fall under it, so it would've been better to put the money towards either building new state-owned housing or helping the tenants enforce their rights.
The laws are there to protect tenants against neglect from the landlord but enforcement takes multiple months which is not a reasonable timeline if you have a problem in your apartment and the consequences for landlord are mostly just reducing the rent for that time by a certain percentage which doesn't make a difference if the rents are already cheap because of the Mietpreisbremse, so it would also be good to introduce fines but not sure if Germany's legal framework allows for that.
The reality is that the actual large-scale sell-off of public housing was carried out under the SPD–PDS (now The Left) red-red coalition led by Klaus Wowereit in 2004. for prices of around 30.000€ per unit.
We live in a society. Everything we do affect others. Therefore there are many different types of affecting. "Confiscate" is a word that has a meaning. This decision is not confiscating, but a different type of affecting. Just as farting next to your house would not count as confiscating it. Affect: yes, confiscate: no.
They do want to pay landlords, though below current (very high) rates.
In San Francisco, NIMBYs secretly support laws like this. This basically guarantees that many builders will do the math and conclude that it doesn't make sense to build housing in San Francisco.
New large condo buildings have to sell 30% of the units at below market rate. This causes many viable projects to never get built.
So laws like this are sold to renter voters as a way to lower housing costs, but NIMBYs secretly love it. Over time, renters pay more in rent because there is less supply due to builders not building. However, a lucky few renters who were here early will get below market rents.
Perfect examples of voters voting for a short term fix but pay more in long term. And voting for themselves while screwing future renters.
Well, it is essentially the same-but-modernized party as that which held eastern Germany under the boot of communism for for some 45+ years. They took the route taken by so many communist parties after the dissolution of the Soviet Union by changing their name, here from SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) via PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) to Die Linke (The Left) so that certainly is something to keep in mind. This is the party which built a wall to keep people from leaving their supposed workers and farmers paradise, shooting those who tried to cross over. It may be filled with young women with odd hair colors instead of stodgy old men but the ideology hasn't changed a whit and is ready to add a few more millions to its death toll.
It is patently absurd that communism is still considered as a legitimate ideology while it should be placed right next to Nazism in the "never again" category. It is responsible for more death and suffering than the latter but those edgy students - who don't seem to learn much at all there in academia - don't seem to know or care.
Oh good lord, the utter majority of the Left Party today weren't even alive in the GDR period (and of those that were, a good bunch got yeeted to the BSW). And on top of that, all the other parties have gobbled up their East German Blockparteien as well and we don't label them collaborators either, nor do we call the CDU and especially CSU a Nazi party despite many former NSDAP members ending up there post WW2 (or a ton of them forming the AfD a decade ago).
Obviously after 36 years many people of Die Linke were not alive when the wall fell. But it’s still the same party as the SED, just a different name.
The CDU and the CSU have nothing to do with the NSDAP.
At some point in time in Germany 30% of the population were either part of the NSDAP or the Nazi Army. Luckily most of them were not war criminals and move on with their lives. And yes, some of them ended in the CDU/CSU but also of the SED/Die Linke.
Just to give you an example, around 10-15% of the DDR state officials had held NSDAP membership pre-1945.
Does that make the DDR a successor of the Nazi Regime? Obviously not. The same about the CDU/CSU.
But Die Linke is still the same party as the SED. Same organization, which just voted themselves into different names.
Look, it's a nice sounding narrative with a sprinkle of truth, but it proves a lot less than it sounds like it does.
There were specific reasons historical communism had such a large death toll, and it traces back mostly to the policies that were introduced and the decisions the political elite made.
So I think it's fair to compare actual policies, and not to judge on the basis of whether someone calls themselves a communist, or whether that label gets applied to them.
To my knowledge, Die Linke is not a revolutionary party, doesn't want to force through breakneck industrialization at any cost, and doesn't deny foundational agricultural science.
1. 60% of the Berlin population voted for nationalising (expropriating) apartments from major landlords in a referendum - this is a bipartisan issue
There's no bi-partisan thing around it: It was the fact that the city has a spcific demographic that voted for it, but the constitutional court revoked it.
Another point: Even during the campaign the group did not explain how it would work given that most of the payments would need to be done at current market rates and the constitutional court will not pass it for obvious reasons.
And on top of that, good luck to make all other states paying it and hoping that the Länderfinanzausgleich will stand.
