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Comment by ArmandGrillet | Hacker News Reader

Instead of buying what they sold two decades ago for practically nothing, they should have built more supply.

Open Google Maps and check Kreuzberg, a district of Berlin. South of it is Tempelhofer Feld, 355 hectares (a third of Kreuzberg), a discontinued airport next to the city only used for people to bike and do barbecues. It's an old airport so it looks bland and there are smaller parks right next to it offering the space to do barbecues and play with your dog. It's been a decade that this airport is not being used yet it's still in that state.

Paris' housing crisis is mostly due to the road surrounding it (le Périph') but Berlin doest not have that yet housing is getting more expensive extremely fast, faster than in Paris actually.

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Tempelhofer Feld is a green space where people can meet, exercise, and enjoy their free time without being expected to spend money. Berlin's green spaces is one of its strongest assets. Don't let that city turn into a concrete hell.

I'd much rather see Kleingarten disappear than public spaces.

They wanted to build just on a small stripe on the side of it, it is not as if they would have to fill the whole place with houses. But even that was shot down via "Volksentscheid".

I think the referendum against building in Tempelhof saw right through the project and understood what its end goal would have been: it would have created apartments that those being priced out of Berlin wouldn't have been able to afford. The losses would be socialized (namely, the park) while the benefits would go to the wealthy.

For those unfamiliar with the situation I found this article [1] which, biased as it is, I think accurately reflects the opinion of the common Berliner at the time. If the plan had proposed 100% social housing, I bet the story would have been different.

[1] https://www.exberliner.com/features/opinion/everyone-is-lyin...

Honestly one of the things I like most about living in Berlin is the fact that local politics manage to represent the public good effectively. I'm a well paid tech worker, so I would be fine either way, but I'm happy that my neighbours who are hairdressers or hand workers can also enjoy a good quality of life here. I would hate for it to become a playground for the rich like London or Manhattan.

But that is nonsense - apartments are apartments, even if wealthy move into those apartments, it would free the apartments they previously lived in. Also, it would be money for the city.

Also it is not just social cases who have problems with high rents in Berlin. You suggest the majority of people in Berlin want only more social housing, implying most of them are social cases themselves?

I think most Berliners would read your comments as "it is a good thing that we give a part of our public park to the rich because they'll give us their less-desirable apartments in return. Like trickle-down economics, but for apartments". And if the current situation is any indication, those rich people will keep their old apartment and rent it, or sell it to foreign investors. Either way, say goodbye to ever owning a place in the city where you grew up.

As for the second part: Berliners feel that the city should belong to those that lived there when no one wanted to, and recognize that those people are probably not rich. Kicking the hairdresser that lived there for 40 years to make room for the tech bro is not generally seen as a positive development. Social housing would ensure that the city remains in the hands of its citizens.

So most Berliners know nothing about economics?

The park would not be "given to the rich", presumably the parts open for building would have been sold to "the rich", with the money benefitting every Berlin citizen (ideally - but we know our government her is composed of very good people, right?).

Also what does it matter if the "rich" rent out their old apartment? What is needed is supply of apartments. Per supply and demand, more supply means lower prices.

Do the people expect to live in luxury apartments for little money?

And it is very touching that nobody wanted to live here 40 years ago and the people held on. But then they could have bought their living places for very little money. Also the whole place was subsidized by the USA as a stand against the Soviet Union. The people staying benefitted a lot.

There already is a construct for the place where you live belonging to you: it is called "buying your own place to live". If you choose to rent instead, you signal that you don't necessarily want to stay forever.

How is that anything other than NIMBYISM?

There's plenty of development which could happen in Berlin without touching Tempelhof.

From my perspective, the worst use of land in berlin is the Schrebergarten[1]. These are little free standing "houses" with a garden which some families own and spend time in during the summer. I live close to a canal on the south-east side of Berlin, within the ring, and there are several patches of these within 10 minutes biking from my apartment. This is very well-located land, and from what I can tell it goes completely unused 6-9 months per year, and at best sporadically during the summer months.

I understand that this is very traditional in Germany, but the idea that some of the most desirable land in Berlin is being used for some families to use a handful of weekends per year is just crazy. At least Tempelhof is public and serving hundreds or thousands of people every day.

[1]: https://www.dw.com/en/a-brief-guide-to-german-garden-colonie...

I'd rather they build in my backyard than on Tempelhof. I live far from it, close to a lot more green space. We should keep Tempelhof because I consider access to such green spaces a necessity, even for city dwellers.

Tempelhofer Feld is for the most part an abandoned field, if half of it were used to build housing a problem would be solved and no damage would be done.

