Berlin rent cap overturned by Germany's top court
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- The supply of rental apartments dropped by 40-60% after the Mietendeckel came in effect. It became even harder to find an apartment in Berlin. Landlords were holding their breaths.
- The supply of housing for sale also dwindled. If I'm not mistaken, sellers were waiting for the court judgement to rent/sell.
- The Mietendeckel also concerned furnished apartments, although it was largely ignored by landlords on short term furnished flat platforms like Wunderflats. The platforms turned a blind eye.
- I know many people who got significant reductions, sometimes exceeding 20%.
- In most cases, the new rent contracts with reduced rents had a shadow rent clause in case the Mietendeckel got repealed. Many people will have to pay the difference back within 14 days.
- The Mietpreisbremse, and earlier rent control measure, is still in effect. It does not include the rent freeze, but it does include significant rent reductions. Unfortunately, it's not automatic (no threat of a fine), and often needs to be enforced in court. The court judgement is retroactive to April 2020.
This is all I know/remember.
- furnished aparthotels are something special and they got an exception from the state (because some providers are state owned)
In the majority(?) of cases it did not work.
Landlords found absurd ways to work around it. Many not necessary fully legal but only in a way that if no one who is "hurt" by it sues the state can not act.
There where enough people which where open to pay the de-facto increased "not so legal" Rent, and as such would definitely not sure.
A common trick was to pair the rent contract with Renting some token furniture for completely unreasonable (and as such somewhat illegal/moon-) prices. (note: this wasn't the same as the rent prices for furnished apartments exception thingy mentioned by others)
Again if both renter and rentee are happy with it there is nothing which the state could have done.
Also more apartments where sold instead of rented out, in turn decreasing the amount of rente-able apartments while the demand did change (maybe except due to COVID, I would have to look it up). Furthermore it's not uncommon that such apartments do not enter the rent pool again even if the person in question leaves Berlin (and then illegally perma rents it over RBnB to tourists, or keeps it empty or resells it or ...)
Lastly due to majorly increased renovation costs (as far as I know) and now rent caps it was basically much less likely for any new apartments to be added to the pool. And even (potentially necessary) renovations of existing ones was much less likely done (as far as I have heard from people involved in that business, through not the very big players, but it matches the experience other cities which did impose rent caps had).
And just to be clear Rents in Berlin reaching a point where it's problematic for many people from Berlin to pay them IS a massive problem. Just that this law as far as I can tell would not have solved it and maybe even made it worse. Also yes Rents had been unusual low in the past (I'm personally profiting from this) but now they have gone beyond any reasonable price in many cases (at least in context what many people earn in Berlin).
That's a problem with the Mietpreisbremse, but not so much with the Mietendeckel, which also sets limits on furnished flats. You also can't just throw in an IKEA BILLY shelf and call it furnished (in the words of my lawyer).
> Again if both renter and rentee are happy with it there is nothing which the state could have done.
Landlords will cheat, and clients will do everything in order to get an apartment.
I've seen rental appointments with landlords, with 30/40 prospective clients, and I've always wondered if price is really the problem. I've even done a sort of test, and offered more than requested - and it didn't work.
Observing so many people competing for housing, intuitively makes me think that the housing problem is not of economic nature (but I suppose that the situation is complex).
also they didn't rent out a furnished apartment, they will rent out a apartment and you will rent some overpriced furniture independent of the apartment from a 3rd party. It just "happened" that you sign both at the same time and that the same person (through proxy) profits from both.
While this still is illegal, it's to a point where even if the renting person tries to sue it likely would not be a super simple case, i.e. would take time.
And then if you agree on it why should you sue? And if you rant and then sue are you not afraid on ending up on secret illegal but unpreventable black list making it harder to find a apartment or gain a incorrect but still very troublesome Schufa (credit scoring) entry?
The problem is often phrased as people renting out apartments for moon prices.
But that's not the case, they rent them out for prices which are paid in many cases.(Also cost for renovating/building nearly doubled in the last ~10y for smaller property owners.).
The actual problem is that the people living in Berlin since a long time (potentially birth) don't earn enough to continue to do so. It's not that there aren't people paying and therefore there are a lot of empty properties (ok in some areas that happens too, in Berlin less so).
Exactly. And the Mietendeckel caused new construction to essentially stop completely. Way to go!
"16.03.2021: Heute hat das Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg die Baugenehmigungszahlen für das Jahr 2020 veröffentlicht. Die Zahl der Baugenehmigungen sank in Berlin das vierte Jahr in Folge."
https://www.immobilien-aktuell-magazin.de/topics/auswirkunge...
https://www.rbb24.de/politik/beitrag/2020/11/berlin-mietende...
And the effects already started in 2019, when the law was planned:
https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2019-11/berlin-mietendeckel-g...
In 2019, in anticipation of the Mietendeckel, the decline became significantly steeper.
Several large companies announced that they were halting all new construction and renovation projects.
At the same time, inventory has practically disappeared. So instead of "unaffordable" housing[1] for new tenants, we now have no housing for new tenants. (Existing rents were already protected).
[1] Berlin is still cheap compared other large German cities and certainly compared to most capital cities of industrialised countries or places like SF. It's just not quite as ridiculously cheap any longer.
I don't think the city is giving out new building permits for this type of stuff, and many of those markets have either been there "forever", or have been built after the reunification (and in the 90's city planners were expecting that the city would shrink further, not grow).
The problem is: Berlin can't. There is not much free space for new construction in Berlin proper, with the exception of "Nachverdichtung" such as you propose with apartments over parking lots - and these have the downside that they are horribly expensive, simply because it costs potential developers a lot of money to acquire the land!
The solution would be to build out internet connectivity and public transport in the suburbs in Brandenburg so that employers don't all concentrate in Berlin.
Here in Prague we have quite a few brownfields that could be home to at least 50 thousand people (Rohanský ostrov, Bubny, Kolbenova), but the development is extremely slow.
Well having some undeveloped space is actually quite nice to enjoy in a city. We don't have to live packed narrowly on top of one another.
But more specifically, brownfields (previously-industrial spaces) are usually highly polluted. Some are full of heavy metals and chemicals that you really don't want to displace into the air by digging into the soil... Some people are doing it, but it either costs billions of euros in depollution, or greatly affects the health of nearby population, and often both.
