The only way to keep rents this low in the face of rising demand is public housing that is rented out below market rates to low income tenants, or via a lottery.
Or you know, build more housing.
Not to mention NIMBY-heavy political systems which are common in urban areas... they are always extremely hostile to new development. Which of course benefits current residents in the short term but is a disaster for everyone in the long run.
And Berlin is light years away from that. A 30 storey apartment building there is already counted as a "skyscraper," while Chinese are about to start talking about 50 storey as "a new norm" in some more expensive parts of the country.
The costs instead come from the extra rules and regulations placed on builders, by people who really do not want more houses to be built.
The city got hit _hard_
Berlin is overall smaller than before WW2. And it shows, the place is really empty and spacious compared to comparably attractive cities.
The issue is that Berlin people like it that way. They don't want high rise buildings, let alone skyscrapers. They want their local "Kiez" culture, where you live, eat, meet and have everything around your house. Berlin doesn't have a CBD, and it doesn't have a real city center. It has many equivalent ones. It's like a huge collection of villages.
Berlin is different from Paris or London, and certainly NYC, most importantly in that it is not cramped. There are numerous huge empty buildings and free areas right around the geographical center. The issue is not space. The issue is buildings.
Building in Berlin is difficult. It needs to be pretty and fit the area, its spaces need to be open to the public or accessible, it needs to provide public infrastructure and provide for kindergartens, doctors offices etc, it can not be too large, it needs to have x% social appartements, and it can not have more than y% luxury flats for sale etc. etc.
Is that good? I don't know. I compare it often to places in developing countries, where you can build up huge areas of high rises indiscriminately, and if you wanna have gated areas for rich people, that's fine. That's why the sidewalks are usually unfinished just outside a given area. Not so in Berlin. Building something is like an expensive privilege.
And hence, there isn't enough space for housing, even if there is certainly enough space to "be".
Even Munich is probably twice that "€10 p sqm centrally located" price.
What the article is concerned about is not how current rents in Berlin compare to cities like London or Paris. But how they compare to rents in Berlin just a few years ago. Or that is -- the impact of rising rents on, you know, local people.
The only way to keep rents this low in the face of rising demand is public housing that is rented out below market rates to low income tenants, or via a lottery.
There are multiple strategies available, and no one strategy will be sufficient. That was the main point of the article.
Except for the fact that poor people aren't the ones driving up demand or prices for decent housing...
Building codes reduce transaction costs by avoiding having to inspect every single thing in a building every single time the ownership changes.
Building codes massively reduce the load on the legal system that would otherwise be required from all the different people suing each other to determine fault when something inevitably breaks.
Building codes reduce death from things like fires because they make sure things like fire exits exist.
There are LOTS of countries with minimal building codes. Take "free market" Somalia for instance. Would you seriously switch with them?
But hey, maybe I'm wrong: tell me, what specific drawbacks do you see in the building standards of Mogadishu or Hargeisa vis-a-vis Berlin?
Unless something significant happens to regulate the housing market we're going to end up with property being something that no individual owns, and everyone rents a place to live from a corporation.