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Comment by lobster_johnson | Hacker News Reader

Berlin is still extremely cheap. You can get fairly large 1BRs in nice, central areas neat Mitte for 400-500 EUR or even less. Larger apartments are not much more expensive. You can still find a largeish 2BR below 1000 EUR.

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Madrid, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Osaka, Barcelona, and Mexico City all seem to have quality cheap central options, too. Tokyo and London seem to have affordable desirable safe quality outlying areas not too far from the center on the train.

The really terrible situation with no viable alternatives seems limited to SF and NY. (Maybe Paris? News about Paris always makes the cheap suburbs seem dangerous and non-French.)

Sydney has no "cheap and viable" areas anymore.

It depends what you class as cheap. I work in Barcelona, and my rent is affordable, but if you compare the IT wages here and in London, I regularly get contacted about jobs paying around double what I earn over in London. I have been looking around for new jobs, but it seems I am already pretty close to the top of the salary range here.

London trains are hardly affordable. A 30 min commute into London on the train would add £300/month to the cost for where I live. Or 500/mo if you want to park at the station.

I have a three bedroom place (wich I share with two others) in New Jersey for $1600 and its only a $6 35 min commute to New York. Not bad if you ask me

Germans usually don't define Berlin to be a "successful first-world major city" (saying that as a German)

I don't know anything about modern-day Germany, except the constant buzz in the news of the German economic success. Is Berlin overshadowed by other cities in Germany? Is it merely the seat of government and not economically successful?

Or is this merely a German joke about a rough town?

Germany's industrial power is concentrated in the central and southern parts of ex-West Germany. Berlin just doesn't manufacture enough cars. :P

(Now I'm wondering if this is like the PRC, where Beijing has the rich history of a capital but bland areas like Shenzhen are where the money is made.)

The jokes about Berlin would be mostly about its horrendously mismanaged prestige project - the new airport.

I don't know. It's clearly first-world. And it's a major city -- the political center of Germany, one of the top tourist destinations in the world, and highly regarded for its arts and culture, nightlife and high standards of living. It's got low unemployment and high growth. It's also host to an apparently booming startup culture (although many of the actors with presence in the city are in fact foreign companies).

Current unemployment numbers: Berlin 205k, Baden-Wuerttemberg 232k, Bavaria 250k.

So much for that...

But the rents in Berlin have also risen fantastically in recent years. Those numbers are about 50% higher than when I moved to the city 7 years ago.

As of when? I've helped three people relocate here over the past three month, as well as hunted around for my own apartment, and we've found nothing in that price range in Mitte.

I just did a bunch of Craigslist searches and verified that the apartments looked nice.

I didn't say Mitte, though, but close to Mitte. Central areas like Friedrichshain, Kreuzberg, Prenzlauer Berg.

Of course there is the problem that a lot of scammers use Craigslist and those apartments don't really exist.

Yeah, and Prenzlauer Berg is actually quite gentrified (staying there for the second time now). It's full of middle-class professional families with children.

The big question is of course how (or if) Berlin can avoid the same fate as London.

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