It required several years of sanation works to clean up, but now it is built over and serves the needs of the population. [0]
I believe that this is a reasonable use of public money, even though private developers profit from it. Or possibly finance it through a Public-Private Partnership project.
The alternative is to let poisoned land within borders of a big city stay poisoned forever. Which does not sound either people- or environment-friendly.
[0] https://www.ostrava.cz/en/podnikatel-investor/real-estate/br...
A city should be worth it to live in and provide enjoyment for the citizens, not be a glorified chicken coop for people.
Otoh sprawl development leads to dead neighborhoods, car dependence and long commutes. It also uses space that could be left to nature instead.
There is a middle way between US-level sprawl and Japan-style chicken coops - and I definitely hope we don't go the Japan route.
The capitalists instead decided to optimize for steadily increasing the price of housing by restricting supply, so these are now primarily seen as an investment with nearly-guaranteed returns, rather than places for people to live.
Or "magic coin-shitting machines", as Charlie Brooker so pithily put it.
Either way I would say housing in Japan (considering all the constraints) seems to work great.
No. Very little. Just read articles over the years saying they are facing similar issues of real-estate bubble and speculation and that prices in Seoul are getting close to those of New York.
Similarly, minimum wage is typically bumped after inflation already made its way, so most of the people are over the threshold anyway and won't be thrown out of their jobs. And those who will — are valuable voters who can be made highly dependent on state unemployment programs.
Empty ugly spaces (not Parks or Public squares) are a symptom of a lethargic bureaucracy, not a healthy thing.
Concerns about being able to afford rent not just now but in the future is a major concern for a huge chunk of the population. They look at what happens in other large cities with rent prices (be it Munich, be it Paris, be it SF) in fear.
Berlin itself uses an unofficial slogan of "Arm aber Sexy" ("poor but sexy/attractive"), coined by a former Berlin major referring to the budget of the city but adopted by the population to mean the people living there as well. They fear that driving out poor people - including themselves - and turn it into yet another place for the rich, and/or fear "over-development" will destroy the character of the city (and the ecological consequences of such developments; the Green party is big in certain parts of Berlin).
I can see that with my sisters, who have been living in downtown-ish Berlin for a long time while "poor" (think student, almost-unpaid intern, unemployed), and who constantly complained about the rents (that my parents and later welfare paid) and scarcity of available apartments, but at the same time were e.g. very much against any plans to develop the large area of the old closed Tempelhof airport, where all plans to develop that area were abandoned after multiple public referendums decided that the area has to remain a "park". That alone is 12km² of now entirely unused space close to the heart of the city, space for about at least 50000 people considering Berlins current population density of 4118 people per km². Or develop only half of it, and leave 6km² and that's still a ton of new apartments. But nope.
To be fair, construction work in Berlin is super slow.
Public construction on the other hand goes with the cheapest bidder, so doesn't pay that well. Also, the state will only pay after a lengthy process of inspections and trying to find something wrong with the finished building. So lots of companies just avoid public bids, because they cannot afford to finance all the materials and work pay for the duration of the build. Those that can afford it are companies that specialize in public construction sites, usually designed to be able to go bankrupt at the first sign of trouble.
Generally, in a public construction site, all contractors are lowest bidders. Some do intentionally bid lower than cost to get the contract. What they then try to do to recoup their cost is to try to find some problem that wasn't spelled out in the bidding, or to wait for some change of plans or regulations. Because they then can bill a lot more for the additional work and material necessary to fix the problem, or hold up the construction site in lengthy court proceedings. Because everyone knows that something like that will happen at some point, they intentionally go as slow as possible, waiting for the order to drop everything and wait for the courts. Because if they are quick and invest a lot of work and material, they might not survive the delay.
In my opinion, compared to other countries things that would be built within 8-12 months take 2 years.
All in all, while some politicians may have suggested that the Gigafactory is an example of a fast project they made possible, they no longer do so. Because actually it is a perfect example of everything being regulated to death, dog-slow bureaucracy and crazy risks you have to take as a business if you want things done fast. Where "fast" is still slow compared to the rest of the world.
No housing construction will ever go to the lengths Tesla did in terms of risk for a fast construction. Housing investment is notoriously risk-averse in any case.
EDIT: not only rental apartments of course but more housing in general.
A second step would be, to make sure that rental housing is used for that instead of AirBNB or any other investment. It would also help to reduce land transfer tax if someone then lives in the bought flat. Speculators and builders anyway get around it in the long term by founding businesses that buy apartment blocks (pay the tax once) and then later only trade the shares of these businesses.
And last but not least, they should stop to discuss dispossessing property. It does not solve anything but wastes time and energy.
In the 30 years since then, the most they've ever managed is 30,000.
It's not in private landowner's interest to build cheap social housing. It reduces rents, it suppresses property values. So they don't get built.
If they do build anything, it's in their interests to build luxury apartments. They make the most money out of those. I know little about Berlin's housing, but by any chance would there be a lot of expensive apartments being built?
Did something similar happen in German history? You'll probably find all the big landowners in Berlin and Germany lobbying very hard to make sure nothing like this ever happens.
Profit is just an emergent form of social compensation for addressing a shortage. That society enacts laws to prevent the profit motive from working, and incentivizing socially beneficial behavior, is a tragedy.
As far as I know, it's a widely discredited theory, never based on any actual studies.
* Typically in Germany, social housing is built with a time-limit built in: after X years, the house falls out of the social housing program and can be rented and sold freely. At the moment, a lot more houses leave the system then are added.
* Many cities sold their real estate after the financial crisis to give the money to the failing banks. I.e. Berlin is super-broke, in parts because of a big banking scandal of the previous government.
* In Munich they have a pretty decent system: anyone who develops land had to keep to a certain split of social housing, middle income housing and free market housing. They use the land they own and their powers over zoning to enforce that.
I'd prefer those over public housing very much because only with them, the interests between the renter and the landlord are aligned, and they're not part of the state and can therefore not be used (or sold) by political decisions.
(I might be wrong but) if I had to bet why councils could build more places it's that they would have a streamlined approval process with councils (denying a social housing project would look bad) while the private developers have to follow the mood of the deparments and several "appeals" and "NIMBYs" (same as in the US today)
But a new "luxury apt" opens a place in a slightly cheaper property.
Or politicians are corrupt and Thatcher is a good excuse. Take your pick.
