And they can't govern alone, so I think it's unlikely that this plan is actually implemented as originally planned. The likely coalition would contain 3 parties.
I’d almost believe the burden one, but you just piled and made the whole thing sound very emotional and not very objective.
If you have any kind of stats supporting this, I genuinely would be interested.
1) > They're pretty much the only capital city in the developed world that's a burden and not a benefit to the country as a whole.
https://www.iwkoeln.de/presse/iw-nachrichten/matthias-dierme...
2) > Then they do things like free daycare paid for by other states in the country while those states can't offer it.
Look up "Länderfinanzausgleich" and then look up daycare programs and compare them. None of the net payers get even remotely the same even though they're the ones actually paying for it.
Both statements are objectively true.
It is more of demonstration how strong other cities in Germany are and how Berlin almost stopped existing (economically speaking) for 70 years than of being a burden in my view, but this is a detail you can throw in any conversation with berlin people to drive them nuts =)
2/ true example, yes. Then check what Germany pays to get power from the north down to Bavaria. And who pays for this? Unfair all around. I’m of course holding every single Bavarian personally responsible for this.
I dislike how you generalise from economical examples to the character of berlin inhabitants. It’s obviously wrong but also just not nice.
They do want to pay landlords, though below current (very high) rates.
New large condo buildings have to sell 30% of the units at below market rate. This causes many viable projects to never get built.
So laws like this are sold to renter voters as a way to lower housing costs, but NIMBYs secretly love it. Over time, renters pay more in rent because there is less supply due to builders not building. However, a lucky few renters who were here early will get below market rents.
Perfect examples of voters voting for a short term fix but pay more in long term. And voting for themselves while screwing future renters.
The City of Vienna is the largest landlord in Europe. It is also the only major European capital without a rent cost crisis.
Most urgent intervention required in the UK, IMO. We're choking to death on the cost of housing.
Every country in the Western world is. And it seriously hits our economies as well - when companies have to pay wages to match what landlords are asking of their employees, places like China with a massive oversupply of housing are far, far more competitive.
If this is what people want, then it seems like the right solution. Short term the only change will be increased taxes and maybe a few lucky renters getting apartments with the number slowly increasing over years and years.
Which is pretty much the situation in Vienna (rents are low in Vienna, but for the 20% that get city-owned apartments the rents are very low. Quality is ... let's call it "very old", and there's no choice (can't move up if you have a kid, say). Then housing associations pay like 30% more but less than private. Private rents are about double city-owned apartments as they're called. Only way to become a city renter is to earn less than 58000 in a given year, then wait 5+ years).
Personally, I believe Berlin has more issues with a lack of affordable housing than with a lack of luxury condos.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009411902...
https://archive.is/2026.02.23-212725/https://www.theatlantic...
IMO, in Berlin the most lacking thing is the supply in affordable housing, so it makes sense to optimize for that directly instead of a side effect of some other optimization.
Why not build something like Alt-Erlaa? [0] [1]
Cities can just build stuff. And if private developers are not as incentivized to invest, that makes it cheaper for the city to do so itself. As somebody from Vienna, it's crazy to me this is even up for debate.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alterlaa [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxuACFQBwxs
I am not sure how it is in Berlin. I haven't visited in a while. I think it's too general an assessment though. In many cities the limit is not land but permits - both being permitted to build at all and then build high enough.
>>Cities can just build stuff. And if private developers are not as incentivized to invest, that makes it cheaper for the city to do so itself. As somebody from Vienna, it's crazy to me this is even up for debate.
I hear a lot of good things about housing in Vienna. Are those city build apartments readily available for anyone? The problem with public housing when I am from is that it turns the city population into lucky few who get access and the rest who not only have to subsidize it but then need to buy on private market themselves.
>>If you let the "market" decide on its own it will always decide on the most profitable items, even if that's not what is needed.
How do you define "not needed"? Businesses will build what they can sell - the very definition of needed. The problem is that it's difficult to build. A lot of cheaper housing projects don't get build because some restrictions (like height, number of apartments, parking places) that are not necessary.
The affordable housing from ~50 years ago was single family housing and is crazy expensive today.
We should be building lots of high density luxury condos today. Those are the affordable apartments of the future.
I shouldn't have to subsidize my neighbor's rental just because they chose to live in my city.
As a society, we decide what we value, and then we pay for it. If you don't like what the group decides, it's your choice to move elsewhere.
you could of course pay them more, and everything would become more expensive. might work. but i bet you don't want that either.
Genuinely interested. Where I live, I have received direct reports that there is almost zero margin between building cost and market price (buying). But buying and then renting still has a good ROI, although a longer term one.
I don’t get it, it goes against the market self regulation, but real estate is very twisted in this respect.
This is not just any law, it's in the German constitution (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_14.html).
