Anyone know any actual solutions? I feel landlords need to be removed as a class entirely. Residential property shouldn’t be able to be owned by anyone who does not reside in it (at least “some large X” percent of the year, perhaps).
If you flood the zone with supply, the power of landlords will diminish.
In the 90s, if you came to Berlin and wanted to rent and apartment, the landlord would hand you 3 keys with three addresses, and tell you to "have a look at them and choose one". The rent was minimal and the landlords had no power.
Your proposed solution of making renting an apartment illegal will create A LOT of friction when people want to move. It will make it impossible for people with bad credit to live in the city. It will expose a lot of people to a lot of interested rate risk. Not everybody wants to be a real estate investor.
It will also not solve the main suffering here, which is that a lot of people want to move into the city, but they cannot, because there isn't enough space.
That is the problem. Berlin and Munich, the cities in Germany with the most insane housing markets, have all space that could be used for housing in the borders already built, under construction or allocated for short-term begin of construction. Even if you'd make policies to "up-zone", it will need decades until housing supply grows because you need to tear down and rebuild all the houses - and that doesn't even include the carbon emissions and resource-waste impact such programs carry. And the suburbs can't really be expanded either, the trains are already filled to the brim with commuters.
We need to get rid of the demand, we need to force companies to not just go to Munich/Berlin/Hamburg/Stuttgart but also the other cities and areas of the country.
> have all space that could be used for housing in the borders already built, under construction or allocated for short-term begin of construction.
Let me introduce you to the original purpose of Berliner Kleingärten.
Plus there are tons of vacant lots, parking lots etc in Berlin.
I’ve lived in Schöneweide for many years and let me tell ya.
Tegel alone could host half a million people and we haven’t even touched the Tempelhofer Feld.
Berlin has no suburbs to speak of. I guess you have never been to any other city in the world if you think that the suburbs are full.
Guess what: you can run more trains, bigger trains, higher frequencies, and you can build new tracks and new tunnels.
Oh, and last: Before you “force companies to move to smaller cities” think about two things:
- Why do many companies prefer to move to big cities?
- Why do many people prefer to live in big cities?
Granted, I've never been to Paris myself, and never in the outskirts of London, but the stories from the Paris banlieues or the 2011 London riots tell enough of a story how fucked life there really is.
> Guess what: you can run more trains, bigger trains, higher frequencies, and you can build new tracks and new tunnels.
I've been born and am still living in Munich. Do tell, where the fuck can you run bigger or more trains here? The stations can't be extended in length, the Stammstrecke is already at a frequency limit that really can't be increased because the people have to get on and off and trains need time to accelerate and decelerate [0], and construction of new tunnels is expensive (as the U5 extension to Pasing is showing) or fraught with massive costs and overruns (see 2. Stammstrecke).
> Why do many companies prefer to move to big cities? Why do many people prefer to live in big cities?
Herd mentality and that there will be more people where they can source staff from.
The thing is, "rural flight" and the corresponding explosion in urban housing prices is a self-accelerating death spiral that cannot be stopped unless political effort is being taken: the less people work in rural areas, the more infrastructure has to close/consolidate to the point it becomes very unattractive, so less children will be there, and so employers will be leaving for urban areas, and so more people will flee, start from begin.
In urban areas, this leads to a lot of issues:
- dense buildings (i.e. skyscrapers) require huge amounts of resources and CO2 emissions to build - they must be made of really solid concrete simply to be able to stand, you can't use wood or other materials for fire safety reasons, fire safety becomes extremely complex and in the event they do burn (like in Grenfell Tower) you're looking at an immense death toll.
- there will have to be an enormous, multi-billion euros/dollars investment into public transit so that it's able to keep up with commuting - and the denser you build housing and employment facilities (offices and production), the denser and more expensive just that basic infrastructure will be. I haven't even included car traffic into planning because that's frankly impossible (and policies like in Singapore and other highly congested areas begin to reflect that reality).
- cities need "green space" like parks, large un-built areas or the Kleingärten you mentioned earlier: people need them for mental health reasons, the city itself needs it to not overheat [1], to draw in fresh air [2], and for stormwater retention [3]. Suuure, you can say fuck all of that, but you'll end up with depressive hellscapes and death tolls as a result. There's a reason why places like South Korea have pretty high suicide rates among developed, wealthy nations [4] - and housing is one of the biggest contributors [5].