If I'm an entity that has 3000 or more apartments, I would have sold long ago to get to 2999. Basically as soon as I heard rumors of this law, I would have started selling.
I used to live in South America (mid-tier city), living here in Berlin my will never understand how such intelligent people in general (no irony or sarcasm) never thought in a collective sense that if you have a market with a rigid supply in terms of availability (not occupied homes with no incentives for renting), it never made a serious planning for building.
I was travelling to some big cities (between 70% of size of Berlin to 4x its size) and you can find a plethora of options since something modest that can fit in a minimal income (salario minimo) to nice appartments.
Here we had in the last 7 years 55K units made, but in my home city alone we had more than 470K in a single city; if you're willing to be 1 hour away by car you can find apartments that the normal berliner never would have access in his/her entire life.
Not to dunk on berliners, but once you're in the environment where people do real housing at scale you will see a small magic in terms of prices for the legacy supply dropping.
Has to do mostly with the historic environment of the country. Berlin was a split city, so after the 90s it abstained mostly from what it perceived as dangerous political experiments. Also die Linke was basically seen as a continuation party of the GDRs SED, and as such didn't have the greatest of reputations in that city (shooting/jailing people that want to move out will do that miraculously).
Die Linke today is a completely different generation of people and drawing any direct line to the SED is mostly wishful thinking by polemic conservatives.
I don't believe this is basically ever the case. The reality is more like that simple promises often collide with messy reality, and the compromise solution ends up solving a fraction of the original promise.
If they try to avoid paying the full price, this will simply be stopped by the courts. If they do this the proper, legal way it will be far too expensive and not do anything useful.
Affordable housing is a very important topic, but this isn't doing anything to fix the current issue.
This headline is alarmist ('far-left' sounds dangerous for some people). And 'nationalise housing' is just wrong.
This party is not far-left, it is just left. But that is not the point. My point is that a headline about anti-left alarmism hit the HN front page. This is unusual; the HN crowd keep their discussions out of daily politics most of the time. So, this has the smell of importance. Alarm! Far-left!
And this is weird because Germany is in real danger of electing a fascist government at the moment. There is not the tiniest chance of socialist projects coming to power, but the far-right is winning—except for Berlin.
And then an OMG-far-left headline pops up here. This headline was made to push anti-left fear, not to inform the readers.
The party is far left. There’s nothing to the left of them. They are the direct successor of the SED, the same ones that supported firing anyone willing to leave their socialist Berlin utopia by crossing the Berlin Wall.
Nowadays votes by many young people that never lived in Berlin pre-1991.
For general context (this topic will be very charged, but anyways) in several times the party that won yesterday voted against urban density for new units.
This is a compilation of an anthologic Reddit post (deleted, but all the links are working):
...
Und wenn dann jemand Nachverdichtung vorschlägt, passiert das hier:
1. Gegen 240 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg [1]
2. Gegen 150 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg (Salzmannstraße) [2]
3. Gegen 105 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg (Joachimsthaler Str.) [3][4]
Hier hat sich die Linke sogar dazu verleiten gefühlt, den Gegnern einen Preis und 500 € zu geben, damit sie ihren Kampf gegen den sozialen Wohnungsbau fortführen können. Die Linke betont ganz stolz, dass das Geld bereits verwendet wurde „um neue Protest-Banner anzuschaffen und mehr Menschen auf das Thema aufmerksam zu machen“ [5].
Again: „das Thema“ ist die Verhinderung des kommunalen Wohnungsbaus.
4. Gegen 84 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg (Gotlindestraße) [6], dabei wird das erzkonservative Weltbild der Bürgerinitiative unterstützt: „So, wie das Viertel einmal geplant wurde, soll es bestehen bleiben.“ Siehe die Selbstbeschreibung der BI [7].
5. Gegen 50 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg (Atzpodinenstraße) [6]
6. Gegen 150 landeseigene Wohnungen in Schöneberg [8]: Dort haben sie Einwendungen gegen den Bebauungsplan formuliert, also aktiv rechtliche Schritte gegen den Wohnungsbau eingeleitet, und ganz offen ihre Position kundgegeben:
„Das Vorhaben [150 landeseigene Wohnungen!] ist für die Anwohner*innen ausschließlich mit Nachteilen behaftet, einen gesellschaftlichen Mehrwert gibt es nicht.“
8. Gegen ~60 landeseigene Wohnungen in Treptow [10]:
„Die Nachverdichtungen bestehender Wohnquartiere sollen möglichst vermieden werden und gegebenenfalls behutsam unter Erhalt von möglichst viel Grün und unter Berücksichtigung der ursprünglichen Siedlungskonzepte erfolgen.“
9. Gegen 30 landeseigene Wohnungen in Friedrichshain [11]
After WW2 all European countries had massive housing shortages. It was not capitalism that solved it but heavy government involvement. In a span a few decades millions of people were re-housed. The free market is remarkably terrible at pumping out houses fast.
