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Comment by _cenw | Hacker News Reader

Social housing in Germany is asinine. The government heavily co-finances new construction for a subset of flats being offered as affordable housing, but with a 30 year limit to these restrictions. It's a subsidy for the rich. You break even, and you get some very cheap real estate in 30 years. The government should've just done the construction itself.

A lot of social housing is currently reaching that 30 year mark, and it's barely being replaced. And costs for new constructions simply don't make a lot of sense right now, also affected by increasing building standards - which also prevent conversion of much vacant commercial space.

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Curiously, some places (notably San Francisco) in the United States have the opposite system: rents are unregulated for the first few decades of a building's life, and then annual increases are capped after that. This ensures that the older housing stays affordable for the people who live in it, but it allows prices to rise for new construction, which should in principle increase the amount of housing that gets built. In theory buildings should generate most of their value in the early part of their life when they're more desirable.

This system isn't always managed as well as it could be — subsidized unit requirements are layered on top of that, and in St. Paul the payoff period is only thirty years, which has made some developers balk. The political factions often imagine all investors as good or bad instead of as a force that can be managed to achieve desired social outcomes.

In Sweden new rentals are exempted from collectively bargained rents for 15 years, the idea being that the landlord should be able to recoup enough of their construction and capital costs in that time to make it attractive.

It’s a way to get around some of the issues that rent control causes, such as reducing construction.

Unfortunately, due to how our rental market works, it’s largely young people living in those more expensive apartments, which is terrible for birth rates and inter-generational equality.

That's pretty much how the private rental market worked in the UK, for a two or three decades at least. The game was to buy a house with a small deposit, break even on the running and loan costs, and benefit from the huge leverage in your investment as house prices rose.

Recently, the current government decided this game was unfair, and tightened taxes and housing regulations to the point where it only really makes sense now for large corporate landlords. Unsurprisingly this led to landlords exiting the market, and now there are too few rentals, leading to insane rents.

Why not have private companies build and sell apartments?

https://youtu.be/mav_Y0ZcVpw showing a random purchasable apartment in Russia.

Condos are politically caught between a rock and a hard place: leftists who think they turn cities into playgrounds for the rich, and reactionaries who think the government is trying to force everyone into multi-unit buildings.

Ownership is nice for the long term, but sometimes people just aren't ready for that. Some careers nowadays involve several training periods which happen in multiple different cities and stretch out for 8-12 years. Sometimes to get a good job in a less dynamic city you are better off working in SF/NY for a few years after school even if that's not where you want to end up. Maybe people learn faster that way. Retirees may be better off renting if they don't want to do maintenance and may only live there for a decade before moving into assisted living.

When you need to move in temporarily, you can always rent a flat from a person just like yourself who bought one and is renting it out individually. In the absense of rent control and abundance of constructions, offers are plentiful.

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