- on top of the question of "how to get the people from home to work and back" comes the question "how to provide for these people": anything from water/sewage over electricity and internet to postal/parcel delivery will have to be at insane sizes; for grids this necessitates higher voltages/thicker pipes with corresponding increase in danger from leaks or backhoes
- no matter what you do, housing construction will never be able to catch up with demand, which leads to gentrification as low-income workers are "priced out" and have to endure a massively lower quality of life (long commute times, significantly higher proportion of rent to income, living in housing together with solely other poor people)
- actually owning real estate will become (or, let's be real, is) far out of reach for most people, which means they have to pay rent their entire lives, will never be able to build up wealth, and most importantly never be able to pass wealth down to their children
- both renters and buyers will be complaining about the high prices, with populists blaming immigrants or hillbillies for this issue
On the rural side, the feeling of being "left behind" and the resulting dereliction of everything necessary for life (infrastructure, schools, shopping, healthcare, ...) leads to frustration, that not rarely manifests itself into anti-urban and in the end anti-democratic attitudes.
Particularly the last four points are the ones with the most explosive political/unrest potential... hell just look at the US "flyover states", look at the elections in Hessen and Bavaria. It's no surprise that the far-right has gotten so strong over the last years, as the consequences of rural flight became undeniable.
Rural flight has to be stopped at all cost.
[0] https://www.abendzeitung-muenchen.de/muenchen/muenchen-u-bah...
[1] https://www.transforming-cities.de/baeume-verbessern-stadtkl...
[2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/giesing-neuperlach-lebe...
[3] https://www.ardalpha.de/wissen/umwelt/klima/schwammstadt-kli...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
[5] https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/11/05/south-korea-suicide-rat...
Per capita, big cities are much more energy efficient and resource-saving than small cities.
And as I come from a family of midwestern farmers, I'd say that your revolution fantasy is just that. They tend to embrace high technology pretty damned willingly. This is what is leading to the country side emptying out. We don't need 50% of the population to farm any longer. In another 40 years we may not need 60% of the population to sit around in offices typing out code. These are things both the rural and urban populations in nations need to work on finding solutions to rather than fighting each other.
Tokyo is a city that is both
* bigger than Munich and
* more affordable for low-income residents than Munich.
Oh, it is entirely possible to build a city larger than Munich, Berlin, Paris and whatnot. I never denied that.
The problem is all the side issues that come with density, most importantly suicide and other mental health and general wellbeing issue rates.
> Tokyo is a city that is both bigger than Munich and more affordable for low-income residents than Munich.
Tokyo has one of the most expensive rental markets in the world [1]. No idea about low income residents, having never been there, but I'd guess a massive amount of government subsidies.
Additionally, due to earthquake resilience Japanese buildings are usually torn down after 20-30 years [2]. That makes it "easier" to upzone - here in Europe this sort of policy would be completely unacceptable because we value the architectural history of our community and because of the effort and resource usage involved.
[1] https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/new-york-city-tokyo-l...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...
Density in itself doesn't drive suicide rates. There's a lot of factors that go into this, and it's reductive to blame this simply on density.
> Tokyo has one of the most expensive rental markets in the world [1]
You're linking to an article about luxury rentals and using that to say Tokyo has one of the most expensive rental markets, but that's misleading at best. Yes, you can pay a lot of money for the high end apartments here, but you can also find super cheap apartments in central tokyo, near the yamanote (central) line.
> No idea about low income residents, having never been there, but I'd guess a massive amount of government subsidies.
There's government housing, which is super popular, but it's not considerably cheaper than market-rate housing. The biggest difference is the lack of fees and deposits. Government housing is a drop in the bucket of overall housing though. Low-income people live in cheap apartments, or shared houses.
> Additionally, due to earthquake resilience Japanese buildings are usually torn down after 20-30 years [2].
Though houses were historically torn down after 20-30 years, that's becoming less frequent as construction quality has increased, and as the current earthquake standards are quite high. This is also not true for highrises and lowrise multi-housing complexes.
Zoning does play a large part in this, as Tokyo's zoning laws are considerably less strict, and don't allow NIMBYs to stop construction.
Just neglecting everything you said after this point because this is insanely ignorant of TCO.
The miles and miles of roads suburbs require not only require massive amounts of concrete to pour, the suburbs require continual sacrifice to the fuel gods to function from each and every one that lives there.
There's also some BS in here about suicide rates, which in the US have a reverse correlation to what you posted.
At the same time, Berlin’s Degrowth mentality has prevented sufficient investment into construction
If suddenly a city were somehow flooded with supply of homes, wouldn't more people decide it now makes sense to move to the city, and prices would rise back up?
Increased vehicle traffic is a bad thing. You want to induce demand for other types of transportation.
There is a finite amount of people willing to move to X city / a finite number of jobs for them to support themselves.