On top of that, the Conservatives made an election pledge to build 200,000 starter homes in 2015 election and apparently failed to build a single one. It's easy to claim you'll build houses and then do nothing, like it's easy to claim you'll reduce immigration but it just keeps going up.
The last election in 2019 was mainly about Brexit and the general public's perception that Corbyn was unsuited to being the Prime Minister.
This is already in place. Berlin is very strict about apartment usage. Once a unit is designated as a living space, it's very difficult to get a permit to use it as an AirB&B. Also if you own an apartment, it's illegal to leave it without a tenant for an extended period - I think 90 days is the maximum.
Those standards obviously have their benefits or are unavoidable (fire protection) and result in new housing being high quality. But they make it hard to address housing shortages in a non long term way.
From what I understand it is very difficult to do something with that space, either because people refuse to sell or because of bureaucratic red tape.
What's wrong with that? Enjoy the little green space you have left while it lasts. Have a BBQ with friends over there, maybe? The gentrifiers/developers won't be so long to remove every last bit of green and freedom in your neighborhood, as they did everywhere else.
...The high housing prices.
It is illegal to keep an apartment empty for more then three months. So if you are aware of any empty housing, feel free to denounce it (https://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/wohnen/zweckentfremdu...). In 2018, 1,9% of the flats in Mitte were subject to an ongoing official procedure on those grounds. The owner can simply claim, they are reforming, but I presume there are limits to that too.
How many flats are really empty is unclear.
I've read that according to the Senat,
- there is an estimated 0.8%-2% of the flats unoccupied
- down from 3.5% in 2011
- ideally, it would be between 2-3%.
The Taz is not particularly strong on keeping opinion from facts separated, but that's where I got it from: (https://taz.de/Spekulativer-Leerstand-in-Berlin/!5749397/)
Two things: I think you put too much value to Friedrichstraße, and likely Mitte in general. It is the physical and historic city centre, but that doesn't have the same meaning as it has in other cities.
Second, in many parts in East-Berlin, you have a unclear ownership of houses and ground with competing claims. People have been disowned by the Nazis, Soviets, or by the GDR. The families have gone into diaspora and are partly spread over the world. Random people may have moved in and layed their own claim.
The ownership is unclear and spread. And it is a battle to lay claim to your _part_ of ownership. The ground is gaining worth over time. All ingredients, which do not expedite the development of land.
This is a constant discussion in Helsinki, too. I think it's better to build expensive if that translates to good locations and high quality.
In The Netherlands there are actually quite a few people that don't want to upgrade from cheaper social rent housing to more expensive private rent housing. These people are called "scheefwoners", which to a Dutch person's ears make it sound like it's almost a criminal activity:
> Scheefwonen is a term that is used in the Netherlands for the living of people in a rental home despite their income being too high for that. So the tenants have an income that is too high for their type of home, so that they actually pay too little rent. With a given housing stock, the downside is that there are people who live in a rented house whose rent is high in relation to their income, which is undesirable for the residents themselves and / or socially in connection with the housing allowance. It can also play a role that the rent is low compared to the characteristics of the home. The Key Publication on the Dutch Housing Survey “Living in Unusual Times”, published in April 2013, showed that the number of households in rental homes with a rent below the deregulation threshold and an income higher than € 33,000 in 2009 was approximately 790 thousand.
Of course these people might have pretty good reasons why they prefer to keep living in cheap social housing. Perhaps these people want to save/invest more of their income, perhaps they like their neighbourhood or perhaps private rent housing is just too expensive. Either way, I feel it's wrong to say that these people "pay too little rent based on their income". That almost seems to suggest a certain percentage of income should be spent on rent or mortgage, whether one chooses to or not.
Again, this problem could be easily solved by just building more houses, but this is also very difficult to achieve in The Netherlands, due to ground speculation by municipal governments and a plethora of rules that a builder has to conform to when building new houses. This, combined with an average immigration of around 400-500 migrants a week means that for the next 15 years or so I don't believe this problem will be fixed, maybe not even in 30 years, unless some major policy changes are introduced. This situation is good for rent-seekers though, they will be able to ask a premium for a very long time.
Source: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=https:/...
Institutional investors have higher expectations of return of investment and are more likely willing to forego a small rent in the hope for a larger future rent. They have more deep pockets. And on top of that, expectations from an international market, which Berlin did not match. Investors are expecting that to change in the long run. And the funny thing, with a limited supply in housing and an increase of investors with such a behaviour, it is a self-fulfilling promise.
The number of empty apartments in Berlin is hard to guess. Not an expert in that matter, but from a quick search, the number is anywhere between 0.8% and 2%.
Yes, it is important to have apartments empty for some time, so people can actually move, but as I understand, that is excluded from those considerations/statistics. We are looking at apartments which are empty for more than three months (which is theoretically illegal in Berlin).
Keep in mind, what I wrote about investors is what I heard from people living there complaining about. So more a reflection of the emotions there, then necessarily factual.
> At some point in the chain that means there's cheaper housing available.
Not at all: if you tear down a cheap apartment and replace it with a more expensive one the overall availability of cheap apartments decreases.
That's exactly what they are doing at a few places in my city (also with a massive housing problem).
We recently found a new apartment here, the process was as follows:
(1) We found the apartment online. It was online for exactly 6 hours, listed by an estate agent.
(2) Inside the listing (hidden deep in the description) was a short sentence saying that any contact made through the listing website contact form would be ignored and that a secret mail address had to be used. You had to email an application letter (preferably with photos), copies of your latest 3 salary statements, copies of your identity card, proof of your credit-worthiness ("Schufa-Auskunft" in Germany), proof that you had liability insurance, and contact information of previous landlords. This had to be mailed until a deadline the next morning. If any of this was missing, the application would be ignored.
(3) A week later, we received an email telling us that we were eligible for an appointment to visit the apartment. But we had to confirm this until the same evening by sending an SMS to a secret number.
(4) A few days later, we indeed got a date and time for visiting the apartment (via SMS). It was a 15-minute slot, but there were at least 10 other families there, and they did visits the entire day. When the agent asked us, we indicated strong interest, told him we could rent the place beginning tomorrow and left.
(5) A week later, we got the apartment (of course we now have to pay 2 rents for 3 months). When we asked him why the process was so complicated, he told us that they were only 4 people in the agency, and they didn't have the capacity to read (not answer!) > 1000 mails of people interested in the apartment. So they gradually came up with various hoops and obstacles to get this number down to something manageable (they got it down to around 50 families who indicated final interest).
