[HN Gopher] Berlin buys thousands of apartments from corporate l...
___________________________________________________________________
Berlin buys thousands of apartments from corporate landlords
Author : based2
Score : 262 points
Date : 2021-09-18 11:45 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thinkpol.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (thinkpol.ca)
| goldenkey wrote:
| I think all countries should be eliminating real estate
| speculation ;-)
|
| Xi Jinping's famous words are "housing is for living in and not
| for speculation."
|
| When will American join these other countries?
|
| Netherlands: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28422768
|
| China: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/7/28/in-its-latest-
| cr...
| sokoloff wrote:
| > Did they get ripped off by some owners that refused to sell
| and haggled upward?
|
| The first sentence of the article says they bought them from
| _two_ corporate landlords.
| goldenkey wrote:
| Missed that. Thank you good sir.
| bserge wrote:
| People are against the idea because in their minds they won't
| be able to buy 2-3 homes and rent one or two out.
|
| No, this is about companies owning 150,000 apartments in a city
| that they simply charge ever-increasing rent for. It's lunacy.
| andrepd wrote:
| Well to be fair buying 2-3 homes to rent is also undesirable
| rent-seeking, albeit on a smaller scale.
| fragmede wrote:
| It matters where the money goes afterwards. If it goes to a
| local landlord that spends it in that same neighborhood,
| improving it, vs going into an REIT that will make their
| investors, and their board, several states away happy. This
| is an important distinction that between trickle down
| theory and practice. Getting one person to $100mm vs making
| 10 people $10mm-airs vs 100 people to be single digit
| millionaires? Matters a lot in the long run, for a lot of
| reasons.
|
| We can't abolish rent-seeking entirely without overthrowing
| the whole system, so we have to realize that there are
| different shades of damage done by rent-seeking.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| You can not simply charge "ever-increasing rent". You can
| only charge what people are willing to pay. More people are
| pouring into the city every day who are prepared to pay more.
| Simple as that.
|
| Those companies owning 150K apartments are also shareholder
| companies, so "small people" and their pension plans will
| still be affected.
| dpatterbee wrote:
| People have to live somewhere, if someone's forced to
| choose between picking up an extra job to afford rent or
| living on the streets, they're gunna choose the first. I'd
| argue this is a bad thing and people deserve places to
| live.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| Yes, they have to live _somewhere_. Not necessarily in
| central Berlin, or central San Francisco. There are
| plenty of places with cheap housing in Germany.
|
| Also just because people need something, doesn't imply
| they have to be given those things for free. That's not
| usually how it works.
| danlugo92 wrote:
| I can either own 2 apartments worth $50k each, or have $100k
| stock in a company that owns $15k aparments.
|
| Can't outlaw one without outlawing the other one.
|
| If you ban one entity from owning more than n apartments,
| they'll just create apartments/n shell companies.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Yes you can. You tie companies back to a specific person
| who has control over that company. And limit ownership of
| residential property by those people.
| anovikov wrote:
| Extending that idea, we arrive from lunacy to a good thing: a
| city that is completely owned by one company. Where police is
| the company's private guards, the city council is its board
| of directors, and municipal taxes are just fees the company
| charges. And that is a good thing. I'd live in such a city if
| there was one.
|
| For example: no homeless. This is all a private territory,
| and if you don't pay your rent, a guard escorts you off the
| premises. Very little if any crime because crime prevention
| is all in one hands and these hands are protecting by and
| large, their own private property and their profits (because
| if the crime rate goes up, rent goes down and rent is how
| they make money).
|
| A wall keeping undesirables out.
|
| Guards/police that can check your papers anytime just simply
| as they can say in a hotel - "what's your room number"? So no
| "undocumented" aliens.
|
| There can't be any constitutional etc. bullshit that could
| prevent them from having an actual 24/7 guarded wall and
| checkpoints with papers check around their PRIVATE property.
| It can be a functional society where everyone who's there,
| belongs there.
| nicoburns wrote:
| What would you do when the city decides to double prices
| overnight because it's a private company focussed on profit
| maximisation and has a complete monopoly over absolutely
| everything
| fragmede wrote:
| Not to mention, what happens when you get laid off or
| fired? Ejected from your company town?
| anovikov wrote:
| Why? A company where one works, rents office space there.
| You rent an apartment. You can work for another company
| there, or move elsewhere.
| anovikov wrote:
| What's the problem? Just move elsewhere. You don't own a
| place there - you can only rent - so you don't lose
| anything - it will be about as stupid/unworkable as one
| hotel in a city raking up room prices 2x just because
| they "try to maximise profit".
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| There are contracts. If your contract forbids doubling
| over night, you are good. If not, it was your choice to
| agree to it anyway.
| vangelis wrote:
| What are you going to do, sue them?
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| Sure, why not? Also, if others see they don't heed
| contracts, they will start avoiding to do business with
| them.
| zwirbl wrote:
| I imagine this as a prison-like corporate dystopia
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| Is this the plot of some diystopian film?
| FredPret wrote:
| Diystopia - this is what happens when I do a home
| renovation
| goodpoint wrote:
| We had that in the past. It was called feudal society.
| bserge wrote:
| Lmao, I actually heard this one before and the guy was
| serious.
|
| I give it a few years before your corporate lordship fucks
| you over and you have no recourse or you simply get bored
| out of your mind in this perfect city.
|
| But don't worry, the rest of us will provide some quality
| locks on the outside of your wall, so you can stay there
| until death.
| anovikov wrote:
| That's the only potential downside i can see: because the
| landlord company is big, it will by nature become very
| conservative with the (working for hire) bosses being too
| cautious as to not goof up their jobs, with a huge bias
| on preventing failures as opposed to enabling success. So
| they may indeed tend to ban more and more "unsafe" or
| "morally objectionable" activities to please everyone,
| eventually making the place too boring to stay in.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| If the government owns all housing, you have no recourse.
|
| With multiple small private cities, you can change
| cities.
|
| Actually, with governments, you could also try to switch
| countries.
|
| That is why I am opposed to mega states like EU wants
| become, so that people still have some choices left.
| luckylion wrote:
| Meh. I have friends who lived in a Vonovia apartment in a
| prefab in East Berlin. It's not for me, but the rent was
| pretty cheap (~10 Euros/sqm, heating + warm water included)
| and didn't get raised during the years they lived there.
|
| Berlin just came from a place of super low rent and is slowly
| catching up to other large German cities. Understandably,
| Berliners are in shock, but it's more "things are returning
| to normal" than "Berlin is so expensive, nobody can live
| there".
| baybal2 wrote:
| It's a dreadful irony that communist plattenbau now cost
| more than homes further West.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| The simple fact is that the people who complain about their
| homes they rent from those companies are unable to find
| other accommodation for a comparable rent. Which in turn
| implies that it is not really the fault of those companies,
| otherwise somebody else would be able to provide better
| housing for the same price.
| andrepd wrote:
| Houses can be homes to live in or can be an investment. They
| cannot be both. Since spending considerable labour and
| materials building concrete boxes for the ultimate purpose of
| speculation is silly, then it must be the former.
| coralreef wrote:
| What is an investment defined as? Because I'm pretty sure
| someone can buy a home, rent it out and make a monthly return
| on it, thus satisfying both a place to live and investment.
|
| Or live it in themselves as they ride the speculative wave.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Optimizing construction for investments leads to different
| houses, apartments and even neighborhoods than optimizing
| for living - the same way as optimizing your site for ad
| revenue leads to a completely different structure than
| optimizing it for actually being useful to your
| visitors/customers.
| Retric wrote:
| As long as homes are being used there is little difference
| between them. The important bit to keep speculation rational
| is to keep occupancy rates high, a simple tax on unoccupied
| homes seems like the logical solution.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| Bullshit. Of course buying your own house is also an
| investment decision. You speculate that its future value
| minus your initial investment (and plus the "extra joy" you
| get out of being a homeowner) is worth more than what you
| would have paid in rent in the same time.
| imtringued wrote:
| Building housing for others to live in is an investment and
| we should encourage it. The problem is that houses don't
| exist in isolation, they are built on land. Most of the value
| is in the land.
|
| Land is valuable because taxes pay for public services and
| you need to be in close proximity of public services to
| benefit from them. Investing into land is effectively
| investing in the exclusion of other people, which is why the
| land owner should compensate the government for the public
| services he is receiving.
| sva_ wrote:
| I don't know much about housing in Berlin, but I think the
| story is that in the time after the Berlin wall was torn down,
| late 80s, the city really needed money. As a result, they sold
| hundreds of thousands of publicly-owned apartments to these
| private companies in the 90s and 00s for almost nothing.[0][1]
| Now those apartments are worth a lot more, and people are mad
| because housing is not affordable to many. Hence you often hear
| demands for dispossession.
|
| The whole story is probably a lot more complicated though, idk.
|
| [0] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/nach-der-
| privatisierung-w...
|
| [1] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/immobilien/neubau-
| in-...
|
| edit: if you read [1] for example, the private companies bought
| 65000 apartments for 400 million Euro. Now the city bought back
| 14750 apts for 2.46 billion Euro. Considering that these houses
| probably have barely been renovated if at all, the quality
| probably dropped significantly.
| FredPret wrote:
| Well if Xi Jinping says so...
| yunohn wrote:
| I wouldn't use the Netherlands as an example, your link is only
| a "plan" they're floating.
|
| The housing situation here is horrible - skyrocketing prices
| and massive corporate ownership. Real estate is massive money,
| and the politicians are in on it - so nothing is going to
| actually change. Plus, they take forever for new builds, so
| supply doesn't meet demand at all.
| wsc981 wrote:
| One member of the Dutch royal family even owns about 500
| apartments (IIRC) in Amsterdam.
| imtringued wrote:
| There you have it (the solution): https://youtu.be/Li_MGFRNqOE
| game_the0ry wrote:
| Former real estate investment professional here.
|
| This is likely a bad deal for the German taxpayer and a great
| deal for the corporate landlords.
|
| Essentially, the Berlin gov has given the corporate landlords a
| profitable exit for their investments. The corp landlords, seeing
| the writing on the wall and fearing lower rents, unrest among
| tenants, and diminishing exit opportunities via selling to the
| market (which wont want to deal with the risks) can now exit by
| selling to the government. The German / Berlin gov gets an
| investment that is all but guaranteed to be a loss assuming they
| drop the rents for the tenants. Thus, tax payer eats the loss.
|
| I see something similar playing out in the US, and not just for
| corp landlords - it could happen to baby boomers looking to sell
| their homes upon retirement. During the last housing crisis in
| '08, Alan Greenspan and Warren Buffet suggested buying homes and
| destroying them, effectively lowering the housing supply in order
| keep prices at the same level in a market with lower demand [1].
|
| Key takeaway from all this - governments and the folks that
| influence them (who also own and get their primary income from
| assets) wont let asset prices go down. They would rather destroy
| assets and lower supply to protect price levels. This dynamic
| teed-up a political war between those who own assets vs those who
| do not, young vs old, establishment vs anti-establishment, etc.
|
| I feel for tenants - I am one myself. However, better to let the
| market to clear market inefficiencies.
|
| [1]
| https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/10/06/creative-d...
| markenqualitaet wrote:
| Maybe more complex.
|
| Legally, you cannot increase rents above 10% of the respective
| average here. If Berlin-owned rents aren't increasing, this
| will slow down the whole market.
|
| Now, this depends a lot on how the law will be enforced in the
| future.
| fnord77 wrote:
| SF is looking into buying unsold luxury condos from developers.
| no_butterscotch wrote:
| To put homeless in?
| madballster wrote:
| Every taxpayer in Berlin is basically subsidizing these state
| owned apartments which are rented out at below market rates.
| mjevans wrote:
| The only way to correct the market is for more supply to exist.
| Adequate supply would ensure that competition works.
| Valakas_ wrote:
| Let me give you an exercise in thought so you can see that just
| simplifying it into "dEmAnD vs SupPly pRobLem" is incredibly
| misleading.
|
| Imagine there is one person that owns 99% of the worlds wealth.
| Now, is there demand for housing? You bet. That guy wants to
| buy all the houses he can. If they build more, he will buy them
| too. No matter how much supply you offer, the demand will be
| there. He will buy anything. Now replace wealthy guy by
| corporations, REITs and wealthy people (who would own not 99%
| but ~90% of the world's wealth) and entertain me how increasing
| supply fixes anything.
| harryh wrote:
| Your thought exercise is interesting, but not in the way you
| think.
|
| Property owners do, in fact, conspire with each other to
| prevent the construction of new housing (via zoning laws).
| They do this, as you say, so that they can get richer.
|
| Allowing them to get away with it (by denying the fact that
| there is a supply problem) plays right into their hands.
|
| What we need to do is thwart their scheme and, through better
| government, legalize the construction of new housing so that
| wealthier people who own much of the existing property stop
| seeing artificial government created gains in the the value
| of their housing because they've conscripted the government
| into their cartel.
| bserge wrote:
| More supply on limited land. Which will be bought out by the
| same 5 real estate companies, just like everything else.
| harryh wrote:
| Even if you were right (and I don't think you are) about the
| same 5 real estate companies buying up all added supply, it
| wouldn't matter. Those 5 companies would still be subject to
| the forces of supply and demand. Increased supply with flat
| demand means falling prices.
|
| https://twitter.com/cw4emeryville/status/1438862784024891394
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Remarkably, Austrian capital Vienna manages to keep a good
| municipal stock of affordable housing. But other cities
| failed to imitate Viennese methods.
|
| Also, Berlin has a lot of land that could be built upon. Land
| is not a scarce resource in that particular corner of Europe.
| mastax wrote:
| Vienna's population intensely declined after it was no
| longer the seat of a large empire, which gave the
| government an opportunity to buy up land for cheap.
| Vienna's population is still lower than it was in 1916,
| which explains why housing is relatively affordable there.
| It's not something easily replicable in other cities.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Berlin itself is quite full (with the exception of the
| airport park, which is intentionally kept as a green area).
| There is a lot of cheap land available in Germany,
| especially in the countryside on the east, but near the
| city the situation is different.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Looking now at Berlin from the bird's perspective, Tegel
| airport could probably be redeveloped now that the new
| airport is in operation.
|
| Also, existing land use could see some improvements. Does
| it make sense to have a huge solar electricity park like
| this:
|
| https://mapy.cz/s/pohetunuzu
|
| in the middle of a city with a shortage of housing? That
| is 150 x 500 m piece of land where at least 5 thousand
| people could live comfortably even without a need for
| high-rises. (6 story houses or so). In a walking distance
| from an existing U-bahn station.