But I have to admit that adding another lane does allow more people to use the road. Even if everybody ends up stuck in traffic again, overall more people are able to get to work or wherever they want to go.
That being said, I still think that with correctly priced externalities, and when offered the choice, that most people would prefer to bike or take the train.
If your roads are jammed, some people who want to take trips on them will take other means or abandon the trip. If additional lanes are built, trip capacity increases, and more trips are taken. Sometimes the amount of supressed trips is such that traffic jams continue to the same extent as before... but that's unusual --- when Caltrans widened the 405 in west LA, morning and evening jam duration was significantly reduced; but population growth continued and trip demand growth continued, and the jam duration grew.
It's the same with housing. A lot of people would love to live in (city you like), but can't because it's too expensive or too hard to find a place. It would take a lot of construction to change that, but incremental construction is still brings supply closer to demand; even if the difference is hard to spot.
There's certainly places that have sufficient roads that there's rarely a traffic jam, and that have sufficient housing such that it's affordable enough for all who want to live there... those places tend not to have a lot of traffic density and not a lot of people density either.
The most effective way to make housing affordable is to make the city undesirable to live in, but that's not typically a popular method. It also tends to make traffic better, too.
The only real factor here is supply/demand. There are no good ways to control demand, so the only solution is to increase supply. Here are some ideas:
* Get rid of anti-dorm laws. There are laws in a lot of places that limit dorm style living by limiting the number of unrelated adults who can live in the same residence. However, this is the most economically efficient living situation.
* Change zoning. A lot of cities have most of their residential land zoned for single family only. Just change everything to multi-family. Remove requirements like having to conform to the character of the neighborhood, having to build parking spots per residence, having to have increased height based setbacks, needing to have a certain amount of land reserved for green space, etc.
* Remove construction limits. A lot of places have a building plan where they only approve so much building over a period of time. Just say yes. Change to a "shall issue" model, where the government needs an affirmative reason to deny a permit and has to do it within a certain time period for certain well-recognized reasons.
I'm not saying that all of these are good ideas. There are problems with all of them. And all of them will be unpopular.
But they should all increase the supply of housing. Which is the same thing as decreasing property values. Which is why they're all un-popular.
Even low density housing through basic human presence distorts natural environments.
It's basically like this in terms of environmental impact:
No humans >>>>>>>>>>> a few humans >>> many humans >> enormous amounts of humans.
Is it passed on by birth right?
I guess that’s the city of liberty for you then.
I think there are valid reasons to want to control immigration, supply of housing isn’t one of them.
Then they make up stories about "neighbourhood character" and how it's gentrification that is driving up the prices.
Less green space isn't really what most cities need.
IMO, it's better to follow the NYC model. Have a few great parks and then dense building.
There are: instead of just letting every DAX or international megacorp to settle in Munich/Berlin or expand at will, force them to go to other cities instead.
Reducing parking requirements _may_ reduce quality of living, if public transportation isn't an option.
Japan solves the parking problem by requiring you to have an off-street parking space to own a car. Removing street parking increases the amount of land available for use, makes the city more walkable (and bikeable) and reduces car ownership.
"In Singapore, nearly 80% of the population resides in housing that is developed and managed by the Housing and Development Board. Units are owned, however, by tenants. The government, following a land-lease system common in other city-states, owns the land and leases it out for 99 years to these unit owners."
https://catalyst.independent.org/2021/09/17/singapore-housin...
Also, cooperative housing. A group of people buy a property with a Loan, and the cost of the loan + management is payed by all people in the apartment. Eventually, the loan is payed off and the cost of rent is lowered to cover only maintenance/mangement. This also has to come with restrictions about ownership and renting out the apartment. Because its ultimately a collective, its unfortunately totally possible there will be biases at play with these kinds of housing setups (ie, biases against allowing POC to move in, disagreements on how common space can be used).
And lastly, fast public transit to expand the area its possible to live by people who can't afford cars.
I found this youtube video[1] about the Vancouver housing situation interesting. Maybe a bit over-simiplified, but gives you an idea of some possible solutions.
I know these aren't silver-bullet solutions. But I think it helps think of this in a different way then just a supply/demand problem. Its also a policy and profiteering problem.
[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/vienna-social-housing-archit...