It says the compensation is determined as a balance of public good and the interests of those affected, so to me it does read like the compensation can be lower than market value so it'd all come down the courts to determine how much below the market value the state can get away with.
sound logic
They don't care about the elasticity of the market, or the demand from people who would want to live in Berlin in the future.
They already have an apartment, and at pretty low prices because nearly everything built before 2014 is subject to rent control,
I'd guess most people just voted for it because in their eyes "government promised to take apartment from my landlord and lower my rent even more".
Yeah, I know the written logic of all this, but as things stand right now we didn't have homelessness East of the Wall back in the day, while the West had. That should have been reason enough to throw all this capitalist and pervert logic under the bus, but I understand how come the highly paid programmers in here are happy with the current economic system, homelessness be damned. Which is to say, you're telling me nothing new.
Because it was forbidden by law. You were forced to be put in an institution or directly went to prison. Check Section 249 of the DDR Criminal Code.
And by the way, the DDR suffered from chronic housing shortage. People were cramped in barracks with not bathroom and no heating. Technically housed but in actually povert level of housing. It was an absolute disaster.
Seems like a very good law, don't you think? And this reminded me of how come one of my favorite childhood books from when I was 3 or 4 here in Romania was about DDR constructors building apartment flats, loved that book and loved the spirit behind it.
> People were cramped in barracks with not bathroom and no heating
There were? Back in the '70s and '80s? You sure? I don't remember it that way here in Romania back in the '80s, and I know that the DDR had a much better economic condition than us, Socialist Republic of Romania.
Rent extraction is utterly counterproductive for a society.
Housing should not be a commodity.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc...
> an income maximum for applicants of €57,600
and can't be bought, only rented
as for the "only rented" part, again, at this level of low rent it does not matter. you're better off renting. And Europeans have actual pension systems, we are nowhere near as reliant on real estate always appreciating in value.
Also government formed co-ops. Find people who want a flat and agree on rent before you build it. As the loan is paid off rent becomes substantially cheaper. The second best time to plant a tree is today.
It also doesn't need to be the entire housing stock, just enough to help keep rent low (see Vienna).
Housing right now is the opposite of a commodity: it's a boutique investment for individuals whose price is propped up by regulations that artificially limit supply.
>> The "free market" (which has been demonstrated to not be free at all)
The Berlin rental market suffers under strong government intervention, and would benefit from being much freer.
- Tax empty flats to death
- Disallow corporate ownership of residential property
That enables mass buyouts of housing from corporation which leads to rent extraction and a myriad of woes.
It's not corporate lawyers who show up to protest new housing, it's retiree homeowners.
Housing in many countries is not part of a free market but part of a monopoly where the government decides how much, how many, the what and the when the houses can be built. If it was a real free market, the issue would have been long solved.
P.s. the EU already decides how much, how many, what and when will be planted, through subsidising. And it's going quite well.
The large investor landlords purchased the homes and often didn't even do the bare minimum in upkeep. The real estate nevertheless appreciated massively because of Berlin getting more and more popular.
It therefore makes sense to nationalize this housing stock, and I'd see a value comprised of "original purchase price, upkeep and inflation-plus-3%-tied appreciation" as fair value. Maybe even less because they extracted 20 years worth of rent payments from the properties already.
It would make more sense just enforce maintenance standards and improve renters rights. You can't really legislate supply & demand.
Their yearly profits are capped because of the Mietpreisbremse (rent control) law since all the old buildings that they bought would fall under it, so it would've been better to put the money towards either building new state-owned housing or helping the tenants enforce their rights.
The laws are there to protect tenants against neglect from the landlord but enforcement takes multiple months which is not a reasonable timeline if you have a problem in your apartment and the consequences for landlord are mostly just reducing the rent for that time by a certain percentage which doesn't make a difference if the rents are already cheap because of the Mietpreisbremse, so it would also be good to introduce fines but not sure if Germany's legal framework allows for that.
> sold at firesale prices after the CDU Diepgen government thoroughly wrecked the state finances with a banking scandal at the end of the 90s.
Wowereit didn't have much of an alternative, the cash coffers were drained.
Confiscation with (some) remuneration is still confiscation. Is your comment satirical?
My province's capital has 43% of unhinabitated houses. They are not even on the market, as we are in a housing crisis. Vast majority of them are property of large housing groups that are backed by black rock and company.
The same firms are manouvering the politicians to get approvals to build modern monstruosities, because there is a housing crisis, but they build only luxury homes thst cost too much and remain unhinabitated.
Yes it is sound logic to force big conglomerates to dissolve by law. Law should aim for the public good.
Wouldn't the landlords would just take a loss and sell the property to avoid penalties?
.. Cities also rely quite a bit on property and real estate transfer taxes. By reducing property values, cities destroy their own tax base while needing lots of additional money to renovate state-acquired, vacant properties.