|
| (Not to mention the other factories around.)
|
| There is a discussion in Prague about moving some big
| shopping centers from the wider center to the outskirts
| and using the freed land for construction. But everything
| takes long in our state of bureaucracy.
| eliaspro wrote:
| ...if you see housing as a market and not as a fundamental
| right in a civilized society.
| harryh wrote:
| If you declare housing "a fundamental right" then you _still_
| need more supply when you have a location (like Berlin) that
| doesn 't have sufficient housing for the number of people
| that want to live there.
| shafyy wrote:
| The problem is not that there isn't sufficient housing, the
| problem is that a lot of the housing is too expensive.
| harryh wrote:
| While I can't speak for Berlin specifically, I can say
| that in most places with very expensive housing this
| isn't true. You can see this because other problems tend
| to occur when housing gets very expensive:
|
| - Overcrowding
|
| - People being forced to move out of city centers
|
| - Very long commute times to work
|
| - Reduced fertility rates because people want more room
| for kids
|
| All of these problems are due to insufficient housing and
| not just too high prices.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| How does adding more housing fix the lack of room issue?
| If anything, all of those subdivisions and upzonings
| shift the market preferences to people without kids.
| harryh wrote:
| Adding more housing means there is more room for people.
|
| Your question is almost non-sensical?
| imtringued wrote:
| If housing is too expensive for you it simply means other
| people have a greater desire to live there than you do.
| If you still want to live there you will have to suck it
| up and either build more housing for them or build more
| housing for you.
| shafyy wrote:
| This is only true in a free market. Housing shouldn't be
| a free market.
| def_true_false wrote:
| That's what people say until they are on the shitty end
| of the deal. The distorted housing markets in Germany are
| pretty rough for newcomers -- think immigrants (not a
| minority group, refugee, etc), international students,
| seasonal workers...
|
| Those people either don't know enough about the system to
| take advantage of it, or don't have enough time to wait
| in waiting lists, so they end up paying twice what their
| native peers pay. But hey, they don't have a vote anyway,
| so it's all good...
| harryh wrote:
| If you don't use price to determine who receives a scarce
| good, then you're stuck with other bad mechanisms. In
| Stockholm, for example, waiting lists for apartments can
| be over a decade long.
|
| Much better to recognize that "The problem is not that
| there isn't sufficient housing" is wrong and legalize
| building more housing.
| shafyy wrote:
| What's wrong with waiting lists? Sounds much fairer than
| to give all housing to rich folks. I'm not advocating
| that 100% of housing should be run this way, but for sure
| more than what is now (in most large EU cities).
| harryh wrote:
| I'm not saying social housing is bad. We should
| definitely have more social housing.
|
| I am saying "The problem is not that there isn't
| sufficient housing" is wrong. Very very very wrong. There
| are massive supply shortages of housing in many many
| places. Governments need to fix their oppressive zoning
| policies so they stop preventing people from living where
| they want to live (either because of $, because of
| waiting lists, or any other mechanism).
| FredPret wrote:
| A fundamental right it may be but it has to be built by
| somebody and that costs money. So it's a market
| luckylion wrote:
| Regarding the "fundamental right" ... does that include "at
| the location one wishes", "of the size that one wishes" and
| "for the price that one wishes"?
|
| Because there's no shortage of housing in Germany, it's just
| not hitting all three of those. People want to live in
| sought-after areas, have large apartments and pay very
| little. Understandable, but everyone should be able to see
| why that doesn't work.
| dvh wrote:
| It won't. Companies will always have more money to spend than
| people. We should add extra tax on house/apartments and you
| don't need to pay it if you live there. Initially landlords
| will add tax to rent but as the tax will increase (let's start
| at 1% and increase each year) eventually the rent will be so
| high nobody will be able to afford it and landlord will have to
| sell it.
| tekkk wrote:
| I have thought something similar but more in terms of
| deduction for living in your own home. But it does make more
| sense to increase the cost of rent-seeking as well.
|
| Also i pondered would adding a law that allows tenants to
| have an option for purchasing the house at market price for
| decreased taxation for the landlord help. That should make
| more people home-owners and thus allow them to generate more
| wealth in the long run.
|
| Of course the whole topic is so complex it's impossible to
| invent any rule or law that fixes everything. But preventing
| useless speculation is what every common sense individual
| should wish for.
| harryh wrote:
| Owner occupied housing already gets a tax deduction because
| owners don't have to pay taxes on imputed rent (in the vast
| majority of tax jurisdictions). It would be great to
| actually fix this because it distorts the housing market to
| the detriment of renters, but I'm not holding my breath.
| goodpoint wrote:
| False. Housing is not an elastic "free" market. Houses are not
| fungible goods like bolts or eggs.
|
| https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2017/03/27/where-mar...
| goodpoint wrote:
| Why the silent downvotes? This is the most basic economy 101.
| harryh wrote:
| Because housing isn't completely in-fungible either. So,
| while there might be irregularities here and there,
| increasing supply will in fact put downward pressure on
| prices.
| goodpoint wrote:
| I never said it's completely non-fungible. Clearly I
| struck a nerve here.
| harryh wrote:
| But you did say that it was "False" that additional
| supply would put competitive pressure on housing prices.
| ryan93 wrote:
| Are you claiming that if America's housing supply literally
| doubled overnight prices wouldn't change?
| goodpoint wrote:
| No, I just said that it's not an elastic market. Powerful
| entities like large investment funds can easily corner the
| market and push the prices up, which is exactly what
| happened in many cities across the world.
|
| Of course if the supply "literally doubled overnight" or
| pigs started to fly the prices would go down. For a number
| of years.
| grey_earthling wrote:
| How would you go about creating more land?
| [deleted]
| lordnacho wrote:
| You change the laws to incentivize building up. You add
| transport infrastructure, parks, schools, etc.
| refurb wrote:
| I recall on rule of fixing a market problem is to apply the most
| direct fix possible.
|
| The government would be better off just giving money directly to
| renters to pay their rent.
|
| This has the added benefit that the cost of subsidy of very
| transparent and it provides a nice incentive to increase housing
| supply.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| I, as a taxpayer, refuse to finance a few lucky grandfathered-
| in people that want to live in a highly sought-after district
| but cannot afford the rent.
|
| There is no human right to an apartment in the city center of a
| megapolis.
| refurb wrote:
| But it's no different than your tax dollars buying housing
| from private entities or building public housing and charging
| lower than market rent.
|
| It's all dollars out of your pocket.
| qeternity wrote:
| As another commenter notes, housing is unaffordable because
| marginal demand is greater than marginal supply. We can either
| decrease demand, or increase supply.
|
| Housing demand is pretty sticky, so that leaves us with one
| option.
| Valakas_ wrote:
| Yes but there are 2 main types of demand in there. Demand
| coming from institutional and extremely wealthy investors and
| demand from regular folks. Who do you think is more likely to
| be the responsible for such an increase in price?
|
| So i disagree with the solution you propose. The better
| solution is to reduce the type of demand that is responsible
| for this failure in housing prices.
| qeternity wrote:
| > Who do you think is more likely to be the responsible for
| such an increase in price?
|
| They of course are contributing factors and if you want to
| regulate that, fine, go ahead. But they absolutely are not
| driving prices higher. Investors have tons of alternatives to
| invest in if prices are too high. People don't have
| alternative forms of shelter, so they will tend to pay
| whatever the price is. And society facilitates and
| exacerbates this through well meaning efforts like
| "affordable housing" policies that artificially reduce
| interest rates and drive demand higher.
|
| The bigger issue is that housing and property should never
| have become a de facto investment class. You should not earn
| inflation adjusted returns for owning a house. But of course,
| most wealth in the world is due to housing. And the next
| generations just increasingly get screwed over.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Housing in Berlin is not unaffordable, else the occupancy of
| those houses wouldnt be so high.
| qeternity wrote:
| Haha yes, a commenter after my own heart.
|
| Of course, the only unaffordable price is one which the
| market will not bear. Any price at which a market transacts
| is by definition affordable.
|
| And herein lies the issue: everyone wants to live in Berlin,
| but not everyone can live in Berlin. Price is the mechanism
| by which we determine who values living in Berlin most.
|
| You might not think it's fair, but this is the reality.
| dathinab wrote:
| It's not that simple.
|
| Affordable housing in Berlin means:
|
| - "Normal" people working in Berlin can afford it (e.g.
| prices are still below e.g. Munich but you ear much more in
| Munich).
|
| - You are not forced to spent so much money on housing that
| you not can't really afford anything else.
|
| - We are speaking about apartments available now, there are a
| lot of people with older rental contracts which as such still
| pay much lower rents. (I.e. the price of entering a new rent
| contract is basically always noticeable above the average
| rent price, often as much as legally possible).
|
| You can totally have "unaffordably" priced housing and high
| occupancy, because housing is in general not a think people
| can choose to "simply not have".
|
| Also if you decrease the supply of "affordable" housing and
| make the remainder more expansive you totally can have an
| effect where occupancy stays high and people and up on the
| street (decrease the supply => convert rented apartments to
| owned ones, which don't count into "rented apartments
| occupancy").
|
| So what you see is:
|
| - More WGs i.e. people sharing a apartment and the rent, and
| this is not just young people.
|
| - A lot of "natives" moving away from Berlin.
|
| - A lot of rented Appartments being converted to owned ones,
| some being actually used other not.
|
| - A lot of people with non-high wage jobs spending so much
| money on rent that they have no money left to put aside for
| emergencies and potentially even have to cut corners in their
| daily live.
|
| - Some more wealth people coming to Berlin.
|
| One major difference to some of the more expensive cities in
| Germany is that people people tend to earn much less money
| and thinks like "moving to a cheaper metro area around
| Berlin" are often not really viable (as there isn't that much
| to move to, it might actually be more expansive then living
| in Berlin it also is legally seen another German state and
| commute times can become a problem, too. I mean they can be a
| problem in-side of Berlin, it's a pretty wide city.)
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| I understood, but the claim "unaffordable" makes no sense
| because obviously, there are enough people that can afford
| it. But yes, low-income households have more and more
| difficulties making ends meet when the prices rise.
|
| The issue is that Germany does not have a housing crisis,
| there are at least 600k uninhabited housing units. Yes,
| those are mostly rural and especially in the former GDR.
| Usually you get a commission if you FIND somebody willing
| to rent long-term.
|
| People are drawn into cities, especially Berlin has become
| "hip" - even though the job market is not even close to
| Munich or Stuttgart. So I think (and most people I know who
| moved there) people move for the lifestyle. I am pretty mad
| at the Berlin government now using taxpayers money to buy
| back pricy appartments - especially since Berlin is one of
| the poorest states in Germany and heavily subsidied by the
| other states (through "Landerfinanzausgleich"). And this
| will in no way help with the high demand/low supply
| problem, that actually exists.
| dathinab wrote:
| > "unaffordable" makes no sense because obviously, there
| are enough people that can afford it.
|
| Doesn't mean thinks didn't become unaffordable for other
| people. If a lot a people which grow up do or are
| considering leaving because they can't afford rent it's a
| social problem.
|
| > The issue is that Germany does not have a housing
| crisis, there are at least 600k uninhabited housing
| units.
|
| Just because there are housing units in some places
| doesn't mean there is no housing crisis. Because what
| point are housing units in the wrong places.
|
| Because what point is a housing unit in a area where
| there is no work, no hospitals (close by), no supper
| market (close by), no public transport (which goes
| frequently), no restaurants, bars or people to meet,
| probably bad internet, etc.
|
| I mean if that places would be nice countryside nature
| places it might be interesting, but they often aren't
| even that. They often are areas where in the past there
| had been a lot of manual work (car industry, coal mining,
| heavy industry, etc.) and it went away, as well as small
| villages.
|
| > People are drawn into cities
|
| Often out necessity, due to the points mentioned above.
| luckylion wrote:
| > One major difference to some of the more expensive cities
| in Germany is that people people tend to earn much less
| money
|
| I don't know. According to a somewhat recent study[1],
| Berlin is pretty average, only 10-20% below e.g. Hamburg,
| North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria and Baden-Wurttemberg
| (where the rents for comparable flats in the larger cities
| tend to be much higher than in Berlin, and not just 10-20%,
| while cost of living (utilities, meals, services) is
| generally 10-20% lower in Berlin).
|
| It's true that the current prices do get obscured by
| looking at averages, especially in Berlin where old
| contracts are absurdly cheap. Comparing the usual real-
| estate sites in Germany (granted, most markets aren't
| exactly showing many offers, so it's always a small sample,
| but it remains the same over time), you'll find that
| Berlin's rents are still considerably lower than those in
| Hamburg, Munich, Dusseldorf etc. Berlin is in a very
| special situation in Europe in that the capital of the
| country is not anywhere close to being the most expensive
| population center.
|
| As for "natives" moving out of Berlin: not so sure either,
| many Berliners weren't born in Berlin, but that has been
| going on for the longest time (it's been a thing a hundred
| years ago, has settled during the GDR, and has been
| reignited in the last two decades; today, slightly over
| half of Berlin residents were not born in Berlin). It's a
| city where young people move to study and party and then
| stay for the life style and lower cost of living.
| Coincidentally, these are often the same people complaining
| about the high rents and asking for collectivization.
|
| [1] https://www.bz-berlin.de/berlin/berliner-liegen-
| mit-42-525-e...
| dathinab wrote:
| Berlins avg. rent level (15,39EUR/m2) is above that of
| Hamburg (14,35EUR/m2) and Dusseldorf (12,80EUR/m2).
| dathinab wrote:
| Through there seem to be massive differences between the
| sources for Berlin...
| djrobstep wrote:
| Please stop saying this - house prices in Australia have
| recorded record growth in the same year as record low
| immigration due to covid restrictions. The primary driver is
| low interest rates enabling cheap debt, not "supply".
