>it's not confiscation, you're just forced to sell at a price i decide is fair
sound logic
sound logic
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.
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?
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.