BTW, 10% of these data collecting advertisements on the real estate websites are from identity thieves.
There's no easy solution. Everyone puts the blame on the landlord saying they should be careful who they rent to, but that's difficult to do without doing some kind of background check on tenants and can also lead to discrimination.
Because that's illegal, even without the rent cap in Berlin.
Another one is vague and based on the "Mietspiegel", which lists appropriate rents according to quality and location.
If the rent exceeds this by too much, you can sue for "Mietwucher" (rent usury).
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bgb/__556d.html
It's illegal here to demand a rent more than 10% higher than the "ortsübliche Vergleichsmiete", which is approximately the local rent averaged over the last 6 years (exactly defined in §558)
More generally, you cannot simply ask for astronomical prices for anything in Germany just because you know that people are in a position where they have to pay them, that's "Wucher" (racketeering) and against public decency, which is generally illegal according to §138.
Berlin had the nice example of a few square kilometers of the Tempelhof airport field being available. Public demanded to make it a park instead of constructing housing.
Almost anything with a tree on it is impossible to build on, and even if there is a building permit for the housing, attaching it to public transports like the S-Bahn or Subway is next to impossible nowadays.
Building codes in Berlin are not much weirder than in the rest of Germany, but they also serve to make constructing housing harder. E.g. there is a strict limit to building height, which limits buildings to 5 storeys (iirc) even in high-demand high-density areas.
Money is especially tight for the state of Berlin, while they get subsidized with lots of money from the other states (Länderfinanzausgleich), they still cannot afford to construct much of the necessary housing or the associated infrastructure themselves. Private investment usually will go elsewhere because the political environment in Berlin is poor. If there is rent control in Berlin and no rent control in Hamburg, of course money will go to Hamburg first.
There is also no political will to fix the above.
What I think is a bigger problem is the countless vacant lots all over the city. Even centrally there are tons of them, e.g. with only a one story supermarket or parking lots (as mentioned above) or sometimes it’s just overgrown. I wonder what the deal are with those. My guess is that the city already sold them in more dire times and now owners just sit on them until the real estate prices makes the time ripe to build something there. Can’t find another explanation for it.
Building more is definitely the wrong solution to housing. Just remove the capitalist vampire landlords making a profit on basic human needs, and let everybody enjoy free housing for life!
EDIT: Corrected stat.
EDIT2: Funny to see people downvoting without argument. Are you all against Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, stating "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services" ?
People can't live without housing so demand is not elastic. Plus the housing market is special regarding spatial location. Applying regular market rules as if the housing market behaved the same as, say, the screwdrivers market, does not make sense at all.
In any case, my point is that applying market rules to housing does not make sense, it's not a competitive market at all and never can be.
The private investors won't do infrastructure either - it is expensive - so they want to build where the infrastructure is already in place. So that's why we see trying to increase density.
So the zoning rules are there as a conterweight to this.
- How tedious will it be to find suitable tenants (do you want to go through 1000 emails)?
- Will they make a mess of the place?
- Will they call you at random times to complain about neighbors?
- Will you have to organize and deal with mechanics when e.g. the heating breaks?
And so on. If property prices go up x% per year, buying housing is a great investment even if you leave it empty. And yes, this is a serious problem in larger cities, where investors (domestic or even foreign) just buy up housing without any intention to let people live there, exacerbating the problem.
To be clear, I am just a tenant, but the above incentives for investors are straightforward to see.
Because then you get the property price gains and the rental income on top!
I don’t doubt this is happening, I’m just trying to wrap my head around it.
Rents are so high BECAUSE there are empty housing units. If all available housing units went on the market, rent prices would collapse along with the real-estate speculative bubble, which is precisely what landlords are trying to avoid.
So my bad for giving a wrong number the >1 million is in fact 3 millions for the whole of France (~8%). For Paris it's "only" ~240000 (according to 2019 paris.fr numbers) which is on the scale of one empty apartment in the heart of Paris for every mishoused person ("sans domicile fixe") in the whole of France, according to official statistics (which may be too optimistic on the number of mishoused people).
https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/3572856
According to INSEE (official statistics), between 1990 and 2015, population has grown 0.4%, housing units have grown 1%, while abandoned housing units grew 2.8%. Now may be a good time to say that secondary housing (vacation houses for the privileged elite that can afford it) is NOT abandoned housing according to these stats.
Here is a little personal anecdote: I used to live in the center of Berlin Mitte when I was a student, had rented a Penthouse apartment for 450 Euro/mo incl. additional costs (but without water, gas, electricity). It was affordable. Then a Bavarian multimillionaire bought the house from the original owners. I was already abroad most of the time, so I didn't experience the loud works his people conducted to get old renters out. However, he did cut off my telephone cable, something the phone technician realized when I returned and was able to fix.
Later he threatened to build a balcony - "and this might take a long time" - unless I agree to pay a higher rent. The classic ugly move. I negotiated with him for a while and in the end the raise was not so bad. However, I realized that I have to get out anyway - he wouldn't stop until I'd have left, you cannot fight a landlord with evil intentions in the long run even if you're a member of renter protection like I was. So I left Berlin and never returned, not even for a visit. I never asked but would estimate the same apartment at around 1600 EUR/mo today, with an ever increasing tendency.
Now I live in another country, ten years have passed, and the same happens in the city I live in. Rents are rising continuously, I've already seen people photographing the houses in our street, several of them are being totally renovated, new apartments are always "luxury apartments" as if any local could afford these (it's a poor country, ca. 800 EUR average income), and an agent from Sotheby's Real Estate rang my doorbell recently to ask if I'm the owner of my apartment.
You cannot escape this trend unless you want to live jobless on the countryside. I'd buy an apartment like most of my colleagues if I had the money, but it would mean having liabilities for the next 20 years and I only have time-limited contracts in Academia.
It's frustrating to know there is a real risk I'll have to spend my later years in the most ugly suburbs and slums of an otherwise beautiful town, even though I have a rather decent salary in local terms, while most of these houses with unaffordable "luxury apartments" are bought by foreign investors. By the way, many of the new apartments are empty, apparently only serve as investments.
The rent was not too low, it was perfectly okay for the previous owners and I can assure you they did not lose money. They made enough money to pay a company full-time to take care of the building and relations to the renters. They merely earned normal amounts instead of seeking a 1000% return on their investment like the guy from Bavaria. There are greedy and fair house owners, it's as simple as that.