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Lack of supply due to zoning restrictions is undoubtedly a
| huge part of it.
| Thuggery wrote:
| Undoubtedly? I've never seen any real proof of it. It's
| just kind of a mantra. Housing pricing continues to be a
| problem in every first world country's urban center. Do
| they all have the exact same "zoning?" And why now? Did
| this evil zoning just get enacted now for presumably
| pointless evil reasons?
|
| "Zoning" to me seems to be a modern version of "kulaks" for
| neoliberal types that just can't grok that there is
| something fundamentally rotten in the entire system. And
| have no real practical solutions to fix it.
| rce wrote:
| Thanks for mentioning interest rates as well. Though I don't
| know that it counters the original point. Things can have
| multiple causes. Both limited supply and low interest rates
| can be major contributing factors.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Many HN posters are California based, and apply the weird
| nuances of that market with everyone.
|
| The demand side of capital is underrated because it's hard to
| see. Normal folks don't realize that managers of large funds
| are doing previously impractical things like buying suburban
| subdivision homes because they have access to unlimited
| capital and can offload/distribute risk.
| foobar33333 wrote:
| The prices in Australia are based on forecasted demand. Since
| there is almost a 100% chance that the population of tomorrow
| will be greater than today, that means you can buy on higher
| prices than current demand. Unfortunately that means houses
| can be considered worth almost infinite dollars since the
| population will keep going up.
| mmerlin wrote:
| Let's not forget the Liberal Party recently throwing out
| the fairly-newly-enacted loan suitability consumer
| protection laws, so that the mortgage brokers could reduce
| compliance and go back to the boomtime days of being the
| legal human shields (plausible deniability buffer) for the
| banks to allow larger and larger liar loans, which are 1 in
| 3 source... abc.net.au and anectodally, I subleased my
| office from a mortgage broker for years, saw how much they
| fiddled the figures for people to get MASSIVE loans they
| will never pay off.
|
| I also recoded a lot of their compliance CRM for them when
| these now-discarded consumer protection laws first came
| into effect.. and was shaking my head in disgust at
| Frydenberg... no wonder Hayne would not shake that man's
| hand...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2019/feb/01/awkwar
| d...
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| > Since there is almost a 100% chance that the population
| of tomorrow will be greater than today
|
| This is of course already priced in today
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That may be technically true, but it misses the fact that the
| demand pool is larger than it should be - it consists of many
| other actors than just people who want to live in a given
| location. Those other actors tend to have more money.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| Who exactly are you talking about?
| bo0tzz wrote:
| Investment types
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Investors who do not rent out locally - including those
| renting out to tourists, those keeping empty homes for
| occasional vacation use, those keeping empty homes because
| they're playing financial shenanigans (moving money
| offshore, money laundering, keeping some properties empty
| to prevent depressing rents from nearby properties).
| Probably some other groups I'm not even aware of.
|
| Point being, it's not true that all supply of homes ends up
| being used by people to live in. A lot stay empty most, or
| all, of the time. People owning those tend to have more
| money than locals looking for a place to live, so the
| latter get priced out.
| qeternity wrote:
| This is a really really small part of demand. And unlike
| dwellers, investors have alternatives to invest in if
| prices get too high.
|
| But investors are really not the main problem. If you
| banned housing investment, prices would hardly budge.
| swiley wrote:
| Deport illegals and halt immigration?
|
| Or genocide followed by an ethnostate?
| helge9210 wrote:
| > Deport illegals and halt immigration?
|
| Halting immigration will result in shrinking economy.
| bombcar wrote:
| A shrinking economy will drop house prices.
| jlokier wrote:
| And reduce average incomes. I wonder which one drops
| faster.
| HappyTypist wrote:
| Without regressing to another ad-infinitum housing discussion,
| real estate involves two markets: rentals/living, and
| ownership.
|
| Some people want to own their own home and live in it (owner
| occupiers); these people however compete with investors who are
| seeking to rent it out. While investors don't directly affect
| the rentals market (as you'd expect an owner-occupier to not be
| a renter), they do push the price of housing, because housing
| becomes more of an investment (competing against everything
| else with zero / negative interest rates).
|
| Progressive taxes on investors can mitigate this and make home
| ownership more affordable. First property, no tax. Second
| property, 1% of its land value charged annually. Third
| property: 2% of its land value, etc...
| sudosysgen wrote:
| That's just not true. Many people just want to live. They
| will rent or buy.
|
| Housing supply is housing supply. There is scarce distinction
| in real life between rental and occupier owned housing.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| I don't follow your logic. In both cases, home ownership or
| rental, you need one house per interested party. Why should
| one be more expensive than the other?
|
| And why should politics decide for people whether they should
| rent or buy, I mean, why push them in one direction or the
| other?
| HappyTypist wrote:
| If you make residential investment more expensive (through
| taxes), you will have less interested investors. This
| reduces the number of interested parties for home
| ownership, which means that the remaining parties (i.e.
| owner occupiers) pay cheaper prices.
|
| Taxes are often used to discourage behaviour society
| believes to have negative externalities. For example:
| tobacco excise taxes; and also in the other direction (e.g.
| concessions for long term capital gains; which is supposed
| to encourage 'investment').
| imtringued wrote:
| Yeah in this case investors are punished for investing
| into space inefficient single family homes. Multiple
| apartments on a plot reduce the tax burden of the land
| value tax. So big investors will primarily invest in
| multi family housing.
|
| In general taxes are regressive and people want to avoid
| them. If you tax regressive behavior the most, people
| will stop doing it.
| qeternity wrote:
| It's not two markets. It's one market with two different
| models (like cars: buy vs lease).
|
| There is an arb between the two markets which should hold
| them in tandem on a risk adjusted basis.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Then you just get thousands of holding companies.
| postingawayonhn wrote:
| You can just use a simpler land tax system.
|
| Owner occupier properties exempt. Investor owned properties
| X% per year.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I wonder wouldn't it be just simpler to ban private land
| ownership in cities.
| mattmanser wrote:
| A significant number of people need, for various reasons,
| to rent.
| imtringued wrote:
| This idea is slightly better than a land value tax but
| implementing it is a financing nightmare. You'll have to
| spend the entire government budget on buying all private
| plots of land.
| iso1210 wrote:
| Or just have a simple X% per year no matter who owns it
| postingawayonhn wrote:
| That should work to lower prices but will also increase
| costs for home owners. If the goal is to increase home
| ownership rates then giving them an advantage in the
| market can help.
| imtringued wrote:
| The point of a progressive land value tax is to relieve
| individuals not corporations. Corporations can simply get
| the maximum rate.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| So be really aggressive about associating holding companies
| with their owners for the purposes of this tax.
| mnd999 wrote:
| You're forgetting investors who don't want to rent property.
| They just by new properties, keep them empty and pristine and
| profit of the rising market value of the asset. Sounds crazy
| but it's definitely a thing in London. It should attract very
| high taxes to make it unviable but of course it doesn't.
| proxyon wrote:
| This is a conspiracy theory that financially illiterate
| people love to parrot. There is no benefit to keeping a
| property vacant on purpose. It incurs opportunity cost,
| which is the cost of rent. The only reasons a property may
| remain vacant is either due to regulations, incompetent
| management or maybe money laundering (an actual crime) in
| which case collecting rent would impose a burden on the
| money laundering operation. By no means is this common, it
| is an extreme exception and bringing it up in these
| conversations is a goofy platitude by people who know
| nothing about real estate. It'd be like talking about the
| supply of automobiles and bringing up "but what about cars
| destroyed at monster truck rallies or used on movie sets?
| it's limiting the supply of automobiles!"
| Ginden wrote:
| Is it actually a thing? When I checked vacancy rates for
| several cities, all of them were really low.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| It surely is already very expensive to leave an apartment
| empty as it is. There also seem to be special circumstances
| and laws in London.
|
| But lets assume the worst, that it is all just pure evil
| capitalist speculation: even that is not necessarily bad.
| They try to anticipate future demand. So they anticipate
| that in the (near) future, somebody will need that
| apartment even more urgently than the people looking for
| housing right now. So it is better to keep it available for
| those people in the future. Think about keeping ICU units
| ready for future Covid patients for an analogy.
|
| So what if the speculators are right, and the future buyers
| really have a higher need than the current ones?
|
| Also I think if there really is just speculation,
| especially foreign investors, why not build cheap houses
| and sell them to the speculators for a lot of money? Nobody
| will ever live there (according to the anti-capitalists),
| anyway. Seems like a good way to make money for a country.
| leppr wrote:
| It's common in my city as well. The reason is tenants can
| stop paying and are protected by law enforcement from being
| evicted. That's not even talking about straight up
| squatters. This makes renting out often non-economically
| viable, when adjusting for risk.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| These evil bogeymen are something people believe are very
| common, but I can't find any solid data on their prevalence
| in London. People also claim these guys are ruining NYC
| real estate, but our vacancy rates are below 5%, and most
| of the places that are vacant are not long term vacant.
| Aunche wrote:
| Yeah. I was looking to rent a NYC luxury apartment
| recently and noticed that any reasonable deal gets
| snatched up very quickly. These apartment complexes do
| feel empty because the residents tend to be childless, so
| maybe that's where the confusion would come from. It's
| sad to see more and more people these days are in denial
| of basic economics. It's strictly better to rent an
| apartment out because otherwise you're getting nothing
| from paying management and taxes.
| reallydontask wrote:
| >It's strictly better to rent an apartment out because
| otherwise you're getting nothing from paying management
| and taxes.
|
| Renters can choose not to pay rent, can cause untold
| damage to the property and can use it for illegal
| purposes to name but a few reasons why it might be
| rational not to rent a property out, specially if it's an
| appreciating asset.
|
| I suspect that the majority of these empty properties are
| owned by wealthy people from countries like China or
| Russia.
| antiterra wrote:
| The evidence is all circumstantial because it's difficult
| to definitively prove someone owns a property with
| absolutely no intent to live in it or rent it.
|
| Further, the properties held purely as assets are
| generally very expensive ones. The effect ripples down,
| well heeled people move into cheaper housing and those
| people moving in turn.
|
| This is nearly 8 years old, but generally describes the
| issue with some specifics:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/31/inside-
| londo...
| anchpop wrote:
| > The evidence is all circumstantial because it's
| difficult to definitively prove someone owns a property
| with absolutely no intent to live in it or rent it.
|
| Vacancy rates are extremely low. That puts an upper limit
| on the amount of people that could be doing that. Is it
| not easy to tell if a home is vacant?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| How are vacancy rates calculated? I have a feeling it's a
| statistic that doesn't correspond to reality well.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's much more common in commercial real estate but
| people confuse the two.
|
| Some very select markets may have an actual problem if
| foreign money laundering is a thing (as I've heard is
| true of Vancouver).
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Yeah, I have noticed lots of commercial vacancies in NYC.
| My understanding is that this is because the leases are
| so long and thus the prices are not as adaptive.
| bombcar wrote:
| And commercial loans are VERY dependent on "building
| income" which is calculated based on lease rates, even if
| not "leased" in some cases.
|
| Lowering rates can cause loan problems.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Makes a body wonder why buildings don't just sell their
| ground floor real estate to get it off the books. There
| must be some reason, otherwise they would, but it seems
| like a neat solution to the problem.
| theli0nheart wrote:
| This goes right back to supply. Real estate prices don't
| exist in a vacuum; ultimately someone will buy said
| property who wishes to live there and will have decided so
| due to it being the best of all options.
| sagichmal wrote:
| > Progressive taxes on investors can mitigate this and make
| home ownership more affordable
|
| In Germany home ownership is not seen as strictly positive in
| the same way it is in the US for example. Many, perhaps even
| the majority, of Germans go their whole lives as renters.
| parasight wrote:
| Buying the apartments is a short term solution to take pressure
| off of low income tenants. This is not about supply and demand.
| Increasing supply is a mid to long term solution.
|
| By the way, land is also limited in Berlin and therefore
| expensive. Makes building cheap apartments difficult.
| daverol wrote:
| Sometimes there is no intention to build, just use the German
| market as a cover for a ponzi scheme, see
| <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55077709>
| qeternity wrote:
| > By the way, land is also limited in Berlin and therefore
| expensive. Makes building cheap apartments difficult.
|
| This is the other reality of free markets and scarce
| resources: if there is only so much land in Berlin, and lots
| of people want to live in Berlin, then it means some people
| won't be able to. That's just the reality. Unfortunately that
| means people who can't afford have to move. As sad as that
| is, we don't have a better system for allocating scarce
| resources sustainably.
| djbebs wrote:
| Land is limited for political reasons.
| hezag wrote:
| Unless you are talking about borders or about the concept
| of property, land is not limited for political reasons.
| It's limited for physical reasons.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Tempelhof_Airport
| iso1210 wrote:
| The number of apartments per square metre is limited by
| political reasons (ban on high buildings, minimum size
| etc)
|
| 20 years ago when I moved to London I'd have loved to
| find a tiny self contained Japanese style 10 square metre
| apartment[0], which is cheaper (in actuality, not just
| inflationwise) and far nicer and featureful than the HMO
| I ended up in.
|
| https://www.livingbiginatinyhouse.com/tiny-house-
| tours/tiny-...
| brigandish wrote:
| > Thankfully, some clever design elements allows the
| micro apartment to be a very functional and cosy home.
|
| Does anyone who has lived in Japan and abroad think there
| is anything "cosy" about Japanese housing?
|
| It's cramped, of poor quality, and manages to be colder
| than the outside in winter and warmer than the outside in
| summer. I've seen some crap properties in London but
| Japan takes the biscuit.
| thazework wrote:
| Berlin's population hasn't increased significantly since the
| end of WW2. There may be desirable areas that are experiencing
| demand spikes but the price increase seems city wide. Why is
| supply more of an issue right now? It is a question of (money)
| supply.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Only if you think that the demand for real estate is mostly
| driven by housing needs, and not speculation & monopoly style
| hoarding artificially driving prices higher.
| qeternity wrote:
| Without a doubt, it is not mostly driven by those things.
| Investors have lots of choice about what to invest in. People
| don't have any choice about needing shelter. They will pay
| whatever the price is.
|
| I get that wealthy investors driving up housing prices gets
| people angry and is a good rallying cry. But it's such a
| small piece of demand.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Define small? Even an additional 2-3% increase in supply
| can have quite a large affect on prices.
|
| For example, pre-covid, there was a _vast_ number of vacant
| apartments in NYC.
|
| https://www.6sqft.com/nearly-250000-nyc-rental-apartments-
| si...
|
| But also being in NYC during COVID and watching the real
| estate market react, it feels far from an efficient market,
| as one side has more information, resources and time.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-city-rent-deals-
| lan...
| [deleted]
| bjackman wrote:
| Demand for _homes_ is sticky. Demand for property ownership is
| not at all! It is influenced by speculation and rent-seeking.
| We can easily cripple both those things and reduce housing
| cost.
|
| (Edit: I do agree with your conclusion though. We need more
| homes)
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| The housing market is complex, but one point I would like to
| make, is that if there is now a (global?) opportunity to borrow
| capital, buy houses on a mass scale and rent them out, that
| implies to me that there is a failure in mortgage market -
| families want housing in a location, it is possible to borrow
| money and buy them, but those families don't have access to that
| monet.
