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Comment by tonyjstark | Hacker News Reader

Same here. The city itself should build as many cheap rental apartments as possible, also in more higher-priced areas to keep the pricing there in check. Building more housing is the only way out of this soaring pricing.

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.

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So here in the UK, our councils used to build social housing. 300,000 per year. And then Thatcher made it illegal and said privately owned housing associations would fill the gap.

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.

I'd take them building more expensive housing (as long as it's not used purely as an empty investment vehicle as in London) over barely building anything at all. I know people who would've paid a bit more for a nicer place but their options were too limited, so I'd expect some trickle-up/down effect at least.

There is a point when you run out of people who are willing to spend millions on the empty investment vehicles so I'm hoping even those properties will help with supply when the tide eventually do go out. Unfortunately it could take a very long time before this happens.

Isn't it widely used for money laundering and wealth sheltering? Don't think there's an end to that money.

An endless supply of money sounds like a great source of tax revenue. It's rather difficult to evade a property tax.

There are millions of chinese and other people who want safe investment vehicles. If the government does nothing, land and housing in a big capital can easily be usurped by investors who then take massive tax breaks.

Investors will profit most by renting out their property. Allowing the profit motive to work to increase supply is an effective way to reduce the price consumers pay in every industry, including the rental market.

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.

This "trickle-up/down effect" is the exact excuse they've been using to justify it.

As far as I know, it's a widely discredited theory, never based on any actual studies.

I know of some related things going on here:

* 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.

Berlin and other cities sold off their public housing to pay for their budget deficits. Generally, there are housing cooperatives in Germany, and they have significant amounts of apartments. Not close to being as big as the largest private companies, but 3000-5000 apartments aren't rare. You become a member and buy shares, and their purpose is to provide housing to their members, they're very affordable and all around pretty great (not as profit-oriented as the private companies, not as bureaucratic as the public stuff).

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.

The dichotomy between "cheap housing" and luxury housing needs to end.

(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.

At least in Warsaw, there are various kinds of developers. Some specialize in luxury housing, while others cater to the mass market, with tall building of small-ish flats, hundreds of units per flat, built on cheaper land further away from the city center. There were entire districts built by such developers in the past 20+ years. Perhaps the key to this is relatively low regulation in Poland, which sadly results in somewhat chaotic urbanism and a lot of missed opportunities for building a city that's nice to live in, but also allows for shit to get done.

Thatcher has been out of office since decades. If this was important to the people they would vote for people who promise to bring it back.

Or politicians are corrupt and Thatcher is a good excuse. Take your pick.

That's not how politics works in the UK. We have first past-the-post, so individual policies mean very little.

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.

Same thing happens here in Austin, if you don't force them to also build affordable housing as part of their deal with the city virtually 0 will be build because the profit margins are so much more with luxury apartments that are 500 sq ft and you can fit a ton of them in a high rise.

> A second step would be, to make sure that rental housing is used for that instead of AirBNB or any other investment.

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.

I think that 90 day limit is great, it would help my city a lot because of all the speculative market buyers who buy and hold just as a store of wealth hoping to flip it for a profit after a few years

High mandated standards on Fire/Noise Protection, Insulation, accessibility on new buildings make it really hard to build "cheap" rental apartments. With the mandated standards in place there is little to no cost difference between high cost and low cost residential buildings.

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.

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