Can't be done in North America. "Fast public transit" means subways (or trains on elevated tracks), and these are really expensive to build and maintain, so the economics don't work out unless you have a lot of ridership, and that only works if you have high enough density. So in Tokyo, it works great because the density is very high and ridership is enormous, so the city can afford hundreds of subway stations with trains running every 3-5 minutes. But in a typical American city, everything is SO spread out that it just won't work: it's too far for most people to walk to the station, having to drive to the station just adds more overhead plus having to deal with traffic with everyone else going to/from the station and looking for parking, etc. Of course, you could try a model where developers build huge, dense, mixed-use developments at the stations, but that's pretty hard to get done when all that land is already owned, and there's NIMBY zoning laws preventing such housing developments anyway: each such station would be a huge, expensive, long political fight.
Honestly, I don't really see a solution; too many Americans think this kind of thing is anathema anyway, so the political will to make any of these ideas a reality is unlikely to materialize.
No, it can be express buses with 100% dedicated bus lanes and fewer bus stops. Of course, that will require removing some standard lanes and converting them into said dedicated bus lanes.
> But in a typical American city, everything is SO spread out that it just won't work: it's too far for most people to walk to the station, having to drive to the station just adds more overhead plus having to deal with traffic with everyone else going to/from the station and looking for parking, etc.
This can be solved with multi-modal traffic with a mix of bikes and buses. This again will require removing standard lanes and converting them into protected bike lanes, and while that's happening and considering the width of the average lane, a green shoulder with trees that separates the road from the bike lane and from the newly added sidewalk.
> Honestly, I don't really see a solution; too many Americans think this kind of thing is anathema anyway, so the political will to make any of these ideas a reality is unlikely to materialize.
However this is what kills any of these proposals, in practice :-)
I think "fast" is subjective. Depending on city size, car culture, etc. Buses with dedicated lanes could be pretty fast. I suppose what I should say is, comprehensive public transit. And maybe not always out to the rural areas until we have good connections to the suburban hubs.
As far as economics, much like Agriculture, Housing and Healthcare the economics will never really work out. They will run at a deficit and require government subsidies because they are necessities.
Often with these things its a vicious cycle.
People don't use Public Transit --> Because its slow and doesn't cover everywhere --> Because adding stops and more vehicles costs money --> And there's not enough money to improve it --> Because People don't use public transit --> ... repeat
If we improve transit, make it more convenient than driving (banning cars in certain metropolitan areas, making it cheaper than gasoline, etc.) Then likely over years the US could transition.
Though I agree, tis a pipe dream at this time in history.
I wonder if frequency and hours get overlooked in these discussions. In my experiences one of the things that made the NYC subway more enjoyable than other systems is that the trains came frequently (so I didn't have to schedule when I got to the station and if I missed a train it wasn't a big deal) and they ran 24 hours a day (so I could do things like go to a bar and not have to worry about getting home).
I used to live in a smaller city, the busses would come every 15 - 30min and then after midnight every 1hr. It was hard to rely on, if you miss a bus you could miss an appointment, after bar close, you had to rely on Taxi and Uber.
Now I live in a city where buses/trams come every 9 and subways come every 4 during peak hours. I don't even own a car anymore!
Dedicated bus lanes would help I'm sure, but I still don't see how this could ever be "fast" when buses still have to stop at intersections for red lights. It's what makes driving in a denser city so slow. Trains and subways don't have this problem.
>They will run at a deficit and require government subsidies because they are necessities.
Not true. The trains in Japan aren't subsidized and run at a profit from ridership. You could argue that they got some "unfair" advantages in their initial funding for construction, but as it stands today for ongoing operations, they don't need subsidies; they generate a profit for their owners. Moreover, the companies running many of the trains are really real estate companies: they own big stations in certain places, and then build big complexes around those stations. Build it and they will come.
>banning cars in certain metropolitan areas
The biggest thing to do is simply make it horribly inconvenient to use a car, by not having any free parking. If there's no place to park except some extremely expensive parking lots that might be a longish walk from your destination, people won't drive.
There are lower volume fast public transport mechanisms; BRTs (ie bus systems with largely fully segregated lanes) or high quality standard bus systems with partially segregated lanes. Somewhere in between are trams.
The big downside of a bus system is that it _does_ have volume constraints (even if you have mostly-segregated lanes, you'll start to run into trouble with stops) but it can work pretty well for low-volume scenarios.
for example compare stuttgart in germany with los angeles.
stuttgart has half a million inhabitants. LA has 4 million. both cities have a very similar population density of 3000 people per sqkm. stuttgart has 350km of rail and about 300 stations. los angeles has 175km of rail with about 100 stations.
now, i don't know how much the stuttgart network extends beyond the city. i only looked at the city rail, and ignored regional trains. but i didn't spend much time to research, so i am going to guess on the safe side that it's city rail network serves 1 million people.
for LA to compete with that it would need 1400km of rail with 1200 stations. so, it could be 10 times as large.
another comparison, vienna: 2million people, 4500 per sqkm. 1100 stations on 250km. most the stations are light rail, which is very dense.
in other words, the population density argument is nonsense. there are plenty of cities with a population density of 3000 people or more per sqkm. and none have public transport comparable to european cities.
the problem is not density. the problem is how many people are willing to use public transportion instead of cars.
if you can motivate more people to use public transport, then you can grow the infrastructure.
this is something that will only change slowly as public transportation improves. if you can motivate more people to use public transport, it will grow. even european cities have not reached the end yet, and many cities are investing in more rail.