|
| This implies
|
| a) inequality in wealth and incomes b) failure to change mortgage
| market to account for higher risk in harder to reach areas (this
| is what savings and loans were literally made for) c) errr d)
| that's it.
| IkmoIkmo wrote:
| > The housing market is complex, but one point I would like to
| make, is that if there is now a (global?) opportunity to borrow
| capital, buy houses on a mass scale and rent them out, that
| implies to me that there is a failure in mortgage market -
| families want housing in a location, it is possible to borrow
| money and buy them, but those families don't have access to
| that monet.
|
| Not sure I see the issue. Renting and owning has very different
| risk profiles, which is why you'll find people can rent a place
| they're unable to buy.
|
| The risks are with loss of income, e.g. due to job loss,
| sickness etc. Such things are somewhat inevitable in the span
| of a 30y mortgage. In such a situation the tenant can move to
| more appropriate alternative housing, e.g. moving to a smaller
| home, a home that's not as well located, sharing a home with
| others, friends, family etc.
|
| In the case of an owner it gets trickier, typically the person
| would eventually be forced to sell the house to be released
| from the contractual obligations to pay the mortgage. The risk
| events' probabilities correlate, i.e. you're more likely to
| lose your job in an economic downturn, as does everyone else,
| which means home prices are more likely to be low during an
| economic downturn, meaning a forced-sale during such times can
| mean you're selling your home for less than the value of the
| loan, leaving you not only out of income, out of a home, but
| also with a sizeable debt.
|
| In other words, there can be reasonable explanations for why a
| government could buy homes and rent them out to tenants who can
| afford the rent, while those same tenants could not afford an
| equivalent mortgage.
|
| Second, I think it'd be very sensible to assume that the
| government is not going to be renting out these units at market
| rate. In other words, they're subsidising the tenants, with
| taxpayer money. That's why the rent would be affordable, but
| the purchase would not, for the tenants. If anything that
| implies this decision is lowering the effects of inequalities,
| due to in-effect a redistribution of wealth from rich to poor.
| Leparamour wrote:
| I'm a bit surprised. I thought the referendum over this wasn't
| due for another week, since there will be general and state
| elections next sunday.
|
| This looks like a hail mary move before elections could have
| switched up majorities and brought a change in administration. As
| a born-Berliner I'm highly critical of this populist move, that
| was mainly organized by transplants who demand stuff for free all
| the time: UBI AND open borders. Unfazed by the fact that somebody
| will have to foot the bill for socialist cloud castles
| eventually. These people will move back to their hometowns when
| they have made the living situation in Berlin become untenable,
| for me it's my home and where all of my family lives.
| markenqualitaet wrote:
| The above comment is propaganda. I doubt the person is from
| Berlin or lives there still.
|
| The Deutsche Wohnen Enteignung campaign has broad and diverse
| support across the population. This was actually proven in an
| investigation for possible "radical left" influences, suggested
| by the conservative opposition.
| Leparamour wrote:
| >The above comment is propaganda. I doubt the person is from
| Berlin or lives there still.
|
| Haha, what? I should probably be grateful you didn't outright
| call me a Nazi or something. If you're in fact involved with
| the campaign feel free to ask around where your fellow people
| are from originally.
|
| How about you? Real Berliner? Or do you move back if Berlin
| doesn't pan out for you?
|
| For instance, I haven't met a single signature collector that
| was native to Berlin and boy have I been engaging them in
| discussion when I ran into them every day while commuting
| between Neukolln and Friedrichshain.
|
| >The Deutsche Wohnen Enteignung campaign has broad and
| diverse support across the population.
|
| This is actual propaganda.
|
| >This was actually proven in an investigation for possible
| "radical left" influences
|
| Explain this then:
|
| https://interventionistische-
| linke.org/beitrag/unterstutzt-m...
| linuxftw wrote:
| Socialized housing only creates slums. Tenants have no incentive
| to keep the place nice, government rationing of maintenance
| ensures they degrade faster than the government is willing to
| spend to keep them functioning. Anyone that can afford better
| moves out. Eventually (not that long), only destitute remain.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore
|
| Relevant quote "In 2008, Singapore was lauded by the United
| Nations Habitat's State of the World's Cities report as the
| only slum-free city in the world"
| FredPret wrote:
| This, 100%. Then a new generation grows up in said slum with
| its attendant effects on their development and the cycle
| worsens
| nicoffeine wrote:
| That's why Vienna mixes subsidized housing and regular
| housing, often in the same building. They also allow families
| to stay in their housing or purchase it as long as they pay
| the higher rate related to their rising income.[1]
|
| The problem in the US is that there is no gray area for
| subsidized housing. As soon as you hit some magic number, you
| lose _all_ of your benefits. The people who game the system
| to stay under this number are not stupid, but acting
| rationally because they know their new job may not stick
| around. They would rather have housing security than take a
| chance at losing everything and living in the street until
| their tax return shows that they are poor again.
|
| [1] https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/2019/09/housing-
| basic...
| kebos wrote:
| I'll take social housing over the homeless problem you get in
| countries without large social housing stock 100x.
|
| Maybe some % of people just aren't going to break the cycle.
| I'd still rather they aren't homeless and causing decay on
| the streets.
| beckman466 wrote:
| > Socialized housing only creates slums. Tenants have no
| incentive to keep the place nice
|
| > destitute
|
| It sounds like you're one of those people who looks down on
| marginalized groups for no reason. Stop poor-hating.
| nicbou wrote:
| Berlin has a few city-owned housing companies [1] that provide
| above average service. You'd be much happier with DeGeWo than
| with Akelius.
|
| [1] https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/find-a-flat-in-
| berlin#hous...
| mnd999 wrote:
| Sometimes that happens, but not always. Take the Barbican
| centre in London as a very well known counter example.
| odiroot wrote:
| It's a part of the City though. Not sure it's comparable.
| postingawayonhn wrote:
| I think that very much depends on whether government owner
| housing is a last resort for the poor or open to wider sections
| of the population.
| imtringued wrote:
| This is an unhealthy opinion because it goes too far into
| either extreme.
| acd wrote:
| Corporate landlords are speculating on housing with central bank
| artificial lowered interest rates.
|
| Its also maybe not in accordance with UN human rights article 17.
|
| "Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in
| association with others."
|
| If a corporation owns the property and you have to rent then it
| may not be in compliance with article 17.
|
| https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If a corporation owns the property and you have to rent then
| it may not be in compliance with article 17.
|
| A corporation is a vehicle for owning property in association,
| so denying it the right to use itd assets to acquire property
| would arguably violate Article 17, as would not permitting such
| associative ownership vehicles.
|
| The _right_ to own property doesn 't imply the _means_ to
| individually afford the particular quantity, class, or specific
| item of property you desire, only the freedom to use the
| resources you have to acquire property.
|
| EDIT: OTOH, if the market conditions the government allows to
| persist make adequate housing (not necessarily ownership)
| unaffordable, after whatever social support is provided and
| considering the cost of other necessities, it is a violation of
| Section 1 of Article 25. "Everyone has the right to a standard
| of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and
| of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical
| care and necessary social services, and the right to security
| in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood,
| old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his
| control."
| aomobile wrote:
| Didn't they sell government housing before? Anyway this is
| probably a bad idea as governments are bad landlords and
| taxpayers will get the bill eventually
| jdiez17 wrote:
| I know some people living in apartments owned by the Berlin.
| Their experience with state-owned rental agencies is much
| better than most private landlords. FWIW.
| oreilles wrote:
| Except contrary to any other landlord, the government doesn't
| expect to earn money but to have a balanced budget. This is why
| medical expanses are much higher in the US than in any European
| country. This is why all basic necessities should be controlled
| by the government. Water, roads, internet, housing.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| Medical staff in the US also has much better pay than in
| European countries with a socialist health care system. And
| if you are insured, the costs don't matter that much.
| msrenee wrote:
| Oh yes they do. I've got "good" insurance and have such fun
| when I get a surprise bill for $150 for talking to a
| specialist for 15 minutes when I thought it would be a $25
| copay under my plan. Costs a couple grand if I end up in
| the hospital. $25 every time I see a doctor. That adds up
| when it takes 4 visits over 2 weeks to figure out what the
| problem is and what medication I need. And the insurance
| itself isn't cheap.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| Why don't you know the costs upfront? "Socialist
| insurance" doesn't automatically cover everything you
| want or need, by the way. Rather, there is a government
| mandated list of things that are covered.
|
| There are presumably different types of private
| insurances, sometimes it makes sense to agree on "self
| pay" for small amounts, sometimes it doesn't.
|
| Also if "socialist insurance" would cover your 15 minute
| talk, you would never know it cost 150$. You would just
| wonder after a while why the health care system always
| seems to be on the brink of collapse.
| imtringued wrote:
| Isn't that because of the socialist restrictions on medical
| staff training in the US? The salaries are high because of
| a lack of workers.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| I'm not in the US, but afaik they provide the best
| medical care in the world.
|
| Socialist restrictions of course also exist in
| "socialist" systems like here in Germany. There also
| seems to be a constant shortage of workers in health
| care.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| mgbmtl wrote:
| Not all governments are inefficient, and not all types of
| public housing are cheap. See Vienna. It can work.
|
| Where I live (Montreal), a very common model is housing
| cooperatives. Funds help build or buy property, then gets
| converted to housing rental coop. It's not perfect since not
| everyone wants to manage a building, but it works fairly well
| overall.
| Leparamour wrote:
| >Not all governments are inefficient
|
| Unfortunately Berlin administration is infamous for this,
| across all parties.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| A lot of people are saying that housing supply needs to go up to
| resolve the problem. This is essentially correct! But the market
| is not doing it, so government intervention is reasonable. The
| government should buy land, construct a whole bunch of high
| quality housing on it, then rent it at below market rates. Rents
| in the rest of the city will collapse downward to compete.
|
| Problem solved. This is the same tactic that the us government
| used to make electricity cheap in the 1930's with the
| construction of the grand coulee dam.
|
| Edit: Look: governments all over the world are willing to plow
| unlimited amounts of money into the stock market when rich people
| are in trouble. But when young people just starting out can't get
| an affordable apartment, somehow nothing can be done.
|
| Let's get real. This is a matter of _priorities_.
| chii wrote:
| > rent it at below market rates
|
| if the gov't rents it out at "below market rates", a black
| market would form to take the arbitrage profits (legal or
| illegal).
| fallingfrog wrote:
| By that logic, the construction of housing by the private
| sector would never make rents drop either. There's no
| difference whether the government or the private sector does
| it.
| ryan93 wrote:
| In the first scenario the housing supply is fixed. in your
| hypothetical housing supply is increasing
| postingawayonhn wrote:
| No, with sufficient supply all owners/landlords will have
| to drop their asking prices. Problems tend to arise when a
| portion of landlords keep their prices artificially low.
| luckylion wrote:
| > The government should buy land, construct a whole bunch of
| high quality housing on it, then rent it at below market rates.
|
| They can't, because they'd need to zone that land for housing
| use (a different part of the government is responsible and
| won't do it) and they'd have to relax the regulations for
| building houses to make it cheaper (another different part of
| the government is responsible and won't do it). You can't spend
| your budget on subsidized housing if you also want schools,
| infrastructure and low tax rates.
| [deleted]
| fallingfrog wrote:
| Low tax rates for existing landowners are not the goal here;
| low rents for young people are what you want. One makes the
| city grow and thrive, the other just allows old or rich
| people to have big piles of money.
|
| I said high quality housing, not crappy housing. No need to
| relax regulations or fiddle with zoning.
| luckylion wrote:
| No, I meant tax rates in general. Berlin levies lower
| business taxes compared to other German cities, complains
| that it has less tax income and gets subsidized by the
| other German states while still complaining about being
| poor. It's an act, they could just raise taxes, but prefer
| not to.
|
| > I said high quality housing, not crappy housing.
|
| Okay, so what services should be cut to pay for high
| quality housing and then rent it out below cost? Schools?
| Fire fighters? Social programs?
|
| And since zoning should not be a concern, do they just
| build over parks?
| fallingfrog wrote:
| You _raise property taxes_ to pay for it, you don't cut
| anything.
|
| You build it in zoning that is designated for housing.
| luckylion wrote:
| > You raise property taxes to pay for it, you don't cut
| anything.
|
| But that's my point. Berlin is _not_ raising taxes and
| there 's absolutely _no indication_ that they will change
| that. If they wanted to spend more money, they 'd either
| have to raise taxes (not going to happen) or get even
| more subsidies from the other German states (unlikely,
| because they're already getting billions per year, and
| those who have to pay aren't too happy about Berlin's
| wastefulness).
|
| > You build it in zoning that is designated for housing.
|
| They don't have enough areas zoned for housing, and they
| aren't even issuing enough building permits for the
| required amount of apartments that need to be built
| _right now_. How would that be changed? Do we just clap
| twice and voila, government suddenly works efficiently
| and the red tape gets cut back to reasonable levels?
|
| The problem is that people want more housing, but they
| don't want denser cities, they don't want construction
| sites, and they don't want parks and open spaces to be
| converted into housing zones. _Especially_ in Berlin,
| people are extremely against new development, see
| Tempelhofer Feld.
| pomian wrote:
| But if you raise property taxes, then the rental rates
| must go up, to pay for those taxes. That's one of the
| problems in many North American cities, where yearly
| rising local city taxes can make housing unaffordable.
| luckylion wrote:
| Absolutely, property taxes are pretty much always "passed
| on" in Germany as well.
|
| Berlin still has plenty of rope in business tax though,
| which is a significant part of local funding in Germany.
| Their strategy has been to undercut comparable cities by
| a good margin to attract businesses that might move to
| Berlin, while at the same time complaining about not
| having enough tax revenue and needing financial support
| from both the German federal government and the other
| German states.
|
| But since they benefit from the current setup, there's no
| incentive for them to change it.
| postingawayonhn wrote:
| In popular cities around the world zoning is the main factor
| limiting housing supply. Governments are actively intervening
| to constrict supply.
| enaaem wrote:
| In many Asian countries you can just buy a townhouse, break it
| down and built a flat. Something like that would be unthinkable
| in the West.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Indeed, quite a number of countries don't have a concept of
| zoning at all, or nowhere near what it is in US.
