Then the govt. should build new homes; I'm not sure that taking homes from people ("nationalize") creates supply.
> »Durch Enteignung entsteht keine einzige neue Wohnung.«
> Das stimmt, aber darum geht es auch nicht.
The nationalization is not about supply, but to stop the price hikes. They also want to invest in new affordable homes at the same time.
Or so they claim.
Source?
Deutschlandatlas says that Berlin has whole 2 percent of empty apartments for all reasons, which is less then half of German average [0]
Some of those apartments are being remodeled, some are just in the period where the previous tenant moved out and the next moved in.
There are 16 thousand long-term empty apartments, which looks like a huge number, but it is only 0.8 percent of the total. [1]
Even if those 16 thousand apartments could be all put to market (some have legal barriers, like being part of a complicated litigation), that easing would not last even for a single mayor's tenure. Last year alone, Berlin grew up by 17 thousand people. [2] It was not an extraordinary year.
ALL that money that the Linke wants to sink into old housing should be spent to build new one, just to accomodate the arrivals.
[0] https://www.deutschlandatlas.bund.de/DE/Karten/Wie-wir-wohne...
[1] https://www.berlin.de/sen/wohnen/rechtliches/zweckentfremdun...
Zero unoccupied housing is unachievable anywhere but in a dilapidated slum, because apartments must get remodeled from time to time. If you remodel an apartment every 15 years and it takes three months (a rather optimistic timeline), you already have 1,6 per cent of the housing stock out of the market inevitably, because 3 months is 1/60th of 15 years. If anything, only 2 per cent of the Berlin apartments being out of the market indicates that they already don't get enough maintenance!
Then you have pauses between tenants. If an average tenant stays for 8 years and it takes about a month to fix the most basic things once he moves out, and find new people, then you have 1 per cent of the housing stock momentarily unoccupied just due to this. Again, Berlin having only 2 per cent of the stock out of the market indicates that the changing of tenants is already overoptimized, with not enough time to vet new ones and fix smaller things: one moves in on the heels of another.
Then you have a certain small percentage of apartments being part of litigations, either commercial or inheritance-related. Inevitable. Companies split, people die, and not everyone has their papers in Ordnung.
You seem to be claiming that all those mechanisms can be compressed to zero, and that all the apartments that are unoccupied due to them can be put on the market by fiat. How? Will you ban apartment remodeling? That's the way to produce - fully occupied - ghettoes.
My grandmother died some years ago, my family wanted to sell the house as they didn’t need it. It took 3 years to sell it because it’s in a location with no demand plus 6-12 months to arrange the inheritance legal details. You would say, the price was too high then! It was sold for €30K, a garden farmhouse with 6 bedrooms, garden and garage.
It’s inevitable that some houses are out of the market for some time due to many different reasons.
The government may (let us forget, for the sake of the argument, that all major parties in Germany are NIMBY in practice), but for what money? The forced buyout was not free, the German constitution won't allow for that. They may even be sentenced to pay the full market price. That alone will make Berlin bankrupt.
The City of Vienna was a place of misery and slums before their socialist party built out enormous amounts of high-quality housing stock, financed by high taxes on luxury goods.
It to this day tops global quality of live rankings as a result.
We have the empirical data. No need to speculate.
Die Linke is a heavily NIMBY party which just wants to change ownership of existing housing stock forcibly. That won't alleviate any pressure in a city that gains almost 20 thousand new inhabitants yearly.
Are you paying attention? The main plan of the Berlin Left is to expropriate existing housing stock. Given that this is Germany and they cannot just take someone's stuff without due compensation, this will put the city on the verge of bankruptcy if not over it, and they will have no money left to build anything even if they wanted to, which they don't, because any development baaaad.
BTW much of the earlier privatization was caused by the previous Berlin town halls spending on unsustainable boondoggles which almost bankrupted the city already. People have short memory. The city sold its remaining housing stock to pay for the spending spree of former mayor Klaus Wowereit.
I just demonstrated why that is not an issue, since public development produces better results anyways.
The chilling effect on private builders would be a plus with that context, since it would drive down costs for public buildouts.
Your point on expropriation costs is also oversimplifying things. The German constitution says that a price has to be found by weighing interests. Nowhere does it specify markets as the mechanism for doing so, nor the weighting of public interest vs that of the expropriated.
Hence I don't believe that the Linke will even try. They will form a coalition government and agree behind closed doors that they will let this one simply slip; sorry, the Greens got cold feet.
Fighting against these companies will only drive prices higher. It is stupid.
I've never met anyone who prefers Vonovia etc. to housing cooperatives, or failing those small private landlords.
My last rental with a big company was perfect: they even skipped asking me for rent deposit, my work contract was enough. Their maintenance team was full time dedicated to maintain the same buildings, so they knew perfectly how to repair everything, they were quick and diligent. They knew if they didn’t fix it right, they would have to do the work again.
Economies of scale is what allows these big companies to offer better prices and better service than private landlords.
It's great that your last landlord company treated you well! But that's not the experience most people in Germany have. For example, I personally know >10 individuals who rented from Vonovia and deeply regretted it, because there were so many issues that maintenance only covered up superficially while NEVER fixing the actual issue. Even for severe issues, they usually waited 3+ months before sending anyone out - in one case a wall showed obvious water damage & mold, and it took 4 months PLUS a letter from a lawyer before anyone followed up on their dozen reports!
> Economies of scale is what allows these big companies to offer better prices and better service than private landlords.
Sure, that's the theory. But when reality does not align with theory, something must be missing: your model only works as long as the market fulfills certain conditions, which the housing market in Germany (and likely most of the west) does not fulfill. If you haven't heard of these assumptions, I'd recommend looking into non-fungible & inelastic markets.
Because previous attempts at discussing such topics were usually met with hostility, I'll only go into more detail if you can bring empirical counter-evidence, or if you were sincerely unaware of the limits I've mentioned.