Yet in the US, it was developers following the Levittown model that resulted in tons and tons of single family homes, so I fail to see how the free market is terrible at "pumping out houses fast"?
Well, think whether the market conditions that lead to it could be recreated today, and then you'll see how the free market fails to deliver a lot of housing fast. Developers have long ago realized it's better for them to pump out fewer houses with more profit margin slower, than lots of houses with little profit margins. They get a planning permission on a giant site for a 1000 houses but only build 50 a year to not disrupt the high prices they can charge for each unit. That's free market for you right now.
This is such a fundamental misunderstanding of how the housing market works, and totally ignores apartments/midrises/highrises. The problem with housing in the US lies with overregulation (mostly in the form of zoning). I know this well, as someone who has attended numerous planning meetings in Chicago, I have seen many buildings reduced in unit count solely due to NIMBYs (mostly retired people, as these meetings are often during the day or the immediately 5-7pm time when many people are still commuting home from work).
The market is not terrible pumping out houses fast, but the current market conditions mean that said houses/apartments are not affordable for most people.
The average rent in Berlin (and other German cities) is not very high but that's because a lot of flats still run on a very old contract. If you're moving to Berlin, finding an apartment is incredibly difficult, even if you're willing to spend a lot of money. My grandmother lives by herself in a 90sqm flat in a really nice area and pays 400 Euros a month. In the last 10 years she tried to find a smaller flat (30-40 sqm) for herself but the cheapest she could find was 750. So she stays where she is and just doesn't use 2 of the rooms she has except for storage. In the meantime, a friend of mine moved to Berlin and couldn't find a decent 60sqm flat for less than 1400 Euros. The only way to get those affordable rents is either knowing someone who is moving out or getting super lucky by finding and getting it through a public ad.
Massenbesichtigung (mass viewings) are not uncommon. The agent will publish a public timeslot and literally hundreds of people lined around the block will show up to view a single flat.
The main reason new housing is extremely expensive has to do with regulations themselves.
It costs a lot of money to build a new apartment building because land where you are allowed to build is regulated by the State. Also the State requires many regulations that increase unnecessarily the costs, and most of all in the name of the ideology.
For example, housing standards of Japan and the US, which are way cheaper and still serve two of the richest countries in the world, would never be allowed in Germany. That makes housing unaffordable and drives people into poverty.
Then the govt. should build new homes; I'm not sure that taking homes from people ("nationalize") creates supply.
But it does. There’s immense amount of houses that are unused because they’re part of speculation, and it’s easier to leave them empty than to deal with tenants and their rights. This is an extremely well documented, systemic issue in large European metropolis and especially in Berlin. Forcing existing property to be used immediately adds supply, and it also lowers prices. Exactly the things large property developers do not want. But I don’t give a shit what they want. I want affordable rent.
immense amount of houses that are unused because they’re part of speculation, ... This is an extremely well documented, systemic issue in large European metropolis and especially in Berlin.
Source?
Deutschlandatlas says that Berlin has whole 2 percent of empty apartments for all reasons, which is less then half of German average [0]
Some of those apartments are being remodeled, some are just in the period where the previous tenant moved out and the next moved in.
There are 16 thousand long-term empty apartments, which looks like a huge number, but it is only 0.8 percent of the total. [1]
Even if those 16 thousand apartments could be all put to market (some have legal barriers, like being part of a complicated litigation), that easing would not last even for a single mayor's tenure. Last year alone, Berlin grew up by 17 thousand people. [2] It was not an extraordinary year.
ALL that money that the Linke wants to sink into old housing should be spent to build new one, just to accomodate the arrivals.
[0] https://www.deutschlandatlas.bund.de/DE/Karten/Wie-wir-wohne...
[1] https://www.berlin.de/sen/wohnen/rechtliches/zweckentfremdun...