|
| Most of South Asia lives with nearly completely unregulated
| construction. _Somebody just building a very narrow highrise
| on their townhouse plot is nothing unheard of, if not quite
| popular._ Google Dhaka, or Karachi.
|
| Most of China's villages near big cities in the south are
| chock full of self-constructed 5-10 storey apartments.
|
| Wealthier South East Asian countries are starting to flex
| bureaucratic muscles on that, but I believe rather
| cautiously. A highrise flat, even completely illegally
| constructed, is way better than a slum, by any measure.
| nkmnz wrote:
| The construction market is heavily regulated in Germany. The
| government is actively suppressing the creation of supply by
| issuing permits very slowly (or not at all) due to zoning laws
| and similar bureaucracy, or due to financial reasons: in a lot
| of places, the city itself is already the biggest owner of
| housing. They would reduce the value of their own assets.
| djbebs wrote:
| Government intervention is literally the reason the market is
| "not doing it"
| sagichmal wrote:
| This is... obviously not true?
|
| Demand exists at a lower end of the market, where there is
| less incentive for suppliers. There is no affordable housing
| stock being created. Government exists for things precisely
| like this situation.
| harryh wrote:
| Imagine car suppliers were only allowed to build 1M new
| cars per year (in the US, consumers currently buy about 17M
| new cars per year). Suppliers would no doubt use their
| limited quota to produce high end cars for the richest
| customers.
|
| This is essentially the situation housing suppliers have in
| many major cities. The solution isn't government built
| housing. Private suppliers are perfectly capable. The
| solution is to lift the quotas.
| sagichmal wrote:
| What quotas are you referring to?
|
| Is your claim that fewer regulations would result in a
| net increase in affordable housing stock?
| harryh wrote:
| Zoning.
|
| Yes.
| beckman466 wrote:
| > Imagine car suppliers were only allowed to build 1M new
| cars per year
|
| Analogies like this don't work and you know it.
| harryh wrote:
| There is plenty of evidence that housing supply is
| significantly limited by zoning regulations in lots of
| places. And in those places the little bit of
| construction that does happen tends to be targeted to the
| top of the market.
|
| So I'm not just making an analogy. I'm reasoning from the
| available evidence.
| [deleted]
| nicoffeine wrote:
| Posted in another thread, but there is a very interesting theory
| about why Germany has stable housing prices compared to other
| nations. This funding model may also explain why local
| municipalities are against multi-family housing, which is driving
| sprawl and unwalkable zoning policy in the US.
|
| 'Local German officials, like local leaders everywhere, seek
| bigger budgets to provide more and better services to their
| constituents. What's different about Germany is that the way to
| get bigger budgets is to increase local populations. And, as
| Professor Buettner says, "Ultimately, to get people,
| municipalities will need to support housing."
|
| The result is a system of incentives that is the opposite of
| "fiscal zoning"--the US practice of zoning land in ways that
| maximize local governments' income and minimize their costs. In
| places with high sales taxes, such as Washington State, leaders
| zone more land for shopping centers. In places where residential
| property taxes are capped, such as California, they zone less
| land for homes and more for offices. In affluent suburbs, they
| often zone land for houses on large lots, excluding low-income
| people.
|
| Maximizing property values is such a central concern of local
| government in the United States that Dartmouth economist William
| Fischel developed the notion into an entire political theory. His
| "homevoter hypothesis" holds that local governments are almost
| single-mindedly focused on maximizing real estate values, because
| homeowners typically vote their home values in local elections.
| German jurisdictions gain financially by maximizing population,
| not house values, and because renters outnumber homeowners in the
| country, homevoters are not the dominant electoral force in local
| German elections. Renters are.'
|
| https://www.sightline.org/2021/05/27/yes-other-countries-do-...
| sagarm wrote:
| I'm very confused: if you want to have more residents in your
| city with a fixed amount of land, then you need multifamily
| housing. Walkability is also associated with density and
| benefits from multi-family and mixed use zoning.
| yunohn wrote:
| Not sure how much of a real change this will make, but man, what
| a bad deal for taxpayers. They shouldn't have allowed rampant
| corporate ownership in the first place, but now they're going and
| spending public money on overpriced real estate.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| At average price of approx.160 000EUR per apartment it can be a
| good deal if financed with debt. Market value for those
| apartments is likely much higher and city-owned property firms
| can borrow very cheap. The only question is, whether this debt
| should be used to fix a short term problem with increasing
| rents or to invest in building more city-owned apartments.
| Besides, this deal may discourage investors, which may see
| property market in Berlin as low margin due to artificially
| limited returns.
| abliefern wrote:
| > spending public money on overpriced real estate
|
| What gave you that idea? The transaction is explicitly budget
| neutral, this is entirely financed by loans that will be
| covered by rental income.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| Who carries the risk if rental income dries up? Exactly, the
| tax payer.
| cnorthwood wrote:
| is this necessarily a bad deal? Governments can normally raise
| capital at significantly lower interest rates than the private
| sector, so if the private sector was making a profit on this,
| then the public should be able to do too, and then re-invest
| that into public services
| imtringued wrote:
| The government sold public housing and then bought (other)
| units that have appreciated in value.
| endymi0n wrote:
| Here in Berlin, the measure has large support and I don't know
| why. It's mostly because the measure is called ,,disowning"
| corporate landlords, which seems to resonate with everyone
| being angry at the rents.
|
| Had they called it ,,paying out the last decade of profits to
| corporate landlords to keep the rent of 5% of Berliners instead
| of building new housing to lower the rents of 95% of Berliners"
| (which is what's planned), I guess it would have way less
| support. It's a populist market rigging measure just as futile
| as the failed rent control and I'm not looking forward to the
| impact on the city.
| andi999 wrote:
| I totally don't get it. Why not use that money to build more
| apartments instead. Why take on the liability with these
| apartments beiing asbestos contaminated and needing more
| money to get rid of this. Too me there is the stench of
| corruption but I don't have evidence. My Hanlons razor is not
| sharp enough to cut this here though.
| wearywanderer wrote:
| It's obviously corruption. Corporate landlords get to
| offload their dodgy property to the government and run away
| with the cash, without the usual time and expense of
| selling each property on the market. By cynically cloaking
| themselves in populist language, they're able to easily
| manufacture the consent of the public.
| andi999 wrote:
| To me the consent of the public is even more shocking.
| Leparamour wrote:
| > To me the consent of the public is even more shocking.
|
| Is there even consent? The referendum (Volksentscheid)
| hasn't happened yet. I wonder how this haphazard move by
| the current Red-Green coalition Berlin city
| administration is even legitimate when the referendum is
| only due more than a week from now. Unless this was done
| to pre-empt losing at the ballot box.
| corty wrote:
| Berlin doesn't care about money. Back when separated by
| the iron curtain, Berlin always got a special deal in
| federal/state finances because of its situation. After
| reunification, Berlin was pumped full of money because it
| was the new designated capital city and showpiece for
| unification. Nowadays, some of the special deals still
| remain, plus Berlin is awarded absurd amounts of money
| from the "Landerfinanzausgleich" (state finance balancing
| mechanism), meaning that the richer German states pay for
| Berlin's deficit.
|
| So Berlin is in the comfortable situation of that one no-
| good family member on social security who will always
| find someone to pay their bills. Why change anything, why
| stop spending all that money, if more keeps coming
| without any effort in any case?
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Nobody wants new apartments in their neighborhood because
| the fear is that those would drive rent prices up.
| tmamic wrote:
| That is like saying more fruit stores on the street will
| drive the fruit prices up.
| RobertoG wrote:
| This is a complex issue. if you add apartments for the
| same number of citizens prizes should go down, but that's
| hardly the nature of the system we are working with here.
|
| If you have a busy highway and add more lanes will
| traffic jams go down?
|
| This is a complex issue.
|
| https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/06/21/the-science-is-
| clear-...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
| ric2b wrote:
| > If you have a busy highway and add more lanes will
| traffic jams go down?
|
| Yes, but perhaps in neighboring/older roads instead of
| the fancy new lanes on the highway.
| vetinari wrote:
| Nobody wants new apartments in their neighborhood because
| increased density decreases quality of life of those who
| already live there.
|
| There's no upside _for them_ (remember, they already have
| apartment, they don't need another), only downsides.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Ignoring the corruption question, building housings does
| NOT lower rent. It's complicated.
| llampx wrote:
| Possibly the stupidest thing I've read
| tmamic wrote:
| Where did you get that from?
| moonchrome wrote:
| I don't get why he's being downvoted - although maybe too
| general of a statement, I can completely see how new
| development in an area could actually drive rent prices
| up - development also affects demand - from
| gentrification to things like opening business and
| infrastructure scaling making the area more attractive.
|
| I've seen this happen in my city - there's a really
| renowned developer building high quality mixed
| residential-buisiness complexes - as soon as they started
| building a new site the surrounding prices went up, this
| happened in all of their projects I've looked into.
|
| But they are the most extreme example. I'd guess that
| most of the neighborhoods that are seeing active
| development are increasing prices faster than the rest of
| the market.
| tfehring wrote:
| The research I've seen (e.g. [0] [1]) consistently shows
| a modest decrease in rent prices for existing renters
| when new housing is built. Are there studies showing the
| opposite that I'm not aware of? I understand that there
| are two competing effects at play (which [0] calls an
| amenity effect vs. a supply effect) but my impression is
| that empirically the latter seems to reliably outweigh
| the former.
|
| [0] https://blocksandlots.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/02/Do-New-...
|
| [1] https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01055
| PixelOfDeath wrote:
| This is a standard corruption pattern in Germany. Sell
| state infrastructure for Cents and buy it back for Euros.
|
| Take for example our Federal Printing Office
| (Bundesdruckerei).
| blablabla123 wrote:
| But it's also a symbolic value, that something is
| fundamentally changing. 15000 apartments isn't that much for
| Berlin but a billion is.
|
| Of course more apartments are needed and Berlin needs to grow
| in height and diameter. But also there is no point in
| landlords hardly putting any efforts in to keep apartments in
| good shape. Needed repairs and modern upgrades are labeled as
| luxury renovations which is just a total distortion of
| reality. At the same time there are small, non-corporate
| landlords which put in more effort, are more approachable but
| who in reality invested in a casino-like asset. IMHO real-
| estate makes only sense for institutional investors, private
| or governmental because any single error can be financially
| disastrous and needs to be averaged out.
|
| That's why I backed the bill but I hope everyone is working
| towards something better...
| pas wrote:
| If these corporations don't keep their end of the bargain
| (ie. they don't maintain the buildings), then sue them
| and/or fine them. No need to buy them out.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| Sure, but it's more than frustrating to go to a lawyer
| for a service you are supposed to just get, even if you
| can get free consulting through an insurance. That's why
| most people don't jump through those hoops and work-
| around it themselves. (I.e. do nothing usually which is
| bad for both parties)
|
| Also there has been a general official agreement so far
| that modernizations justify higher rents. Which is just
| nuts because why would a one-time investment justify a
| basically indefinitely going increased rent...
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| > Here in Berlin, the measure has large support and I don't
| know why.
|
| This fits perfectly into the recent "eco, socially
| responsible, ev, wind and solar power, fridays for future,
| throw the baby out with the water green party support, take
| from the rich-give to the poor, 100kph Autobahn speed limit,
| we need to be the best example in the world at whatever cost"
| mental state of Germany. It doesn't have to make sense. It is
| what it is.
| mqus wrote:
| The "disowning" part is somewhat different from the current
| transaction though. It will be decided by referendum if the
| "disowning" actually happens and at least the proponents say
| that Berlin should not be paying market rates for the
| apartments.
|
| The article mentions a different deal that was struck
| separately without a referendum. I think there is not much
| support for buying back apartments for such prices.
| corty wrote:
| Problem is, "not be paying market rates" will never happen.
| Market rates will be paid, because disowning anyone for the
| public good is only constitutional, if market rates are
| paid as restitution. There have been lots and lots of cases
| around disowned people lost by the state because of that.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| There are often ways around that. For example the state
| can manipulate the markets, or offer an alternate choice,
| for example to never raise rents ever.
| secondcoming wrote:
| This is happening now in the UK. Lloyds bank [0] and John Lewis
| [1], a retailer, are both planning to tap into this revenue
| stream.
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/19/lloyds-
| plan...
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jul/04/john-
| lewis-...
| dazc wrote:
| I am all for big businesses moving into buy to rent. There
| are far too many amatuer landlords in the UK making a living
| by renting out poor quality housing.
|
| My office landlord also has two small flats above (think
| glorified bedsits) and his partner also rents out a tiny
| cottage. This is their living (aprox. PS3k a month), neither
| works or has any other business, all from a 'portfolio' of
| properties that maybe cost PS150k twelve to fifteen years
| ago.
|
| As an example of market inefficiency, multiply this across
| the country and it's not hard to argue that the housing
| market is severely broken.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I too have no issues with large business getting involved
| with rentals. As long as it is clear for everyone involved
| that housing should be low margin business. That is very
| low, but relatively safe returns and mostly not from
| appreciation of assets.
| bjackman wrote:
| A lot of comments in this thread about corporate buy-to-let
| seem reasonable, but only under the nihilistic assumption
| that prices cannot fall and home ownership must be
| perennially out of reach for the median earner.
|
| What about instead of shifting from private parasitic
| landlords to corporate parasitic landlords, we just let
| people buy the homes they live in (by enacting one of many
| possible policies to limit the profitability of BTL and
| thus reduce competition for homebuyers)?
|
| It just doesn't seem to make any sense to try and apply
| free market principles to housing. There's absolutely no
| benefit.
| lifty wrote:
| If we wouldn't have a centrally planned monetary system
| that is trying to avoid deflation at all cost, I would
| agree with you. So for now, it seems that assets won't be
| allowed to go down because it would blow up the debt
| based system that we have built. Central planning begets
| more central planning.
| kiba wrote:
| This is exactly the kind of solution I favor in the states. Buy
| up properties, build or expanding housing supply, and then
| either continue to subsidize it or sell it back to the market
| while imposing land value tax.
|
| Why? Because the problem is lack of political will. You can't
| expand housing supply if nobody wants to.
|
| It's a piecemeal solution until we figure out something better
| or that society is willing to support public housing
| initiative. Otherwise, we would be waiting forever for
| entrenched political opposition to die or the situation to
| worsen over time.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| Or, you could simply allow private entities to build housing.
|
| I am sure especially in those "hot" areas where prices are
| spiralling out of control, there is no shortage of entities
| with the "will" to build.
|
| That is usually the point behind markets, rising prices give
| an incentive to increase supply.