And rents rising as a city becomes a more desirable place to live just makes perfect sense. If you are convinced that this will happen in your city maybe now would be a great time to buy a place?
This was artificial though, as landlords were waiting to know the outcome of this ruling. It's not like the apartments just vanished from existence.
The very opposite. The market optimizes for maximum profitability, not for maximum savings for renters or best quality of life.
There's a reason why governments have been building cheap housing across the last 100 years in most developed countries.
That said, I'm not opposed to the government building cheap housing. I think that's actually the best solution to an undersupply of housing.
You are simply rehashing the idea that free market is holy and magic. Instead, housing is inelastic. Also, apartments are non-fungible goods.
Furthermore, they have a ton of externalities. (e.g. access to transportation, shops, workplaces, schools)
All of this breaks every assumption around free market theory. Unsurprisingly, governments intervene heavily in the housing market almost in every developed country. The only exceptions lead to a combination of slumslords exploiting the poorest people and gated communities for the wealthy.
Housing is not inelastic at all. Economists have studied the effects of laws reducing land-use rights, and have found they impose massive social costs, in the form of less housing construction, that leads to less affordable housing.
You mean that decreasing housing supply correlates with increasing price?
Because that's exactly what inelastic demand is: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/inelastic.asp
Did you miss the part were they explained they can't do it because they only have a temporary assignment? This sounds a lot like "just be rich".
The reality is that a lot of people simply cannot afford to just "buy a place". According to some statistics [0], 40% of Americans (i.e. a "rich" country), are just one missed paycheck (or unexpected expenditure) away from homelessness. If you belong to the 60% that aren't and never experienced the situation, I understand how foreign the concept might seem to you.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/40-of-americans-one-step-from-p...
Not everyone can just buy a place, if rents keep increasing only rich people will be able to afford living in the city, you need a lot of non-rich people to actually run the city though: cashiers, nurses, teachers, firefighters etc. It's not that easy.
The market forces you refer to are fictitious. What happens in reality is that the middle class is dwindling, there is an ever increasing divide between land and house owners and mere renters, and at some point in the more distant future the whole system will break down.
This is not true. The cap didn't apply to new flats. Which means that nobody wanted to invest and build new housing, but instead created artificial scarcity, there are a lot of empty buildings now because very few people can afford some of the abhorrent prices.
So yeah supply and demand totally worked. /s
The same is happening in my city (Baltics) too. We bought a new apartment 5 years ago in the city centre, at the time we paid €2250/m2 which was quite a lot. Now I'm seeing the standard price for new apartments being double that. The typical salary here is around €1000/mo[1], so these apartments are completely unaffordable to most people.
We were actually looking to upgrade (as we have a 1br apartment and now a kid), but we wouldn't be able to afford to buy a bigger apartment. Instead we bought land and are building a house on the outskirts of the city. We got lucky there too, as we completed the purchase right before COVID and apparently land prices have gone up a lot now.
You can still find barely affordable (usually older) apartments further out of the city, but if you want to live anywhere close to the centre you need to be earning a salary a good few multiples higher than the average.
[1] Thats for the country as a whole, but salaries vary a lot in different regions, so maybe for where I am it's higher.
Then there is a massive indiscriminate sellout of property to very rich foreigners. In some top locations you hear more Russian than German in the streets.
Otherwise, in the lower segments there is enormous pressure from refugees, who get government aid while low income Germans do not.
The people who decide everything (Red/Green party) most have cheap apartments that they got 20 years ago. They don't suffer from their own policies.
The part about hearing more Russian that German doesn't ring true to me, and reeks of xenophobia. Doubly so for the non sequitur quip about refugees.
34 hectars (>90 acres) of waste land in a prime location can't be bulldozed to build 2000 new apartments because a rare species of toad was found to be living there, which can't be relocated because no state agency is responsible. The court case has been running for over 10 years!!!
Today I'm leaning more towards - "so what?".
As long as there's obviously enough space to waste on detached houses and land speculation in the middle of the city, it can't be all that bad.
If it was really such a big deal, "someone" would've paid "somebody" already to relocate the animals "after business hours", if you catch my drift. There's more going on behind the scenes for sure that we just don't know about.
Doesn't work, the next thing that will happen is the tree-huggers (B.U.N.D. and others) will get public money to re-establish the population and impose stricter protection measures. In Germany, the environment gets far far better protection than the people.
So how come Glyphosat wasn't banned immediately then? How come nitrate in drinking water goes up [0] and treatment becomes ever more expensive while at the same time industrial livestock farming still gets heavily subsidised?
German politics still bends a knee to industrial farming, chemical industry, and heavy industry more than the environment, don't fool yourself.
There's a reason the insect population has decreased by over 70% in the last 3 decades [1]. All because the environment is top priority, I presume.
The reality is that still no-one cares and the few things that are being done (tunnels and bridges for wildlife to cross roads, relocation programs for endangered species, etc.) are blown out of proportion by critics while the big picture looks bleaker than ever.
FYI there's ain't going to be many trees around for the "tree huggers" to hug in a few years if things continue to go the way they do [2]. But yeah, it's all to easy with the us-vs.-them instead of tackling actual roots of the problems...
[0] www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/wasser/grundwasser/nutzung-belastungen/faqs-zu-nitrat-im-grund-trinkwasser
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/19/europe/insect-decline-ger...
[2] https://www.nationalgeographic.de/umwelt/2021/02/deutscher-w...
Which is it?
It could be argued that they are - both indirectly (by electing the representatives that do make the decisions) and directly (by lack of [legal!] activism for their cause).
It's a case of pointing fingers instead of lifting a finger.
edit: what I mean by that is votes and protests do matter as does providing reasonable alternatives. I see that happen way too little in Germany. Try something in France and they set half of Paris on fire each time; not that I think that's better, but at least it shows that people actually care.
Ultimately the owner/investor either has to find a way to move the toads or apply for an exception. Without an application, the state government can’t act.
Shorter press release (German, too): https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemit...
It's a classical application of the "federal law breaks state law" rule, which I think exists in the united states as well.
The phrase "Bundesrecht bricht Landesrecht" is even part of the German constitution, as Article 31.