[2] https://www.statistik-berlin-brandenburg.de/106-2025/
Thanks for actually proving my point! 2% of 2.07 million residential buildings is 54 thousand empty buildings. Let’s say an average number of 2 people per building. Hey, we could house 100 thousand people today. I think that would solve the annual 17 thousand growth for the coming years. And you’ve done nothing, spent nearly no money, no planning involved. Just a single law to force people to rent, and everyone will have housing. Hmm, crazy isn’t it?
It is not buildings, but apartments. And you completely la-la-ed your way around what I wrote and considered them ALL as long-term speculatively withheld apartments, while only about a THIRD of them are. Which means that only about two years' growth could be accomodated like this. Then, what? Given that the city has spent all its money on buying out old stock?
Zero unoccupied housing is unachievable anywhere but in a dilapidated slum, because apartments must get remodeled from time to time. If you remodel an apartment every 15 years and it takes three months (a rather optimistic timeline), you already have 1,6 per cent of the housing stock out of the market inevitably, because 3 months is 1/60th of 15 years. If anything, only 2 per cent of the Berlin apartments being out of the market indicates that they already don't get enough maintenance!
Then you have pauses between tenants. If an average tenant stays for 8 years and it takes about a month to fix the most basic things once he moves out, and find new people, then you have 1 per cent of the housing stock momentarily unoccupied just due to this. Again, Berlin having only 2 per cent of the stock out of the market indicates that the changing of tenants is already overoptimized, with not enough time to vet new ones and fix smaller things: one moves in on the heels of another.
Then you have a certain small percentage of apartments being part of litigations, either commercial or inheritance-related. Inevitable. Companies split, people die, and not everyone has their papers in Ordnung.
You seem to be claiming that all those mechanisms can be compressed to zero, and that all the apartments that are unoccupied due to them can be put on the market by fiat. How? Will you ban apartment remodeling? That's the way to produce - fully occupied - ghettoes.
Berlin already has fines against letting an apartment sit empty without reason, if they're empty, they're empty for a reason or eating the fine is cheaper than the cost of renting it out.
I just bought a house in Germany. It will remain unused for around 6 months due to renovation. It is naive to believe that any empty house is empty due to speculation.
My grandmother died some years ago, my family wanted to sell the house as they didn’t need it. It took 3 years to sell it because it’s in a location with no demand plus 6-12 months to arrange the inheritance legal details. You would say, the price was too high then! It was sold for €30K, a garden farmhouse with 6 bedrooms, garden and garage.
It’s inevitable that some houses are out of the market for some time due to many different reasons.
I don't know what you're trying to achieve by comparing it to the total. It's not about the proportion of empty houses to full ones, it's about the proportion of empty houses and people with no house. The full ones are a problem already solved, there's no point in pulling that into the comparison.
We’ve established how many empty houses there are and how much further demand there will be, and guesstimated that with the current empty apartments, we can cover almost 6 years of the cities growth. That is, if you do absolutely nothing but to force people to rent their homes. Now in reality, we’ll do more than that. Both the government and public sector are and will continue to build houses. But those are just projections. The existing houses, well, exist. So let’s make sure we use them. Whenever this argument comes up people get extremely defensive for no good reason whatever. It will make a significant impact to the housing market if we force stalled housing to become available. Sure, we can and must do more than just that, but why not start with the cheapest and easiest thing we can today? Because it’s someone’s private property and we can’t even demand they rent it out in a housing crisis???? Come on now. Stop the madness.
It's not from people, it's from corporations that rent out 3000 or more apartments.
My cheapest and best experiences when renting have been always from big corporations due to economies of scale.
Fighting against these companies will only drive prices higher. It is stupid.
And the party agrees with you: https://dielinke.berlin/vergesellschaftung/
The nationalization is not about supply, but to stop the price hikes. They also want to invest in new affordable homes at the same time.
Or so they claim.
We did but stopped in the 90s after the infamous Neue Heimat scandal that got brought upon us by the Conservatives.
Same story in NZ.
Hmm, I got curious and read Wikipedia:
Italics added. Seems the government was somewhat involved in the US too. Of course, now the reason "the free market is terrible at pumping out houses" is government regulation too....
Germany doe not have a housing shortage problem, it's another set of problems. (Edit: these are economic problems, productivity, bureaucracy, and all sorts of other things showing up as housing problems)
They will have to wail until after WW3 because Russia is openly threatening action, European governments are trying to prepare their citizens, German populists want to return to 'normal relations' with Russia, which means 'use our money to invade and kill everyone to the East of us, just not us'.