| yunohn wrote:
| There's always real estate developers willing to build. The
| problem is that they never want to build affordable
| housing, only massively profitable housing. Also, an
| underlying problem is usually lack of land - a limited
| resource by nature.
| ryan93 wrote:
| If they build luxury apts rich people take those freeing
| up crappier apts for middle income people and so on.
| Silicon valley millionaires dont want to spend 2.5
| million on shitty 50yr old homes, but they cant get new
| ones built
| yunohn wrote:
| Thanks for this non-insightful comment and derailing a
| post about Berlin into yet another SV rant.
| kiba wrote:
| You need to realign incentives. You can't do that now if
| homeowners and investors don't want to allow housing.
|
| Resetting taxes to LVT means that improvements on land
| won't be disincentivized. Buying them out means they get a
| lot of cash and won't be so opposed to you lowering the
| value of their owned property.
|
| Also, the government will be able to afford to focus on
| cheap housing, not what makes them the most money, since
| their focus isn't private profit.
| fnord77 wrote:
| in SF, the wholesale cost for building a unit is $800-900k.
|
| private entities will only build luxury housing in these
| conditions
| foepys wrote:
| This is one of the reasons why all new housing is in the
| luxury category in Germany as well.
|
| Building codes have become so strict that it's not
| worthwhile to build affordable housing for private
| investors. Especially since the government pays
| incentives (or rather gives out very low interest loans)
| to build houses of the highest energy standard.
|
| Why build a "cheap" house when you can build a more
| expensive house with subsidies that has a lot higher
| resale value later?
| kiba wrote:
| Why are building code so strict? Are they 'necessary'?
| How much benefit do these building codes provide?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Note that there is a lot of lobbying involved in the
| building code. An example:
|
| What if a kid ran into a balcony glass and broke it,
| hurting or killing itself? Better demand that balcony
| glass be reinforced (and more expensive, _to a great
| delight of the glass factories!_ ) just in case. Even in
| old folks' homes.
|
| No one wants to be known as the child killer, so here is
| a new demand making the construction a bit more
| expensive.
| shkkmo wrote:
| That seems perfectly reasonable to me. I expect balcony
| railings to be sturdy, they exist precisely to prevent
| accidents. As long as there is no regulation mandating
| railings be made of glass, I don't see any problem. I've
| only ever seen glass railings on the houses of people who
| can afford to pay someone else to clean them (i.e luxury
| housing) so I don't see how that makes it harder to build
| affordable housing.
| rcpt wrote:
| > build luxury housing
|
| The most luxurious housing is single family homes. Is
| that all they're pitching in SF now?
| awild wrote:
| Berlin has been a hot market for a long time, what's been
| built has been a lot of very expensive apartments. There is
| actually some leerstand but they are luxury apartments
| without renters. The biggest thing the market has achieved
| in Berlin is allowing landlords to rent out shitty
| apartments at abhorrent prices (25sqm at 600EUR) without
| incentive to actually provide good services for the renters
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| It would surprise me if Berlin is permissive with respect
| to permitting new housing. It would be quite unique among
| desirable western cities if it did. When the amount of
| new housing allowed is insufficient to keep up with
| growth in demand, obviously developers are going to
| tackle the most lucrative segment of the market, since
| they can essentially pick their buyers. If there were ten
| people who want new cars but you have one import permit,
| and your cut is 10%, are you going to import the luxury
| car or the econobox?
| awild wrote:
| I agree and that's why I think the problem cannot be
| solved in private hands but with communal ownership.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| If you permit enough new housing to satisfy demand, that
| would also solve the problem. As long as insufficient new
| housing is being built, prices will go up on market rate
| housing. The lucky few who manage to get into price
| controlled housing will have better prices, but everyone
| else will face higher costs or be unable to live in a
| region entirely.
|
| One thing is for sure: as long as any private housing
| ownership is allowed, rich people aren't going to be the
| ones left high and dry.
| awild wrote:
| The amount of new apts would be dramatically high to curb
| prices and make them realistic again. And Berlin is
| probably also not able to magically create as much new
| living space as is needed in that short of a time frame
| especially given the developers unwillingness to build
| affordable housing. I think where we probably
| fundamentally don't agree is that not all things need to
| be provided through a market. (or I think my point is
| more so that we've at least observed it not reall working
| here, so we could at least try a different strategy or
| multitudes and see how far those take us)
| [deleted]
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| > The amount of new apts would be dramatically high to
| curb prices and make them realistic again
|
| I'm fine with short term patches to help with the acute
| issues, but fundamentally unless a lot of housing is
| built, there are going to be some people suffering in the
| housing market. Either it will be poor people paying a
| lot for housing, or it will be poor people who are unable
| to win lotteries to get into public housing who then
| cannot afford housing at all. Whether the housing is
| publicly or privately owned is just pushing sand around
| the sandbox. It just changes exactly who the winners and
| losers are, but not the number of people losing.
|
| > I think where we probably fundamentally don't agree is
| that not all things need to be provided through a market.
|
| I don't hold this belief. There is no fundamental
| disagreement on this score between us.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| The problem is: who gets the cheap housing in communal
| ownership? Supply is limited. So if you don't pick the
| person who is willing to pay the most, who do you give
| the apartment to? Who gets to decide? Are you sure you
| want to live in that kind of world, where some political
| elite gets to decide your fate?
| awild wrote:
| There is already communal property in Berlin and all over
| Europe. Its not some grim socialist dystopia. They serve
| under the same conditions as private companies just don't
| have to completely bend over to shareholders wishes.
| Vienna the city for example is the biggest landlord in
| Europe.
|
| Obviously we need more housing but until then we also
| need to ensure that people with normal incomes can also
| afford to live _in_ the City.
| [deleted]
| yunohn wrote:
| > Are you sure you want to live in that kind of world,
| where some political elite gets to decide your fate?
|
| Whenever people say stuff like this, I wonder if they've
| ever taken a moment to look around themselves and see
| that it is already that way. The current housing problem
| is also orchestrated by the same political elite...
| xyzzyz wrote:
| There is a difference between policies making your
| desired place more expensive, and being literally
| dependent on some corrupt government officials, who is
| handing out apartments as favors for allies, or just for
| bribes.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| A number of public housing here in Berlin is reserved for
| people making less than a certain amount, having no job
| at all, or working/living in precarious situations. You
| can apply for that status at the local gov. It is not
| flawless, of course, but it at least avoids segregation.
|
| I live in a district that was originally working class,
| and is being very fastly gentrified now (yuppie myself I
| guess), and it just sucks that people who've lived here
| all their lives have to move to completely new
| environments because this is now an area desirable
| desirable for rich people.
|
| Same with small businesses, one of my favorite bars
| closed down recently due to some English billionaires
| wanting to turn the house into higher margin living. Vice
| did a documentary on it called "Punks vs. Billionaires".
| For the people living here, who live in small flats and
| still pay half their income to it, these "living room"
| bars, where you do not have to buy to be welcome were
| absolutely essential. But they all get destroyed now.
|
| Almost all new private housing is for richer people,
| because they are the most profitable, and lots of them
| move over at the moment. The state needs to step in to
| make sure that normal people can still live a decent life
| around here, too, lest we become a horror show like
| London.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| The argument of the empty apartments in Berlin comes up
| all the time, but it is a myth. Maybe in London it is
| different, for various reasons, but in Berlin, that is
| not the reason for the issues. [1]
|
| Even if only new luxury apartments are being built, it is
| more housing that takes pressure off the market. The
| wealthy people can move into those apartments, freeing
| their old less luxurious apartments for "poorer" people.
|
| And there is no "free market" for housing here - it is
| very difficult to build, with lots of regulations.
|
| And who wants to invest, when the government will seize
| your assets as soon as you are successful? Last year they
| introduced a hard cap on rents, that applied no matter
| how much you paid for the house you wanted to rent out,
| and no matter where it was located.
|
| In two weeks, there will be a public vote to seize
| thousands of flats at "way below market value" (quote
| from the voting sheet) from corporate landlords. These
| are not conditions where a "free market" can do its
| thing.
|
| As a matter of fact, only big companies have the means to
| build under such conditions, it is much too risky for
| smaller entities.
|
| But then, sure, blame the evil capitalists for the issues
| your socialist government has created.
|
| [1] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/wohnungsnot-
| leerstand-in-...
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Even if only new luxury apartments are being built, it
| is more housing that takes pressure off the market.
|
| Luxury housing construction can help, but can't really
| fix the issue on its own because it is also a relatively
| inefficient and expensive method of increasing the
| housing supply (since each added unit has high costs.)
|
| This problem is one that a large number of municipalities
| have failed to solve. It seems very difficult to get the
| regulatory and tax incentive structure setup just right
| to get sufficient affordable housing built in large urban
| areas.
|
| > As a matter of fact, only big companies have the means
| to build under such conditions, it is much too risky for
| smaller entities.
|
| I would think that governments have the scale to take on
| those risks as well. At some point, I think it makes
| sense to stop struggling to get privately build
| affordable housing and do it publicly.
| vonmoltke wrote:
| How is it that there are "luxury apartments without
| renters", yet landlords get away with " rent[ing] out
| shitty apartments at abhorrent prices"? Why don't the
| people who can afford those shitty apartments move to the
| empty luxury ones instead?
| Kliment wrote:
| Because they're not on the rental market, but are mostly
| used as a value store by owners that don't live anywhere
| nearby, and have multiple properties.
| geitir wrote:
| Maybe impose a tax on unoccupied apartments past a
| certain number
| Jenk wrote:
| > you could simply allow private entities to build housing.
|
| London is the poster boy for exactly why you don't do this.
|
| The result is builders and landlords buying up land,
| "delaying" (often indefinitely) building the homes to
| artificially drive up the prices of existing housing, or
| building tiny, tiny, apartments in huge hive-like blocks
| and towers, with insane prices.
| dnissley wrote:
| Nobody lives there anymore. It's too expensive.
| blub wrote:
| The prices are spiraling out of control everywhere that's
| even moderately desirable. In a city in the BW part of
| Germany which has ~20k inhabitants and is nearby another
| city with ~200k inhabitants there's new 3 room apartments
| for sale for around 400.000+ EUR.
|
| The sales prices in BW and many other areas of Germany are
| simply ridiculous.
|
| And they are building: a few dozen lots are being offered
| by the city and there's dozens of takers per lot.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| Then they are not allowing to build enough if there are
| dozens per lot?
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| If you give real estate developers too much of a free hand,
| they will plaster over every bit of common space with
| cramped flats or other abominations. There's even a word
| for it in Polish - "patodeweloperka". It's most prominent
| in Cracow (alleged ties of real estate companies with local
| officials), also in Warsaw and its suburbs. In Gdansk, it's
| suspected that many old unused buildings in attractive
| areas had an "accidental" fire.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I looked at some of the new construction in Wroclaw
| (arguably not Cracow) and it seemed fine to me.
|
| If I could sustain my work from abroad, I would be
| tempted to move to Wroclaw, actually. Unfortunately I
| need access to cheap shipping to Czechia, which means
| being in Czechia or at least going there pretty often.
| gregorygoc wrote:
| Define "fine". People want to start the family, but
| private real estate developers build shitload 40m^2, 1
| bedroom flats (as they're the most profitable). I'd argue
| the current housing market is definitely not "fine" for
| them.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Why not just let private developers build apartments. They
| have the capital, know-how and will to do it. All that needs
| to happen is government and councils getting out of their way
| with zoning restrictions and the problem will fix itself as
| if by magic.
|
| I agree on the land value tax part of what you said, though.
| gregorygoc wrote:
| Because private developers optimize for their profit, not
| creating high quality area of living. You can look at what
| the full fledged free market is doing to largest cities in
| Warsaw. It's a shit show.
| kiba wrote:
| The problem is not government and councils but all the
| homeowners who don't want any development. Buying them out
| incrementally is hopefully a way to remove political
| opposition.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| The problem is councils and governments that are
| controlled by homeowners who vote in NIMBY restrictions.
| The reason there aren't apartments going up everywhere is
| that it's literally illegal to do it, not that a
| developer is finding it difficult to find eight adjacent
| single detached homes to buy up in one go.
| robert_foss wrote:
| There's nothing preventing them from building now, yet they
| are not.
|
| What would incentivize the building of low or medium income
| housing, when higher profits can be made from high income
| housing.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| The BauNVO stipulates restrictions on building height and
| on floor area relative to land area. Are you sure it's
| legal to build a 30-storey apartment in a residential
| zoned area in Berlin without needing to get some special
| exemption or permit?
|
| In the US and many other countries, the reason is
| definitely local government restrictions. Developers
| would love to build more high-rise apartments - it's very
| profitable to them - but they're not allowed to in many
| areas. In the area I'm living in, it is illegal to do it.
|
| The incentive picture is not as you're portraying, and we
| can look to other industries for counter examples. If
| there's profit to make, the market will fill those shoes,
| even if there's "more profit" (which I don't agree is the
| case always due to volume) serving wealthier customers.
| Consider the market for low-margin cheap restaurants in
| poor areas, and the market for high-end dining in rich
| areas. These are both very well served markets. The
| market will almost always find profits where they're to
| be had, especially in an industry like real estate
| development.
| imtringued wrote:
| Baden Wurtemberg is introducing a modified land value tax.
| It's probably the biggest political win of the decade.
| notatoad wrote:
| >You can't expand housing supply if nobody wants to.
|
| it's wrong to say "nobody" wants to. the problem is that the
| homeowner class holds all the political power, and so there
| is no greater political sin than decreasing the cost of
| housing (or "lowering property values" in homeowner
| terminology). if anybody cared what non-homeowners thought,
| there'd be plenty of will to build more housing. as long as
| so many people's net worth is tied to their housing, there
| will be no appetite for lowering the cost of housing.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Maybe this is just me being a filthy capitalist, but it also
| seems somewhat fair? If cities are instituting rent controls
| on properties that were previously market rate, that is a
| targeted form of wealth expropriation. To be clear, I'm not
| one of these "taxes are theft" people -- we do have to pay
| shared costs. But there's a continuum of acceptability: it
| would clearly be wrong to pass a law that raises taxes on one
| person by name. And it's clearly ok to raise taxes on
| everyone.
|
| For me, instituting rent controls is towards the less
| acceptable end of this spectrum. If the city believes it
| ought to be able to set prices on an apartment, it should own
| that apartment first. Just my unenlightened gut feeling on
| this issue.
| yunohn wrote:
| > it would clearly be wrong to pass a law that raises taxes
| on one person by name
|
| What do you mean? There are innumerable such taxes,
| globally. You definitely need to tax various people &
| businesses differently, it's the only real solution.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| I am not aware of any examples where a country taxes a
| single individual at a higher rate than everyone else by
| law. If examples are innumerable, I'd be grateful if you
| could provide one.
| yunohn wrote:
| Where are you getting this strawman of taxing "single
| individuals"? I'm saying that classes of people or
| businesses are already taxed differently.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| > Where are you getting this strawman of taxing "single
| individuals"?
|
| Could you please reread the section of my comment that
| you quoted and your response to it? I said, "it would
| clearly be wrong to pass a law that raises taxes on one
| person by name," and you said, "there are innumerable
| such taxes, globally." You very specifically did not say
| that classes of people or businesses are taxed
| differently. You said single individuals are taxed
| differently. (You might not have intended to, and if not,
| well enough, but I set up no strawman in my comment.)
| bombcar wrote:
| Iirc the first income tax targeted a very small number of
| individuals- maybe just Rockefeller or something, as
| nobody else qualified.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| I believe it, although at least then it's still targeting
| a class that others might enter. I do also believe that
| there's a fundamental difference between income taxes and
| wealth taking in this regard, in that one is retroactive
| and the other isn't.
| jounker wrote:
| Yeah, the shouldn't have allowed rampant corporate ownership.
| Now is a great time to remedy that. Given the city's continued
| growth, in ten years that real estate will look like a great
| investment.
| refurb wrote:
| The market for housing sets the price. Whether it is owned by a
| family, a landlord with one property or a corporation doesn't
| change the price.
| rastafang wrote:
| Around here, corporations buy a lot of homes and rent them so
| that probably affect prices.