There are various categories where the states or federal have the power to enact laws. In this case, it is part of the competing law section: As long as the federal government has not provided a conclusive law on the topic, the states may make their own laws. For renting there is conclusive law, so states are not allowed to make new laws regarding the topic.
1. Build more housing on land that is already owned by Berlin State
2. Increase the amount of housing support available to low income families
3. Prevent the migration of social housing units to the private market by extending existing contracts.
4. Close loopholes in the Mietpreisbremse that allowed landlords to dramatically raise the rent after renovations.
5. Block NIMBY movements from preventing the construction of housing projects
6. Fund the court system so cases can be resolved in less than a decade.
7. Increase the minimum number of social housing units in new developments to 50%
...
Taxing unoccupied properties could help to ensure existing properties were actually used and not just held empty by speculators.
But yeah, the main solution is building stuff - I think we need to build residential skyscrapers in the West like they have in Eastern cities, otherwise the urban population densities we are arriving to are unaffordable for most citizens.
This won't work, as investors can hire people to live in the property and it will make it more expensive as a result, as someone will have to pay for that extra admin.
Unfortunately, many rent contracts had a "shadow rent" clause - a higher rent they'd have to pay retroactively if the Mietpreisbremse was repealed. A lot of people are about to get a really big invoice they have to pay within 2 weeks.
Fortunately, the Mietpreisbremse is retroactive back to April 2020, so you can start the process now and get a refund later.
Your action plan should be the following:
1. Use a Mietpreisbremse calculator to check how much you are paying
2. Contact your landlord, either alone or with the help of a tenants' union (Mieterverein)
3. If that fails, use a lawyer, or a service like Wenigermiete. If it get this far, the resolution will generally take around a year. This is the average resolution time.
I have worked directly with Wenigermiete. They explained the situation to me just last week, but they expected the court to resolve the case in July, perhaps even later.
Also, for many people in Germany buying e.g. a single apartment is an investment for their later retirement. It's not all big and evil real estate companies.
Something tells me governments are also interested in real estate prices going up.
That being said, I'd say the situation sucks especially for older folks not owning their apartments. The generally higher educated post 1980 generation has it comparatively good.
I just take issue with such general blatant statements, things are never that simple.
Housing situation in London is so fucked
Housing situation in Spain is so fucked
Housing situation in Canada is so fucked
....
I'm not an expert, but I see a pattern there...
Housing needs to not be an investment.
But Dubai is not _entirely_ that repressed (believe it or not, you may date someone. (but technically, no sex outside marriage - didn't know anyone caught on that one though)). There were many caveats and "watch outs" for sure - the _general_ rule was "don't be a stupid drunk", "don't publicly insult anyone", "no overt PDA in public" and you were fine. Obviously that's not to everyone's taste and wasn't always uniformly applied.
I made some great trips from Dubai - in Berlin now, every trip is a choice between crappy layovers or expensive airlines. There have been a few surprising exceptions (finnair being one)
New Zealand banned foreigners from buying property[2].
Among Brits, there's a (small) trend of retirees going off and buying a French Chateau and doing it up, because the cost of doing so will be the same or cheaper than buying a very modest place in many urban areas in the UK. This is spurred on by a popular TV show[3]
I'm not sure what the answer is. More construction, rent controls and banning foreigners from owning property, none of it seems to really fix the problem. Construction is often too slow, rent controls can put in place conditions for landlords neglecting properties, and banning foreigners will bring other problems too.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/britishproblems/comments/lvx0xg/pro...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/16/new-zealand-bans-most-foreig...
So demand for big-city-housing is rising permanently. This wasn't as much of a problem in the last decades. But then, central banks flooded the market with cheap money, making most "safe" investments unviable. Therefore the only "safe" investment left is real-estate which also drives up prices in addition to the increase in demand.
And here we are.
How do we fix it? Get central banks to stop printing cheap money. No idea how that will work out, because it also has other consequences beside the housing market. And stop urbanisation, make the countryside more viable for industry, commerce, office space. Improve transport around the countryside and suburbs. Curb speculation by promoting home-ownership (for the home you live in, not the 20 you rent out) through tax incentives and other measures (currently, in Germany, you pay lower taxes when renting out a property than when living in the same property, because when renting it out the mortgage payments are "business expenses").
Which - spoiler ahead - they won't. Cities will within a decade or two have lost their luminosity, with the giant shift towards remote work that is about to take place, in parallel with the wiping out of brick-and-mortar businesses. Prices will reflect this, sooner or later.
That's the question as those in power wouldn't want to suffer the consequences.
Extremely profitable on the other hand is much more attractive to investors than economically viable. It promises short term ROI with great revenue and very low risk in overheated markets.
There's a balance to be struck here and thinking in extremes just isn't helpful.
And yes, I do consider buying up land and just letting it sit there until housing crisis becomes severe enough that developing luxury housing becomes profitable to be gaming the system.
It's funny how quick investors are to complain about something not being economically viable and praising the free market and its power to innovate, while at the same the cost of developing houses goes up and up and up.
Where's the innovation there? How come a portable supercomputer can be bought brand new for the equivalent of a day's worth of work today, while at the same time fewer and fewer people can afford to own a home?
Why hasn't the increasing demand for affordable housing spurred innovation in that sector and why is nobody even asking that question?
This makes me wonder: is inflation calculated based on averages or based on medians?
Since I have to pay back the cummulative savings to my landlord in case the law is overturned(which happened today), I saved 100€ extra each month.
It's likely that I'll now have to increase my rent payment by 100€ and pay back roughly 1000€ to my landlord.
I'm happy I prepared for this situation. It's OK for me. However, I'm worried about friends that may haven't prepared...
>It's OK for me. However, I know others that will likely lose their flat now.
They won't just lose their flat. If they can't backpay the rent (thousands in some cases) their Schufa will be ruined which will make it even harder if at all possible to get a new place.
Damn, I didn't consider this but it's true. Usually, landlords also want a Mietschuldenbescheinigung to check if you have rent debt with previous landlords.
What upsets me about the situation is that I feel like some people are experimenting with my property/contract/living condition. I'd prefer if they could just leave me alone. It makes me feel uncomfortable and unsafe.
Unfortunately, this takes time, and people will be asked to give the money back NOW.
Last time I intensively job searched in Berlin there was a clear salary ceiling at 70-75k EUR annually for software roles.
Also sites like glassdoor report 70k for the average Berlin Amazon Software Engineer Salary.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Amazon-Software-Development...
https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Berlin-Ger...