Germany and Europe is in for a very rough ride.
Were it not for the war situation, then we could say this is 'healthy political turmoil' - but this is at a time when outside parties will take advantage of European disunity.
Berlin has a massive shortage. Vacancy rates are at about 1.5%. Functioning housing markets are at about 3%.
It's wrong to suggest that vacancy rates are are necessarily sign of housing dysfunction.
Areas that are attractive to live always have low vacancy rates, because there's a reason that people want to live there.
The assumption that 'as many people ought to be able to live in a neighbourhood as should want to live there' - implied by the 'vacancy rate' issue just means 'every attractive area turns into Hong Kong'.
While there can be very good reason for more building as well - socialized housing is almost never the answer to that. It has a role in some situations, but generally not on the aggregate like that.
Usually this will have to do with permits, regulation - and frankly workers. Nobody wants to do the kind of labour necessary to build homes, and it's extremely hard to find workers to do that kind of work, which to anyone paying the least bit of attention should be a pretty big paradox.
'City overflowing with people who want homes to live don't want to make homes in which to live'
Probably there's a lot of bureaucracy to clean out and that's a good place to start.
To add a b it of context. They do not want to confiscate housing. They do want to pay landlords, though below current (very high) rates. Also this would only apply to private real-estate companies not individual owners.
And they can't govern alone, so I think it's unlikely that this plan is actually implemented as originally planned. The likely coalition would contain 3 parties.
sound logic
You need sound logic against the evils of neo-liberalism, there's nothing logic about housing being as expensive as it now is.
It's a reflection of the demand from people who want to live in Berlin.
The logic is defined by demand. Currently Berlin is under high demand, and that’s why drives prices up. On top of that many rents, around 12% are paid by the job center, which also drives prices up. That’s around 250.000 housing units paid by someone else’s money. That’s the scandal.
Yeah, I know the written logic of all this, but as things stand right now we didn't have homelessness East of the Wall back in the day, while the West had. That should have been reason enough to throw all this capitalist and pervert logic under the bus, but I understand how come the highly paid programmers in here are happy with the current economic system, homelessness be damned. Which is to say, you're telling me nothing new.
Do you know why there was not homelessness in the DDR?
Because it was forbidden by law. You were forced to be put in an institution or directly went to prison. Check Section 249 of the DDR Criminal Code.
And by the way, the DDR suffered from chronic housing shortage. People were cramped in barracks with not bathroom and no heating. Technically housed but in actually povert level of housing. It was an absolute disaster.
Seems like a very good law, don't you think? And this reminded me of how come one of my favorite childhood books from when I was 3 or 4 here in Romania were about DDR constructors building apartment flats, loved that book and loved the spirit behind it.
There were? Back in the '70s and '80s? You sure? I don't remember here that way here in Romania back in the '80s, and I know the DDR had much better economic condition that us, Socialist Republic of Romania.
The "free market" (which has been demonstrated to not be free at all) has no place in basic needs such as housing.
Rent extraction is utterly counterproductive for a society.
Housing should not be a commodity.
Who builds the houses then?
Governments directly, cooperatives or non-profit organizations. The Churches used to be pretty active in that space as well to invest tithes, with rents paying for common-welfare projects.
Yeay communism! They built such lovely tower blocks.
Yeah like that ugly drab city of ... Vienna??
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc...
Who builds all those bridges, roads, power plants, and other public works projects? Maybe them?
Also government formed co-ops. Find people who want a flat and agree on rent before you build it. As the loan is paid off rent becomes substantially cheaper. The second best time to plant a tree is today.
It also doesn't need to be the entire housing stock, just enough to help keep rent low (see Vienna).
Housing should be a commodity. Commodities are fungible, plentiful, and easily tradable.
Housing right now is the opposite of a commodity: it's a boutique investment for individuals whose price is propped up by regulations that artificially limit supply.
Yes, the grandparent scored an own goal with their aside
The Berlin rental market suffers under strong government intervention, and would benefit from being much freer.
This is not true. Two more strong government interventions that would benefit the housing market:
- Tax empty flats to death
- Disallow corporate ownership of residential property
I do not think that housing should be broadly available for trade in global markets, in the typical definition of a commodity.