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| "overpriced" is accurate. People complaints of rising rental
| prices, but property prices have skyrocketed to a much faster
| pace.
|
| A realignment is going to be due at some point in the future:
| either rental price will have to catch up faster, which would
| fuel more discontent, or the real estate will have to
| "collapse" ...
| HPsquared wrote:
| What will happen, I think, is a large amount of inflation.
| Prices of everything else (including wages and rent) will
| increase substantially, but house prices will stay
| (nominally) about the same.
|
| That way, they cease to be overpriced but the owners avoid
| negative equity.
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| Maybe. That would be a pretty bad scenario. Just less bad
| than anything else, I guess.
| asoliveira wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| After the leftists start to fuck up the real estate market with
| rental cap, statization, and other threats. The real estate
| investment fled the city.
|
| Now it's almost impossible to find an apartment in Berlin
| anymore.
|
| This populism is ruin the city, which needs to build new
| residents for the incoming influx of migrants.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Go to London. Then you'll see if the free market can provide
| what you want. It doesn't.
| ric2b wrote:
| It has provided quite a few high rise buildings that are
| used by a lot of people. That will keep happening as long
| as it is allowed, making it possible for more people to
| enjoy the city.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| (more rich people). Average people are not living there
| and they are getting increasingly squeezed. But if that's
| your goal, I guess we fundamentally disagree then.
| jounker wrote:
| Yeah, the shouldn't have allowed rampant corporate ownership.
| Now is a great time to remedy that. Given the city's continued
| growth, those purchases are a solid investment.
| llampx wrote:
| I don't think so. In investment terms, i believe the taxpayer
| is being forced to buy back these apartments closer to a top
| than a bottom.
| est31 wrote:
| The worst is: just a couple of years ago, in 2013, the (mostly)
| publicly owned BayernLB has sold 32 000 condos/rentals to a
| private owner for extremely cheap prices: around 77 thousand
| euro per rental.
|
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayerische_Landesbank#GBW-Verk...
| (German)
| foepys wrote:
| In 2008 the state of North Rhine-Westphalia sold ~93,000
| apartments for about 8,500EUR each to Goldman Sachs. The
| reasoning was that the apartments were in bad shape and
| renovations would be expensive.
|
| It's ridiculous how concerned politicians, especially
| conservatives, act now.
|
| https://rp-online.de/nrw/panorama/leg-mieter-in-
| sorge_aid-11... (German)
| blub wrote:
| They got 3x what they expected and still it didn't dawn on
| them that they were missing something. At first sight this
| goes off the stupidity chart into evil territory.
| y4mi wrote:
| pretty sure you can expect most politicians to be evil.
|
| if you understand german, Rezo [1] did an interesting
| video last month about similar corruption
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIj3qskDAZM
| est31 wrote:
| > for about 8,500EUR each to Goldman Sachs.
|
| The article you linked mentions debt in height of 2.7
| billion EUR. Means that the actual purchase price was about
| 375k _37.5k_ per apartment.
| foepys wrote:
| If you factor that in, it's ~38,000EUR/apartment, you got
| an extra 0 mixed in somewhere. Those debts should've
| never existed in the first place. It's public housing, it
| should not make profits and rather break even.
|
| Nowadays the investor makes huge profits despite the 60
| year rental agreements the state negotiated for the
| renters and the required 12.50EUR/m2 per year
| improvements. How was the state unable to break even?
| It's a mystery.
| est31 wrote:
| Oh right, my bad, it's been 38k per apt. I've edited the
| comment. Indeed that's very cheap. As for debt never
| existing, it's pretty common to leverage in the real
| estate world.
| harryh wrote:
| Corporate ownership of housing is good. Every time I've rented
| from a corporate landlord, it's been great. They're organized,
| have staff, fix problems promptly. Every time I've rented from
| an individual owner, it's sucked. They are undercapitalized,
| don't know what they are doing, and hem and haw over every tiny
| repair expense.
|
| Economies of scale are real.
| GoodJokes wrote:
| You live in bubble and are failing to look at all aspects of
| your situation including your own wealth.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Can you explain how wealth status of renters affects the
| competence of corporate landlords?
|
| FWIW, I've also had nothing but good experiences in
| corporate-owned/managed housing.
| bildung wrote:
| You get the best of both worlds with housing cooperatives,
| where the tenants are also collective owners of the units.
| Those are pretty common in Berlin and the rest of Germany (at
| least Eastern Germany).
|
| You have a large enterprise giving tenants the advantages you
| described, while also removing the incentive to rise rents on
| every possible occasion.
| jagger27 wrote:
| I wish there was more of this in North America. It's either
| rent and own nothing, get soaked by a condo corp, or own a
| McMansion freehold out in the burbs.
| 41209 wrote:
| It's also much easier to avoid scams.
|
| Plenty of individual owners will rent out units they don't
| actually own , rent it out while in foreclosure, etc.
|
| That said, always see the unit first. Avoid luxury
| apartments! Get the cheapest place in the best neighborhood
| dgellow wrote:
| When I was in Berlin I got the exact opposite experience.
| Same in Hamburg. Are you actually talking about Germany?
| klyrs wrote:
| I've never had a prompt and responsive landlord. But at least
| with an individual, you get the responsible party on the
| phone. With property management companies, you need to
| navigate the corporation in order to get work done, and some
| are quite skilled at putting stupid barely-legal obstacles in
| your way.
|
| > Economies of scale are real.
|
| Agreed. Try getting google on the phone for support.
| fspeech wrote:
| Actually it depends on the line of business. It is quite
| easy to get Google on the phone for Google Fi for example.
| As for their "free" services, you are not their real
| customer but the product they sell.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It's famously hard to get any kind of support for GCP and
| the Android store as well, so I'm not sure this applies
| only to their "free" services.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| I had my deposit stolen recently by a large corporate
| landlord in SF when COVID lockdowns started.
|
| Large corporate landlords are the ones who calculate the
| legal costs of massive abuses and do it anyways.
| rcpt wrote:
| California small claims court costs like $50. If you win
| there's a permanent ruling against the landlord.
|
| It's worth going through the process just to learn. It's
| also crazy how difficult it is.
| pgeorgi wrote:
| Ownership moves from corporate to communal, which also
| manages several thousand units already. There's no individual
| owner involved in this scheme.
| beiller wrote:
| Yes but looked at another way, this is taxpayers
| subsidizing real estate investment. The act of buying all
| the units by the government actively raises the collective
| price of real estate making it an even more lucrative
| investment.
| the_other wrote:
| The taxpayers should also gain from any appreciation of
| the housing stock, no? Seems like a reasonable, if very
| abstract, take on community ownership (on paper).
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Short term, many people gain from artificially inflating
| the value of goods in a supply restricted market, but
| that is just market manipulation, no real value added.
| Those apartments will be demolished one day and the value
| will drop from $100,000 to $0 in a second.
| Kiro wrote:
| So it moves from one landlord to another. In my experience
| (in Sweden) the communal landlords are no different from
| corporate, and most people don't even know if their
| landlord is communal or corporate.
| yunohn wrote:
| Believe me, I've lived in both individual and corporate owned
| rentals. I fully agree that the latter are better organized,
| and economies of scale are real.
|
| But I'd much rather nobody invest in housing, and governments
| handle scaled affordable housing - so that there's
| accountability and no profit motive.
|
| P.S. Please no replies claiming anything run by the gov will
| fail; those are boring and called whataboutism.
| harryh wrote:
| Government run housing can have its own problems too. For
| example in Singapore, there have been huge issues with gay
| couples being unable to rent housing. This can happen with
| some private landlords too, but at least in that situation
| there can be multiple suppliers and you only need one to
| rent to you.
| yunohn wrote:
| While we're using anecdotes, corporate owned housing can
| have issues too. They discriminate against renters with
| low income, unstable jobs, mixed-race families, etc etc -
| examples from "first world" Netherlands, where companies
| like MVGM own majorities of rental housing.
| klyrs wrote:
| > While we're using anecdotes...
|
| Shallow dismissal. Singapore discriminates against LGBTQ
| couples as a matter of policy. Just because it doesn't
| affect you doesn't mean it's an anecdote.
|
| https://the-singapore-lgbt-
| encyclopaedia.wikia.org/wiki/Publ...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| It's completely legal for private landlords to
| discriminate against LGBT people in housing federally in
| the US, as well as many states, counties and cities. And
| it happens quite often.
|
| There's also the Fair Housing Act exemptions, where small
| private landlords with fewer than about 4 units, or
| landlords that share buildings with their tenants, can
| ignore the discrimination limits imposed by the FHA.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| It's still an anecdote. Corporate housing discriminates
| against poor people and people of colour as a matter of
| incentive, which is no different in practice.
|
| In any case, it doesn't change anything, if Singapore is
| oppressing LGBT people they will do so government owned
| housing or not.
| foldr wrote:
| Sorry but it's just not an anecdote. It's government
| policy, as you can easily determine by googling. It's not
| like we have to take one person's word for it that this
| is happening.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The argument is not about Singapore. You're making the
| argument that it's not a good idea to have government-run
| public housing (presumably in Berlin/US/UK) because one
| government somewhere they did something bad through that
| they could have done even with private housing.
|
| It's an anecdote for your argument. If the argument was
| "did Singapore discriminate against people through
| housing" it wouldn't be. If the argument is "should we
| have public housing [here]" then it's an anecdote. You'd
| have to show that this would happen in the place in
| question. If you want to make a general statement, you'd
| have to make that clear and make the case that in such
| countries landlords wouldn't discriminate against you for
| being LGBT (which they absolutely do).
| foldr wrote:
| I'm not making any argument about whether it's a good
| idea to have government run public housing. I think you
| have me confused with another poster.
|
| Your definition of 'anecdote' seems way off to me. We're
| talking about an objectively verifiable data point. Just
| because it doesn't fully confirm some argument that
| someone's making doesn't make it an anecdote. Check the
| dictionary definition.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Anecdotes are objectively verifiable data points. The key
| is that they are a single data point and can't be used to
| make a general argument because of that. It's a single
| interesting story about an event. That is a valid
| definition of "anecdote".
| foldr wrote:
| Housing discrimination against LGBT people in Singapore
| isn't a single story, it's government policy.
|
| The definition of 'anecdote' has nothing to do with
| arguments. 'Anecdote' isn't a back formation from
| 'anecdotal argument'.
| wyre wrote:
| I think Singapore discriminating against LGBTQ is the
| bigger deal than Singapore owning the housing.
| wearywanderer wrote:
| It's all part of the same deal for people living in
| Singapore. They don't get to pick and choose which
| aspects of the government they want (democracy in
| Singapore is a farce.)
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Sure, but that goes to show that "state ownership" simply
| means very different things in a democratic state vs a
| non-democratic state. Democratic state ownership is a
| kind of public ownership - the voters have some amount of
| control over the state, and through the state, over the
| owned resource. Non-democratic state ownership is a kind
| of private ownership - the dictator(s) have direct
| control of the resource, and the voters have no more
| rights to control state-owned property than corporate-
| owned property.
| harryh wrote:
| Indeed! As I acknowledge in the last sentence of my
| comment. Because of these things, I think the healthiest
| housing markets are those with a good mix of suppliers
| (both govt and private). Supplier competition comes with
| many benefits.
| yunohn wrote:
| My point about MVGM and the rental corporations mentioned
| in the post, is that they're massive and bordering on
| mono/duopolies. That reduces the "mix of suppliers"
| you're talking about. Moreover, most corporations act
| similarly when driven by profit, so it's a false choice.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| A non-democratic state like Singapore is very different
| in discussions of state-provided services compared to
| mostly democratic states.
|
| A democratic state is, ideally, controlled by the people
| who live under its rule. As such, services provided by
| the state are, to some extent, under the control of these
| people, who can use their political power to influence
| those services directly in various ways. In contrast,
| people don't generally have any right to change the way a
| private entity chooses to do business, as part of the
| basic definitions of property rights. Basically, people
| often want public ownership, and use the idea of state
| ownership as the mechanism to achieve that.
|
| This difference though changes completely when discussing
| an authoritarian state like Singapore (and even more so
| in dictatorial states). The benefit of democratic control
| that is expected from state ownership in democratic
| states doesn't exist if there is no democratic control of
| the state in the first place (this is one of the reasons
| it is absurd to talk about the USSR as "socialist", when
| all economic activity was in fact controlled by a state
| that was in turn controlled by a ruthless dictator). In a
| non-democratic state, state ownership is just as much
| private ownership as corporate ownership.
|
| Of course, the problems get even more complex when you
| have a quasi-democratic state that is nevertheless
| actively discriminating against certain groups of people.
| dustintrex wrote:
| The vast majority of public housing in Singapore is
| owned, not rented. However, government policy is that
| subsidized flats are only available to married couples,
| and thanks to colonial-era British laws still in force,
| in Singapore that means only a man and woman.
| wearywanderer wrote:
| The quasi-fascist PAP has ruled Singapore with
| authoritarian force since the 1950s. They have the
| uncontested power to change any old British law they
| wish. If they haven't, it's because they've chosen not
| to. If you want to point fingers, all fingers in modern
| Singapore should be pointed directly at the PAP.
| foldr wrote:
| >and thanks to colonial-era British laws still in force
|
| These laws could easily be repealed. The root cause of
| the problem is that Singapore is still a pretty
| homophobic society. (Also, did Singapore have same sex
| marriage before British Colonial rule?)
| wonnage wrote:
| The worst is renting a condo and then something affects your
| unit that requires the HOA's involvement... might be faster
| just to move out.