A few years later, the neighborhood cafe is just full of tech workers coding the frontend framework for the next food delivery app and you wonder where the soul went.
That's somewhat inaccurate, because "infringing" doesn't come into play.
The German Constitution clearly delineates things that the federal government may regulate, things that the state governments may regulate, and things that both may regulate.
In the latter case, the state governments may only regulate when the federal government hasn't done so.
Here the federal government did, by way of amending the civil code, so Berlin isn't allowed to.
The court did not rule on the material issue whether such a rent cap would be constitutional, if enacted in a procedurally proper way.
This means that the rents do actually reflect the real market.
And there is simply no right for a cheap apartment in the center of Berlin.
Obviously when more people want to rent than there are properties available rents go up.
This is why rent caps do not solve problems. They ignore and do not address the cause of high rents and they may make things worse by reducing supply and making tenants stay put.
And as you say not everyone can live in the most desirable areas, which will always be pricey.
but the reality is that the population is changing. I've only been here a few years but basically everybody who's been here longer says "it's not what it used to be" in that the vibe of the city has changed greatly with it's increasing attractiveness to foreign (tech?) workers.
The "original" inhabitants of the city are priced out in "favour" of expats. The "real market" itself is obviously both combined, but one segment can afford the higher prices, and there's an ever increasing number in that segment that is shifting it for everyone.
Obviously I see that I'm ironically part of the problem.
Meh. The people who say that have displaced the people who lived there before they moved to Berlin. And the people who lived there before they came also said that when they arrived. The people complaining about this the most aren't "original" inhabitants, they moved to Berlin 10-20 years ago because it was cheap, hip, and had less rules around things. They've changed Berlin. Now it's changing again. The circle of change, if you will. They've done it to others, now it's being done to them. Sucks every time, but claiming some sort of "the indigenous population gets removed" is false.
Lower Manhattan is a shining example of this. That area is built on the memory of artists who can no longer afford to live there. It’s a weird sort of fossilization and museumification.
Berlin's attraction in the last 70 years (from the Western perspective) has been that it's cheap, has kind of an frontier spirit, laws and rules are much less strict, and it's being well-funded as an enclave and a thorn in East-Germany's side (it's still losing money, and is a drag on the German economy; capitals in comparable Western countries are typically strong economic motors in their country [1]).
For many young men, Germany's draft (or the alternative civil service) could only be circumvented by moving to Berlin.
With the Reunification, Berlin was on track to become the capital once more. That meant: gigantic amounts of money, jobs and opportunities, and that in return made Berlin extremely attractive. Before that happened, Berlin was actually shrinking.
With the government moved many large corporations in Germany, and brought even more money and jobs. They made Berlin attractive. It wasn't Berlin's night life and cultural scene, those are a consequence of the attractiveness and funding, not the other way round. So it's really not that those who built it are being forced out. It's that those who were attracted to it have to share with other people who want to also live there. Sucks for them, I agree, but there's nothing unfair about it. It will also happen to those moving there today, and they'll complain as well.
[1] https://qz.com/753244/berlin-is-the-only-capital-city-in-eur...
Many other things are cheaper as well. Power is -10% in Berlin for example, compared to Hamburg. Local taxes are also lower, e.g. business tax rate in Berlin is 410% while it's 470% in Hamburg.
I get the impression that it's mostly the citizens of Berlin not knowing what things cost elsewhere.
Similar offers in e.g. Hamburg are 20, peaking to 30€/sqm. And it's been this way for a decade or two. Having lived in Hamburg, whenever I was with Berlin friends and heard their complaints, they usually turned into being happy for the good fortune not to have to pay those prices when they compared it not with Berlin 10 years ago, but with Hamburg today.
Price controls lead to shortages at the price point that the government dictates is the ceiling. It's a silly work around based on the fallacy that the problem with high prices is people charging too much, as opposed to the supply of the good in question being insufficient relative to the demand for it. The high price is actually the most effective solution to the problem of scarcity, and price controls prevent that solution from working.
When the referendum idea first came up a common argument against it was "there are milder measures against high rents". Now that's what was tried and failed.
I'm almost certain the referendum will get approved. There will likely be legal actions against it as well, but expropriation in the public interest is part of the German constitution, so legally it seems on good grounds.
I know quite a few friends who won't be able to pay.
In many cases this essentially doubles their rent.
On the bright side, you might still be eligible for the slower, less universal Mietpreisbremse. There's a lawtech startup that helps people get that reduction. They keep 5x the monthly reduction as a fee.
For those downvoting - look at literally any city that has implemented rent caps and tell me that they are a good idea. Where the standard became asking for 6 months upfront and signing a 3-year-no-exit-clause contracts because the demand is so huge it allows landlords to do that. Is that really a net benefit to people renting?
On the other hand, if rent controls are used as part of a wider strategy to gradually convert private rental stock over to social housing - that is, as a stick to encourage private landlords to sell up to the public sector - along with other measures including more state investment in building such housing, large fines for private landlords leaving their rental properties unoccupied, and so on, then this can be a long-term positive on the overall housing situation.
The end goal should be to remove this wholly unnecessary parasitic landlord class from the housing provision entirely, rather than tinkering around the edges of the problem, as this Berlin measure was doing.
What about the thriving culture which exists in Berlin, and which is supported by low rent prices.
* If you want cheaper rents: build more housing.
* If you want more housing, zone more housing.
* If you want to keep "local vibrant culture" alive. Give direct cash transfers from the government. Don't try to sneak subsidy trough private housing.
* If local government needs more money, tax property.
Urban economics has real trickle down effect: It does not matter if you build apartments for the rich or poor, everyone gets affordable housing if you just keep building enough apartments.
There was money to be made in housing 10 years ago when rents were half of what they are today. What changed is the demand / supply ratio. I guess the laissez-faire logic would be that higher demand drives up the prices so much that investors can't help themselves but build more. Do we have empirical data from other cities that show that relationship? I.e. as rental prices rise so does private investment in housing? And also the opposite, how much do rent caps like the one in Berlin influence housing investment longer-term? I'd argue our Berlinian experiment did not get a real chance to run, given the expectations around it were that the courts might over-turn it, as they did.
From my understanding and from I read over on freakonomics a lot of the assumptions about rent caps come from single neighborhoods in NY which I'd argue does not generalize.