That enables mass buyouts of housing from corporation which leads to rent extraction and a myriad of woes.
The only reason you enjoy cheap food is because of the free market.
Housing in many countries is not part of a free market but part of a monopoly where the government decides how much, how many, the what and the when the houses can be built. If it was a real free market, the issue would have been long solved.
Surely, if we are decommodifying basic needs, our first priority should be food, not housing, right? How has nationalization of agriculture worked in the past?
Most of the affected housing used to be government owned, sold at firesale prices after the CDU Diepgen government thoroughly wrecked the state finances with a banking scandal at the end of the 90s.
The large investor landlords purchased the homes and often didn't even do the bare minimum in upkeep. The real estate nevertheless appreciated massively because of Berlin getting more and more popular.
It therefore makes sense to nationalize this housing stock, and I'd see a value comprised of "original purchase price, upkeep and inflation-plus-3%-tied appreciation" as fair value. Maybe even less because they extracted 20 years worth of rent payments from the properties already.
I don't know if that's really fair though because it's unlikely that the people that benefited from the fire sale are still the owners.
It would make more sense just enforce maintenance standards and improve renters rights. You can't really legislate supply & demand.
Still the same companies Deutsche Wohnen and Vonovia but I agree with the second part.
Their yearly profits are capped because of the Mietpreisbremse (rent control) law since all the old buildings that they bought would fall under it, so it would've been better to put the money towards either building new state-owned housing or helping the tenants enforce their rights.
The laws are there to protect tenants against neglect from the landlord but enforcement takes multiple months which is not a reasonable timeline if you have a problem in your apartment and the consequences for landlord are mostly just reducing the rent for that time by a certain percentage which doesn't make a difference if the rents are already cheap because of the Mietpreisbremse, so it would also be good to introduce fines but not sure if Germany's legal framework allows for that.
The reality is that the actual large-scale sell-off of public housing was carried out under the SPD–PDS (now The Left) red-red coalition led by Klaus Wowereit in 2004. for prices of around 30.000€ per unit.
Which is precisely what I said:
Wowereit didn't have much of an alternative, the cash coffers were drained.
We live in a society. Everything we do affect others. Therefore there are many different types of affecting. "Confiscate" is a word that has a meaning. This decision is not confiscating, but a different type of affecting. Just as farting next to your house would not count as confiscating it. Affect: yes, confiscate: no.
With the disclaimer that I am neither German nor familiar with the policy under discussion,
Confiscation with (some) remuneration is still confiscation. Is your comment satirical?
In San Francisco, NIMBYs secretly support laws like this. This basically guarantees that many builders will do the math and conclude that it doesn't make sense to build housing in San Francisco.
New large condo buildings have to sell 30% of the units at below market rate. This causes many viable projects to never get built.
So laws like this are sold to renter voters as a way to lower housing costs, but NIMBYs secretly love it. Over time, renters pay more in rent because there is less supply due to builders not building. However, a lucky few renters who were here early will get below market rents.
Perfect examples of voters voting for a short term fix but pay more in long term. And voting for themselves while screwing future renters.
The fix is for the city to be the builder, like it is in Vienna.
The City of Vienna is the largest landlord in Europe. It is also the only major European capital without a rent cost crisis.
Similarly UK cities built their own housing, up until Thatcher and Right to Buy. Costs spiralled out of control after that.
Most urgent intervention required in the UK, IMO. We're choking to death on the cost of housing.
They are saying that this is what the want to do. They can't do that because it would be illegal.
This is not just any law, it's in the German constitution (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_14.html).
The article you linked can be clearly interpreted in a way that would make it possible.
This sounds super alarmist. Bit it’s not: the party only got 25%, so they will have to make a coalition with other parties to govern.
They were junior party in many previous coalitions.
The weird thing this election was: there were like 7 parties with a mayor candidate - and none of them grew up in Berlin.
Well, it is essentially the same-but-modernized party as that which held eastern Germany under the boot of communism for for some 45+ years. They took the route taken by so many communist parties after the dissolution of the Soviet Union by changing their name, here from SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) via PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) to Die Linke (The Left) so that certainly is something to keep in mind. This is the party which built a wall to keep people from leaving their supposed workers and farmers paradise, shooting those who tried to cross over. It may be filled with young women with odd hair colors instead of stodgy old men but the ideology hasn't changed a whit and is ready to add a few more millions to its death toll.