The issue there is the usual weird coalition between landlords that don’t want more residents (if they live there) or more competition (if they rent their flat) and the fringe of the green/left that is worried about urbanisation, gentrification economic activity.

It's not abandoned. I was there earlier and it was full of people having fun and exercising.

People need the space. It's not fair to force a whole city to live their lives entirely in 25m2 apartments, if more apartments are built, there's a chance more will go to speculators. I, and a large portion of Berlin, would rather force speculators out.

It doesn’t have to be speculators, whatever that’s supposed to mean, it could be social housing built and managed by the city council.

And, of course, “half of it” was a hyperbole.

My issue with it is that it won't help with the problem at hand. Sure, it might help tip the scale of rent prices, but lack of units or even rents are not the issue in Berlin. Sure, it's way more expensive than before, but rents are still payable.

The issue is that it's very difficult for individuals to acquire housing units. My apartment costs about 1500x its monthly rent to acquire (€400 vs €600k min). Which means it's now a lousy investment for people wanting to live in it (since they won't be saving any money unless live to be 150 years old), and for people wanting to buy a small number of properties to rent (same deal).

Since real estate is traditionally kind of a "future insurance", for old people not to have to rely on pension to live, it also makes the future a lot grim and uncertain for people who'll have to rely on public pension for a place to live.

Getting more units in the market will only make things worse for those people: rent prices will make it impossible for them to own, and won't make sense for them to own to rent.

Individuals not being able to acquire apartments also has the side effects of things like crazy rental terms (not difficult to see the best apartments with limit of 6 months rental) or even empty units because they're used for commercial renting only. Across the street from me there's a 50-unit condo that's fully empty. I know that because I used to live there and for a while I was the only tenant. It costs about €2000 a month vs my €400.

I don't know what's the endgame of speculators. Maybe they're waiting to own everything so that they can jack up the prices? Maybe they're merely taking opportunity of the low interest rates to pay for those things in 100 years? Is that investment companies buying it to force people into private pension?

I don't know. I just know that the issue is a lot darker and I don't see "the market" solving it by itself without creating even more problems. I know this is a very sensitive matter to some people but I just don't see "the market" doing anything positive if left by itself.

EDIT: As user probably_wrong put below, "the losses would be socialized (namely, the park) while the benefits would go to the wealthy."

Speculators generally want to constrain supply as much as possible. That's good for their investment.

They also have the power to acquire anything new showing up, which is exactly what happened in the last ten years. I can't explain their end game as it doesn't make sense to me, but what Berlin needs is not more units, but rather more units that are affordable to non-speculators.

As user probably_wrong put it below, "the losses would be socialized (namely, the park) while the benefits would go to the wealthy."

Speculators as an aggregate voting block want less supply. This might seem counter intuitive since it is simultaneously true that a new development is an investment opportunity.

What we need is more units. The affordability to non-speculators follows from that, which is just supply and demand playing out. If you double supply via high rise apartments, the value is guaranteed to drop significantly. Increasing supply by removing regulations around apartment construction also reduces the incentive to buy to invest. Who would want to invest when the supply is liable to increase?

That's a fine opinion, but I and others in Berlin would also prefer not having to have high rises just because there are speculators. The issue in Berlin is not really lack of units, this is not San Francisco. The problem here is purely the rampant speculation.

I don't follow the same economical dogmas you do. In my opinion it's not about supply or demand, but purely about a certain group of investors fucking up everyone lives. I'd prefer to attack this problem head-on rather than having bandaids that involve destroying Tempelhofer Feld or removing the Kleingarten, like other people suggested.

And this is why house prices are high in every urban centre. We see this same unexpected alliance everywhere between the environmental left that wants to preserve as much greenery as possibly via zoning rules, and the crony right who just wants to cynically increase property prices. The end result is a lot of human suffering and nothing to show for it.

Property investors really aren't the root problem because they lease the property back onto the market and that supply doesn't vanish.

This is not dogma. Quite the opposite. The impact of supply caps due to zoning has been studied to death by economists.

The "preserve greenery" perspective is just a highly privileged one and a false choice/false dilemma to boot. You can build vertically without sacrificing greenery or destroying your parks and bushland. Why not just do that and solve the entire problem? Oh wait that is illegal...

Nobody said "property investors who lease back" are a problem anywhere... The problem is merely a small group of entities with too much purchase power distorting the market and making the city worse for everyone. Maybe this is something that your favourite branch of economics likes to pretend doesn't exist, but, again, different people have different opinions.

> People need the space. It's not fair to force a whole city to live their lives entirely in 25m2 apartments

What? Berlin has lots of parks and public areas, much more than Munich and slightly more than Frankfurt or Dusseldorf.

You make it sound like Berlin is full of cramped buildings and someone is trying to take away the last open space. That's absolutely not true.