Stop calling them cities then! They're just endless suburbs and strip malls, which makes for a really really large town. If they're not dense enough to do what cities do, they're not cities.
it's a far more complicated problem than "landlord bad". Renting is a valuable option for expensive necessities that often times aren't as useful permanently owned (cars, ski gear, houses).
the problem is that incentives are terribly non-aligned, given majority of people need to rely on renting.
here are some of my ideas (as a long-time renter who owns a co-op unit since the pandemic)
- make "projected housing capacity growth rate guarantee" for every residential-capable zone a policy — every <N> years, evaluate each zone for meeting that growth rate, and slate lowest density housing in that zone for demolition with large bounties for developers to claim the permits to build denser (usually taller) housing than the existing densest housing within the zone. The densest zones of the city can extend N by some factor each time. (that's a rudimentary version of the idea)
- rent payments up to a certain amount per household member should be tax deductible commensurate to market rate in the region, so that home ownership doesn't immediately become tax optimal.
- property taxes should be tied to market rate rent and market rate home values in that region so that home owners are not incentivized to prop up inflated rental prices when they aren't actively renting out, or to inflate home valuations when they aren't actively in the market to sell.
- home ownership beyond primary residence should be taxed more significantly than it is.
- tax developers constructing and/or operating luxury housing at different tiers (factoring sq. footage/room, amenities, starting lease prices)
Germany has a housing shortage, but people don’t end up homeless or dying of mould, because the tenant would just withhold rent and crush the landlord in court.
Said that, I agree with all your ideas, especially tying taxes to market rent (in Switzerland, if you own property, the average rent for your area is added to your income in your tax return), apart from the last. 1) Luxury housing is better than nothing, 2) demonising luxury housing (that in the UK means having a working lift and renovated windows and maybe air conditioning) is a way of blocking all new builds.
The government can also apply a global increase or decrease to rents in a city, based on study of the market conditions.
The tenant can object within X days of signing that the previous tenant's rent was less. That rent has to be made available for comparison. That makes it hard to raise rents by kicking people out.
There are many additional parts that the Swiss get wrong, but the above is a good start.
> Your landlord must give you a clear explanation for raising your rent. Justifiable reasons could be an increase in the reference interest rate, inflation, increased maintenance costs or an investment that increases the value of the property e.g. the installation of additional kitchen appliances.
It is interesting that there is no hard cap mentioned. Inflation, interest rate and maintenance cost all skyrocketed last year, would a 5 percent rent increase be possible? Or could that be refuted?
For comparison, The Netherlands has set a max rent increase of 4.1 percent for 2023. In 2022 this was 2.3 percent.
Though, politics is everywhere, and they want to cap the index rents as well. Make sense, because why can everyone raise prices, while salaries do not automatically rise. There is no balance.
In the Netherlands the average waiting time for rent-controlled social houses in popular places like Amsterdam and Utrecht now exceed 10 years.
If the rent increase has been determined by market conditions to be 10%, incumbents have their rent increased by 40% of that, so 4%. And it's not asymptotic. If the rent increase next year is 0%, the incumbents still pay just 104% of the basis rent.
Over time, incumbents have unbeatable rent and can't afford to move, and newcomers pay an extortionate amount, which is the present status quo. The Swiss also blame the newcomers for raising the rents, even though they are the victims.
Coming from the UK, i find the system here vastly more sensible, having been kicked out of multiple residencies in the UK because landlords felt like raising rents by outrageous amounts
That's not equivalent, I hope you're being sarcastic.
People who can afford not to rent out an expensive property are almost by definition multi-millionaires.
Those people (and those properties) do not make up all, or even most, of the picture.
Otherwise the solution is to just build more. High property prices and rent is fundamentally an issue of supply vs demand, no?
This is not some uncharted territory. Western societies just need to stop treating residential property as an investment. Japan would be a great example of such approach.
All else being equal: More supply -> Lower price.
As someone who was born in USSR I can venture a guess that OP won't also like its implementation.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Venezuelan_presidential_e...