It is patently absurd that communism is still considered as a legitimate ideology while it should be placed right next to Nazism in the "never again" category. It is responsible for more death and suffering than the latter but those edgy students - who don't seem to learn much at all there in academia - don't seem to know or care.
Oh good lord, the utter majority of the Left Party today weren't even alive in the GDR period (and of those that were, a good bunch got yeeted to the BSW). And on top of that, all the other parties have gobbled up their East German Blockparteien as well and we don't label them collaborators either, nor do we call the CDU and especially CSU a Nazi party despite many former NSDAP members ending up there post WW2 (or a ton of them forming the AfD a decade ago).
Obviously after 36 years many people of Die Linke were not alive when the wall fell. But it’s still the same party as the SED, just a different name.
The CDU and the CSU have nothing to do with the NSDAP.
At some point in time in Germany 30% of the population were either part of the NSDAP or the Nazi Army. Luckily most of them were not war criminals and move on with their lives. And yes, some of them ended in the CDU/CSU but also of the SED/Die Linke.
Just to give you an example, around 10-15% of the DDR state officials had held NSDAP membership pre-1945.
Does that make the DDR a successor of the Nazi Regime? Obviously not. The same about the CDU/CSU.
But Die Linke is still the same party as the SED. Same organization, which just voted themselves into different names.
Look, it's a nice sounding narrative with a sprinkle of truth, but it proves a lot less than it sounds like it does.
There were specific reasons historical communism had such a large death toll, and it traces back mostly to the policies that were introduced and the decisions the political elite made.
So I think it's fair to compare actual policies, and not to judge on the basis of whether someone calls themselves a communist, or whether that label gets applied to them.
To my knowledge, Die Linke is not a revolutionary party, doesn't want to force through breakneck industrialization at any cost, and doesn't deny foundational agricultural science.
Before knee jerk reacting to this
1. 60% of the Berlin population voted for nationalising (expropriating) apartments from major landlords in a referendum - this is a bipartisan issue
2. This only affects entities with 3000 or more apartments
There's no bi-partisan thing around it: It was the fact that the city has a spcific demographic that voted for it, but the constitutional court revoked it.
Another point: Even during the campaign the group did not explain how it would work given that most of the payments would need to be done at current market rates and the constitutional court will not pass it for obvious reasons.
And on top of that, good luck to make all other states paying it and hoping that the Länderfinanzausgleich will stand.
Entity = owner?
If I'm an entity that has 3000 or more apartments, I would have sold long ago to get to 2999. Basically as soon as I heard rumors of this law, I would have started selling.
I used to live in South America (mid-tier city), living here in Berlin my will never understand how such intelligent people in general (no irony or sarcasm) never thought in a collective sense that if you have a market with a rigid supply in terms of availability (not occupied homes with no incentives for renting), it never made a serious planning for building.
I was travelling to some big cities (between 70% of size of Berlin to 4x its size) and you can find a plethora of options since something modest that can fit in a minimal income (salario minimo) to nice appartments.
Here we had in the last 7 years 55K units made, but in my home city alone we had more than 470K in a single city; if you're willing to be 1 hour away by car you can find apartments that the normal berliner never would have access in his/her entire life.
Not to dunk on berliners, but once you're in the environment where people do real housing at scale you will see a small magic in terms of prices for the legacy supply dropping.
Has to do mostly with the historic environment of the country. Berlin was a split city, so after the 90s it abstained mostly from what it perceived as dangerous political experiments. Also die Linke was basically seen as a continuation party of the GDRs SED, and as such didn't have the greatest of reputations in that city (shooting/jailing people that want to move out will do that miraculously).
Die Linke today is a completely different generation of people and drawing any direct line to the SED is mostly wishful thinking by polemic conservatives.
Unfortunately solving the housing crisis will remove any incentive to vote for the Left or the Socialist Party.
Remember the first incentive of any politician is to remain in power not to solve citizens problems. Sometimes there’s overlapping, fortunately.
I don't believe this is basically ever the case. The reality is more like that simple promises often collide with messy reality, and the compromise solution ends up solving a fraction of the original promise.
Do you know which big city recently solved the rental price problem? Buenos Aires, by just removing most of the rental housing regulations.
It can be solved, you just need to do it without ideology. Die Linke is not that type of party, quite the opposite.
Decades ago, when I was still living in Berlin, the predecessor party of Die Linke (the PDS) was made up of creepy former GDR officials.