I.e: "it's x euros _now_, but if/when it's repealed, you'll pay y euros, and the difference between the two"
The court overturning the cap means that renters will have to pay whatever they agreed to in their rental contracts, even if much higher than what they had to pay when the cap was active. Even worse, the landlords may request you pay back the difference you "saved" between the time the cap came into effect and now.
If you entered a new renting agreement post cap, the landlord might have kind of written the cap into the terms as "shadow rents" [other commenters mentioned]. Read your contract very carefully. But even if you're good there, the landlord may try to have the contract invalidated by a court (probably not going to happen), or legally cancel the contract (after the normal notification period required by law) and offer to make a new contract with higher prices.
I am very fortunate to have a rent contract that included lower rent frozen for 5 years, but without any conditions. In my case, I get to keep my cheap rent.
If your rent is about to go up, don't forget that the Mietpreisbremse is still in effect. You can still get your rent reduced this way, either alone, with a tenants' union, with Wenigermiete, or with a regular lawyer.
Since it's the government that gives it to private contractors , the city builds more social housing than giving land for "normal" housing.
Creating a continuous loop of more expensive prices for normal houses and more social houses ( government sponsored) being build.
It's ridiculous.
- Mark Twain
If you have a finite supply of something, like housing, it seems pretty obvious that the reason the price is going up is because the supply is unable to catch up with demand. Not only do more people want to live in the city, they're also willing and able to pay more. The mechanics are obviously more complex because this is all affected by things like interest rates, influx of foreign capital and whatever, but I think the basic assumption still stands: there's not enough housing.
So if we approach this problem from a "neo liberal" and a "socialist" point of view, I think there are two ways you'd normally go about it, none of which include capping rents because that achieves nothing except make people hoard the commodity that was previously rare, and is now even more rare because of market manipulation:
Neo-lib: The market will take care of it, and poor people being pushed out is not a problem, they can live somewhere cheaper and new housing will be built because builders want to make money.
Socialist: Poor people have a right to live here too, but there is a lack of affordable housing. We should tax the rich to enable a wider array of housing financed by the state.
Regardless of which extreme (or somewhere in between you are) I still can't understand what rent caps would achieve apart from being a destructive policy for almost everyone except the ones who already are lucky enough to have a contract. You don't get more houses to live in by making the houses a more valuable commodity through market manipulation.
and AFAIK MietenWoG didn't fund or support the new housing developments.
>The Effects of Rent Control
>Economists are virtually unanimous in concluding that rent controls are destructive. In a 1990 poll of 464 economists published in the May 1992 issue of the American Economic Review, 93 percent of U.S. respondents agreed, either completely or with provisos, that “a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.”1 Similarly, another study reported that more than 95 percent of the Canadian economists polled agreed with the statement.2 The agreement cuts across the usual political spectrum, ranging all the way from Nobel Prize winners milton friedman and friedrich hayek on the “right” to their fellow Nobel laureate gunnar myrdal, an important architect of the Swedish Labor Party’s welfare state, on the “left.” Myrdal stated, “Rent control has in certain Western countries constituted, maybe, the worst example of poor planning by governments lacking courage and vision.”3 His fellow Swedish economist (and socialist) Assar Lindbeck asserted, “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”4 That cities like New York have clearly not been destroyed by rent control is due to the fact that rent control has been relaxed over the years.5 Rent stabilization, for example, which took the place of rent control for newer buildings, is less restrictive than the old rent control. Also, the decades-long boom in the New York City housing market is not in rent-controlled or rent-stabilized units, but in condominiums and cooperative housing. But these two forms of housing ownership grew important as a way of getting around rent control.
Now, of course, you might say the thing that is preventing the market from rectifying the situation is that there simply isn't enough space. And that is partially true, there are real physical limits here. But it's not like Berlin is a super high density city, so I find it hard to believe that we're anywhere close to reaching those limits.
Ya know, the same place that YC is located & many of the current unicorns.
It's interesting to understand how other cities and countries are dealing with similar issues to what we face.
Build more.
It is just another form of xenophobia.
The fact of the matter is, first movers have all sorts of unfair advantages over latecomers, many of them from luck, or from circumstances of birth - and I doubt you are seeking to overturn all of them.
Young people and foreigners have to pay large taxes and rents, to subside older people.
Foreigners can naturalize (and most of them have the freedom to weigh the costs of paying into systems they don't benefit from, and consider whether or not immigrating is worth it.)
Why do you think that for a moment you have a right to 'go over there' and posses land currently owned by people over there?
I am just taking that axiom to it's logical, but absurd conclusion, to argue that the axiom itself is absurd.
Also, the Berlin government was retroactively changing (rent) contracts which normally invalidates any contract as this will always put one contract party at an unprecedented disadvantage.
Wrong, it was declared unconstitutional because only the federal government is allowed to pass such a measure. Our federal construction minister "Voll-Horst" Seehofer is free to regulate rents any time he wants, but unfortunately all he has been doing for the last four years is to deny systemic issues in police all day.
> New people will not find any rentable properties, and will have to stay in hotels paying 10x more.
So what? Without rent control poor people are forced out of the homes they grew up in, this is certainly worse than tech hipsters having to pay for hotels.
That's wrong. States may do it, but only if the federal level hasn't acted in that field (here: social protection for renters)
And this policy is pushing more flats from normal market into airbnbs.
https://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/wohnen/zweckentfremdu...
This law was probably meant against big housing corporations like Deutsches Wohnen, which bought a lot of the housing stock during previous privatizations, and so have some power on the housing market.
IMHO Berlin (just like Prague) needs to lower bureaucratic hurdles on new construction, but maybe the locals do not want that. There was a chance to turn the former Tempelhof airfield into a new neighbourhood, but a local ballot turned it down.
When I was in Berlin, it seemed to me people in Berlin wanted the impossible combination:
- Continue to afford to live in the city (ergo more housing in the city)
- No sprawl to keep the car traffic down (ergo still more pressure on housing in the city)
- Keeping the green spaces (so no denser housing)
- No higher buildings, or God forbid, high-risers (so no denser housing)
Or better said, you would find people, who are dead set against high-risers and would tolerate building on Tempelhofer Feld, or who are dead set against using spaces within the city (Tempelholfer Feld), but would probably tolerate higher buildings.
It seems now, higher buildings have won: https://www.berlin.de/rbmskzl/aktuelles/pressemitteilungen/2...