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.
Sadly, the examples of economies of Soviet Union, and Cuba, and Venezuela, and North Korea etc. are somehow not sufficient enough for people to realize the danger of such control.
Perhaps it is better than nothing, however, living in Soviet Union's surrealistic "economy" was not worth that.
I agree, but the same applied for buying a car and other rare goods as well. The whole system was unsustainable. The almost comical dysfunction of it is probably hard to believe if you didn't experience it first hand. 10 years after the wall came down my dad came into the kitchen announcing that today we could have picked up our first car, which was one of those [1], in the late 90s.
That's because a lot of people want to live in cities like Berlin. But don't worry, the Soviet Union had a solution for that, too!
You would get assigned a job by the central committee, based on grades, people you know, who you're married to, things like that. So a lot of people would get assigned to very undesirable places, such as villages or very small cities, thus solving the problem of too many people in large metros. Do you think that's an acceptable tradeoff?
Seems like this law is only going to make things worse: the rent freeze will make renting even less appealing to owners, only increasing their desire to run their property as a hotel. No?
Rent freeze will limit available housing and lower the quality of it.
If it is attractive to investors to run illegal hotels now, it will only become more attractive to do so once they are unable to raise rents on normal tenants.
They have already done it and recovered less than 3000 flats. Again, illegal hotels are not a real problem in this city.
> It nonetheless imposes some pretty firm conditions on vacation rentals and makes the penalties for ignoring them far more stringent. All landlords seeking to rent out their home will only be allowed to do so if they get a general permit from their borough, even if they intend only to rent their property out for occasional short stays. While landlords applying for a permit at their primary residency will likely be approved, second home owners may face a more rigorous process. Landlords who leave an apartment untenanted, meanwhile, will need a special permit from the borough to do so after three months of vacancy without having a permanent tenant registered, cutting the current vacancy grace period in half. Most strikingly, the maximum penalty for breaking the rules has been multiplied by five, to a potential fine of €500,000 ($617,000).
Berlin receives 30.000+ new people every year and builds only ~1/3 of the necessary flats. It just cannot work this way.
That being said I'm sure there are some anti competitive laws/regulations creating problems but the solution is not more bad regulations.