Yesterday on TV, I saw mostly hip young people. Elif Erap, the party’s lead candidate, reminded me of Chrissy Hynde from The Pretenders.
If they try to avoid paying the full price, this will simply be stopped by the courts. If they do this the proper, legal way it will be far too expensive and not do anything useful.
Affordable housing is a very important topic, but this isn't doing anything to fix the current issue.
This headline is alarmist ('far-left' sounds dangerous for some people). And 'nationalise housing' is just wrong.
This party is not far-left, it is just left. But that is not the point. My point is that a headline about anti-left alarmism hit the HN front page. This is unusual; the HN crowd keep their discussions out of daily politics most of the time. So, this has the smell of importance. Alarm! Far-left!
And this is weird because Germany is in real danger of electing a fascist government at the moment. There is not the tiniest chance of socialist projects coming to power, but the far-right is winning—except for Berlin.
And then an OMG-far-left headline pops up here. This headline was made to push anti-left fear, not to inform the readers.
Of all parties in Germany that have a shot at governing, it is the furthest left. Thus, „far-left“ is not wrong in my opinion.
The party is far left. There’s nothing to the left of them. They are the direct successor of the SED, the same ones that supported firing anyone willing to leave their socialist Berlin utopia by crossing the Berlin Wall.
Nowadays votes by many young people that never lived in Berlin pre-1991.
That's liberal left, not far left. Routers is just doing its usual capitalist propaganda here.
Far left would be inciting people to outright hang landlords. Much like far right is labeling anarchists as terrorists in the US.
For general context (this topic will be very charged, but anyways) in several times the party that won yesterday voted against urban density for new units.
This is a compilation of an anthologic Reddit post (deleted, but all the links are working):
...
Und wenn dann jemand Nachverdichtung vorschlägt, passiert das hier:
1. Gegen 240 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg [1]
2. Gegen 150 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg (Salzmannstraße) [2]
3. Gegen 105 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg (Joachimsthaler Str.) [3] [4]
4. Gegen 84 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg (Gotlindestraße) [6], dabei wird das erzkonservative Weltbild der Bürgerinitiative unterstützt: „So, wie das Viertel einmal geplant wurde, soll es bestehen bleiben.“ Siehe die Selbstbeschreibung der BI [7].
5. Gegen 50 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg (Atzpodinenstraße) [6]
6. Gegen 150 landeseigene Wohnungen in Schöneberg [8]: Dort haben sie Einwendungen gegen den Bebauungsplan formuliert, also aktiv rechtliche Schritte gegen den Wohnungsbau eingeleitet, und ganz offen ihre Position kundgegeben:
7. Gegen 95 landeseigene Wohnungen in Treptow [9]
8. Gegen ~60 landeseigene Wohnungen in Treptow [10]:
9. Gegen 30 landeseigene Wohnungen in Friedrichshain [11]
10. Allgemein gegen Wohnungsbau in Treptow [12]
11. Allgemein gegen Wohnungsbau in Pankow [13]
12. Allgemein gegen Neubauziele in ganz Berlin [14]
Alles Beispiele von Die Linke, weil das die Partei ist, die eigentlich am härtesten für den sozialen Wohnungsbau kämpfen müsste.
Auch Neubau im Außenbereich wird nicht gerne gesehen: 5.000 Wohnungen auf der Elisabeth-Aue sollten verhindert werden [15].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20211015205615/https://www.tages...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210202231844/https://www.links...
[3] https://www.facebook.com/linke.lichtenberg/photos/a.16689808...
[4] https://www.archivebuttons.com/articles?article=https://www....
[5] https://archive.is/a8QVo
[6] https://web.archive.org/web/20220926185744/https://www.berli...
[7] https://web.archive.org/web/20220926184054/https://www.nachh...
[8] https://web.archive.org/web/20220119200234/https://www.links...
[9] https://web.archive.org/web/20220927182345/https://mobile.tw...
[10] https://web.archive.org/web/20220928214930/https://www.dieli...
[11] https://web.archive.org/web/20220307125359/https://leute.tag...
[12] https://www.dielinke-treptow-koepenick.de/politik/aktuelles/...
[13] https://web.archive.org/web/20210910093835/https://www.die-l...
[14] https://www.rbb24.de/politik/beitrag/2022/05/berlin-bauen-ge...
[15] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/baustopp-fur-den-klimasch...