Suggestions on this thread were to use half of Tempelhofer Feld and all Kleingarten to counteract what are the effects of speculation.

All I am saying is that those areas are not "useless" by any means.

I'd rather attack speculation head-on that have band-aid solutions.

I also don't believe that removing those areas will make any difference regarding speculation. Again, as user probably_wrong put below, "the losses would be socialized (namely, the park) while the benefits would go to the wealthy."

Tempelhofer is an enormous asset of the city and turning half of it into apartments would be a disgrace.

If somebody reading this has never been to Tempelhof, I would recommend (please allow me) to think of it as a Park. It is a big area for leisure, with some portable stands for coffee, community gardens, small sport courts, bbq area and grass. And the old airport runways right in the middle of it to run, skate, ride the bike, etc.

On one side it also has the actual airport building. They have very interesting historical tours there.

You can see a couple of representative photos here.

https://www.npr.org/2018/08/11/634394533/the-site-of-the-ber...

No offense but that park looks like crap. Can't the city at least plant a few trees?

There are parks with trees all over the city. This is an open plain that's home to festivals, kite surfers, cyclists etc.

It’s not abandoned. It’s an incredibly heavily used park. People skate and kite board on the old runways. The are community gardens. Portions of the fields are breeding sides for locally threatened bird species. The list of things that happen there goes on and on.

Tempelhofer field is one of the jewels of the city.

For the most part abandoned? Have you ever been there? On a sunny day this place is packed to the brim.

While I’m sure there’s something better that can be done with the Tempelhofer Feld site than currently (even trees in the grass between the runways would make it better, IMO), the large number of green spaces — including Tempelhofer Feld itself — is one of the things I like about Berlin.

Separately, given the large mostly empty expanse of Brandenburg surrounding Berlin (and the really low house prices I see there on immobilienscout24), I think improved transport connections are more critical: improving connections to the surrounding area makes the surrounding area more available for commuting. For example, there are routes from Eberswalde or Frankfurt an der Oder to parts of Berlin which are faster than reaching those parts of Berlin from elsewhere in Berlin, so improving existing routes would enable lots of the existing room outside the current city to become more city.

I have no idea what the political issues with this might be, not just with “would people like this?” (I can’t even determine that effectively in my original country) but also with “can this even be done, given Berlin is a different state?” (I have yet to learn anything beyond the most superficial about German politics).

You could just as well argue NYC should start to use Central Park for new housing...

Manhattan's population density is already 17 times higher than the one in Berlin so no, I wouldn't suggest that.

Berlin is also super unevenly populated and includes several forests. If you compare the density of the actually populated areas, like Mitte, you are still under Manhattan, sure, but only by a factor of 4 - which is extra impressive given the near complete lack of tall buildings in Berlin. Neukölln (which borders the area in question) is even more dense - about half as much as Manhattan [1].

Its unfair to compare Manhattan which apart from Central Park is nearly 100% urban to Berlin, which is significantly larger and includes many areas with widely distanced houses and forests.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitte_(locality) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuk%C3%B6lln_(locality)

That doesn't make sense. If it's 17x less dense in Berlin, then it sounds like there's still a lot of room to build that doesn't involve taking away the parks.

A lot of the available space is woodland and on the outskirts of Berlin. People want to live in the center, not further out (they already can do that, once you cross over into Brandenburg in the north, the competition for flats is much lower), that's why such a giant piece of land in a sought-after location would be a great idea for development, while some even larger piece of land out in the middle of nowhere where nobody wants to live isn't.

You could

Berlin is not a very dense city, maybe because of the backyards (almost every block has a backyard for trash containers and bikes, maybe an elevator) in most blocks and the green spaces.

In the last years I have seen also a lot of floors being added (to the last floor) of buildings that allow it, to gain one more floor.

Your comment about periphery made me think of something. Berlin is surrounded by Brandenburg, which is even less dense. So Berlin has space to expand, unlike other cities (like Barcelona, much denser).

In my mind the solution would be to build affordable housing in Brandenburg (there is space there) and on the edge of Berlin.

Berlin does not have space to expand, precisely because it's surrounded by Brandenburg. It has been a problem for years.

Berlin and Brandenburg were not always separate and they might not stay separate (https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin-Brandenburg), but that is semantics.

Brandenburg is a very low density area (85/sqm) surrounding Berlin (4227/sqm). It might be a problem politically but the space is there.

Other cities are surrounded by areas of similar density, and cannot expand. Brandenburg has a lot of space (enough for a gigafactory) :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Berlin

> Instead of buying what they sold two decades ago for practically nothing, they should have built more supply.

"Instead"? It's not an either-or choice.

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