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| Meanwhile, every time I've rented from a corporation the
| property management has been evasive and incompetent, punting
| issues down the road and fixing issues with as little effort
| as possible (often leading to lasting damage and more
| expensive repairs down the road). All of the private owners
| I've rented from have been incredibly helpful, quick to deal
| with issues, and willing to flex on move-in/out dates, month-
| to-month terms, etc.
|
| Sometimes it's about the personal touch, not "economies of
| scale."
| rcpt wrote:
| > the personal touch
|
| landlords. Give me a break..
| igobyterry wrote:
| Oddly, I agree with you.
|
| When I rented from a personal landlord, when the dishwasher
| was leaking water across the kitchen they told me it was my
| problem to replace it with a like model as it must've been
| my abuse. I barely cook so I have no idea what I could've
| done wrong.
|
| When I rented from a corporation it was no questions asked,
| even when I was at fault. They were even proactive with
| things like filters for the heating/cooling.
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| My takeaway? Private owners and corporations can _both_
| be total jerks to renters. Generalisations about them
| will (generally) miss the point.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| Hm. This is a US-centric website discussing a piece of news
| from Berlin. Which country are you speaking about?
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| That's my experience in the US cities I've lived in --
| NYC and Denver. As discussed in another comment, the
| truth of the matter is probably closer to "neither
| private owners nor coporations are universally good or
| bad."
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| In 2004 the state of Berlin sold 65000 flats for 405 million
| euro. Now they are buying 14700 flats for 2.46 billion euro.
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSW_Immobilien . Back then they
| had the same coalition in power as today, the taxpayers money
| at work.
| bildung wrote:
| The important context here: The conservatives who were at
| the helm pre 2004 created a big banking crisis that brought
| Berlin on the brink of insolvency, which forced the state
| to sell a bunch of public property:
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_Bankenskandal
| (German only, sorry)
| bdowling wrote:
| > In 2004 the state of Berlin sold 65000 flats for 405
| million euro.
|
| So, the average price per flat was EUR 6,230. That sounds
| impossibly low. Or were these distressed, dilapidated
| properties?
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| In the same period or a bit earlier, hundreds of
| thousands of apartments in Bucharest and other major
| cities were sold at preferential prices (read: heavily
| discounted) to the renters. It was a populist measure,
| people bought apartments and sold them a year later at
| 4-5 times the purchase price.
|
| Also the old Communist era small apartments were cheaply
| build and without much value. 6000 euro looks low, but I
| bought in 1998 from the open market an apartment for
| $13,000 (the transaction was in USD). These days, that
| apartment is around 3-4 times more expensive (I don't
| have it for many years), but it is still small and poorly
| insulated. "small" means less than 50 square meters, one
| living room and one bedroom.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Back then the general sentiment was that Berlin was going
| to shrink. A lot of high-rises were razed in the eastern
| districts, others were converted into low-rise buildings
| as part of the "Stadtumbau Ost" program.
| hristov wrote:
| What you are missing is that corporate ownership makes it
| much easier to raise rent. It is very hard for 100 000
| individual small time landlords to collectively raise rent in
| normal conditions (i.e., with no housing shortage). Many will
| lower rent to get their properties rented faster. But if you
| have a dozen or so large corporate owners it happens almost
| automatically.
|
| This is very simple and well understood economics. If you
| lower the number of providers of a good or service they gain
| bargaining power.
|
| Large corporations work very hard to make sure there is as
| large as possible number of providers of every item they buy
| and every service they use. But somehow when it comes to
| ordinary people, we are supposed to pretend it is a good
| thing. No, it is not a good thing.
| nohuck13 wrote:
| "It is very hard for 100 000 individual small time
| landlords to collectively raise rent in normal conditions
| (i.e., with no housing shortage). Many will lower rent to
| get their properties rented faster. But if you have a dozen
| or so large corporate owners it happens almost
| automatically."
|
| Yes, a 100,000-firm marketplace forces participants to be
| price takers.
|
| Yes, a 1-firm marketplace allows the firm to arbitrarily
| raise rents.
|
| Why do you think a dozen-firm marketplace "automatically"
| tends toward the latter?
|
| A dozen seems like a pretty high number. Explicit OPEC-
| style cartels are illegal (I assume) under anti-trust law
| so we're talking about about some pretty implicit forms of
| collusion.
| humaniania wrote:
| It's not good. It's better than awful. What a horrible way to
| decide how to structure society. Landlords are parasites that
| expect their tenants to pay >100% of their mortgage costs
| every month or they'll be heartlessly ejected into the
| street.
| computerphage wrote:
| I mean, as opposed to other businesses where owners expect
| customers to pay <100% of the costs of the product?
| thrav wrote:
| There's a bit of a difference here, in that the landlord
| is also coming out the other side with an appreciating
| asset, not pure costs and the consumer coming out of the
| transaction with the asset.
| humaniania wrote:
| The landlord gets 100% of the appreciation as well as
| 100% of the equity being built by the mortgage payments
| while the tenants are forced to pay for everything except
| the initial investment. It's extremely unfair and hurts
| the most vulnerable people in society.
| willcipriano wrote:
| So it is services generally that you have a problem with?
| wallacoloo wrote:
| > the landlord is also coming out the other side with an
| appreciating asset
|
| This isn't true of services in general. Are you reading
| the comment you're responding to, or are you just being
| belligerent?
| willcipriano wrote:
| The restaurant isn't disassembled when you leave, when
| you eat a meal at a establishment you pay for the upkeep
| of a building that will grow in value over time and yet
| receive no upside. If you take an Uber, you pay the auto
| loan of the person driving you. I guess a pure service
| like housecleaning doesn't leave behind a productive
| asset, although the business itself is one.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Obviously you get a hard product when you get a meal. You
| get someone's labour when you ride and Uber and consume
| gas and car.
|
| When you rent, you basically are buying someone else a
| house. You don't get any service in many cases, as the
| landlord can contract our 100% of maintenance and repair
| and still make massive amounts of money.
| willcipriano wrote:
| When you eat at a restaurant you are in the very same way
| also buying them a restaurant. That food will only
| satiate you for a few hours and eventually you will have
| to eat again, having nothing to show for the service. In
| the same way you can rent a house from someone, have
| shelter from the elements for a time and once that
| business has concluded have nothing to show for it.
|
| I don't' advise eating out too much or renting long term
| if you can avoid it. I also don't advise living in a
| major city. You can more easily take the first two pieces
| of advice if you take the third first.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| No, you're absolutely not buying them a restaurant. They
| are fundamentally making money because they provide
| labour in exchange for it.
|
| A landlord is not providing labour. They are acting as a
| middle-man between you and the bank. They provide no
| service to society. A restaurant is, as they provide
| cooked food. One is a zero-sum game, the other is
| actually producing something.
|
| Your advice is frankly shit on the societal level. There
| is no way for everyone to avoid long-term rentals unless
| we do things you are opposed to. Equally it's impossible
| for everyone to avoid living in big cities, the entire
| economy would collapse. It's senseless to punish people
| for doing things that are necessary for our common
| prosperity and interests, such as living in major cities.
| [deleted]
| javajosh wrote:
| That's only the "happy path" (for the landlord) story. I
| had a coworker who enterprisingly rented his old apartment
| to someone, who ended up squatting and forcing him into an
| expensive and drawn-out litigation. The tenant absolutely
| abused him and the California law which favors tenants
| quite strongly. He was a young guy in his 20's, not rich,
| and that woman really hurt him.
|
| And of course there are other risks too; can you imagine
| being an entity that owns lots of commercial for-lease
| real-estate right now?! They must be scrambling to stop the
| bleeding, since Covid has sent demand into the earth.
|
| My point is that being a landlord is not without risk, and
| it's not always an "I do nothing and make money by
| leveraging your fear of homelessness" situation (although,
| granted, this is the ideal state landlord's seek, which is
| itself kinda gross).
| majormajor wrote:
| > My point is that being a landlord is not without risk,
| and it's not always an "I do nothing and make money by
| leveraging your fear of homelessness" situation
| (although, granted, this is the ideal state landlord's
| seek, which is itself kinda gross).
|
| Yep, that's the problem, at least in the US. Ideally we'd
| reduce risk on both sides. Rent control wouldn't have to
| hurt this - your tenant's rent doesn't go up much, but
| your mortgage isn't going up much either.
|
| It's not like small landlords are in position to
| redevelop and increase density anyway, so I'm skeptical
| of arguments about housing stock if you limit the upside
| (and downside!) of small private landlording.
|
| It's often pitched as the most productive investment
| strategy for the middle to lower-upper class. Get one
| property, leverage it into a second, leverage more rents
| into a third, etc. Even in tenant-friendly states! Yet
| it's literally just rent-seeking and landlords riding
| along a wave of demand that they help create (by
| leveraging their properties and rent to acquire more) to
| squeeze higher and higher rents out of people is not
| particularly economically productive overall.
|
| Covid is the first real blip I can remember that's hit
| those landlords so hard, but the truth is many of these
| people are over-leveraged and were in a precarious
| position to start with given the risk. Let's say there
| were no eviction bans: they could evict all these folks
| not paying their rent, and ... try to rent out the units
| to the people that got evicted by other landlords?
| Because they couldn't afford the old market rate in the
| first place? Doesn't that just depress the rental market
| even more?
| klipt wrote:
| > Yet it's literally just rent-seeking
|
| That's not the economic definition of rent seeking.
|
| > and landlords riding along a wave of demand that they
| help create
|
| Demand for owning, yes. But for renting they create
| supply, not demand, in effect helping lower rents.
| majormajor wrote:
| > Demand for owning, yes. But for renting they create
| supply, not demand, in effect helping lower rents.
|
| No supply is created by person A buying a rental building
| from person B. Person A paying a higher purchase price
| does nothing good to the rents charged in that building.
|
| Yes, there is no lobbying or current manipulation of the
| government, but for small landlords it's often just a
| game of "I want to take advantage of population
| increasing over time to make more money over time"
| coupled with "I want to take advantage of other people
| improving the economy so that I can charge higher rents
| as incomes increase." Neither of those are productive,
| and the latter is hard to avoid calling parasitic. They
| don't have the ability to redevelop into higher density,
| or often even do much to change the condition of the
| property. So you get small mom-and-pop rentals in SF or
| similar places that charge far higher prices for far
| shittier units compared to those put on the market from
| larger developers or management companies in, say,
| Marietta, GA.
| klipt wrote:
| But if someone buys a house and rents it out instead of
| living in it, that creates rental supply.
|
| In a free market, pushing up prices of apartment
| buildings would also cause more apartment buildings to be
| built. Of course many places like SF are not a free
| market because NIMBYs block most construction, which
| keeps supply down and prices up.
| majormajor wrote:
| They've still gotta live somewhere. Overall housing
| supply has not been increased.
|
| I actually think this case is worse for the overall
| economy than the rental building scenario!
|
| Perpetual rentership is more economically precarious and
| less stable than ownership. But here we have the folks
| with assets and income sufficient to purchase properties
| buying up _additional_ ones to pull ownership further out
| of reach for more people. So yay, we 've converted a
| property that someone might've otherwise purchased as an
| asset to yet another rental.
|
| I also don't agree with your claim that in a free market
| this would cause (much more rapid) increased construction
| in most cities, given current attitudes about small-
| landlordship. You can't build there without tearing
| something else down first, and small landlords are not
| often going about replacing ten unit buildings with
| twenty unit buildings! That requires a different level of
| capital. In SoCal can see this in neighborhoods in places
| where the current zoning allows, say, 5 story buildings,
| but those new five story buildings are still sparsely
| scattered amongst old two-story buildings that are simply
| too attractive to keep (the dream people are pitched that
| makes them become small landlords isn't "sell everything
| eventually to a developer, it's "passive income".) Small
| landlords made a lot of fuss about earthquake
| retrofitting, a much smaller expense than "kick out all
| my current income-generating tenants and rebuild it all."
| It's been much easier for developers to convert old low-
| density commercial or industrial property, since the
| market is more fluid there (and often with much more
| slack in it, in large cities).
|
| I similarly don't expect a high number of single family
| lots to turn into four-plexes in the next fifteen years
| now that CA has changed zoning on them. It's definitely
| different at four units than two - where duplexes aren't
| selling for any more than SFH currently, since the
| qualitative demand for a true single family home is just
| that much higher - but I don't think it's enough
| different for a significant number of people to want to
| cash out or try to play developer.
|
| (NIMBY's exist everywhere, too - acting like they're
| unique to big expensive cities is self-defeating. The way
| lower-cost-of-living cities have maintained those costs
| is a combination of less demand and more land to expand
| into. If you can build your new mega apartment complex on
| empty land, you don't have to convince those small-time
| landlords or property owners to sell all their separate
| buildings! Dallas County didn't increase in population
| much more rapidly than SF County because of rapid
| increases in density - just look at the Dallas city
| population vs the burbs.)
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Rental supply is an idiotic concept. You are increasing
| rental supply by diminishing owned housing supply. You're
| not doing anything for housing supply, which is the only
| thing that matters.
|
| And no, pushing up the prices of rents don't incentivize
| building. Building rentals is meh compared to just buying
| existing housing supply. While house prices are
| increasing, so will rental prices commensurately, because
| renting and buying a house are not isolated and
| independent choices.
|
| In reality, there is no increase in construction, because
| the increase in housing demand is no different from
| someone buying a house, and the increase in property
| costs that follows it doesn't change anything.
| klipt wrote:
| > You are increasing rental supply by diminishing owned
| housing supply. You're not doing anything for housing
| supply, which is the only thing that matters.
|
| They're two separate markets. Increasing rental supply
| does drive down rents.
|
| If in one location, rents are very low but house prices
| are very high, then landlords would have incentive to
| take properties off the rental market in that location
| and sell them, perhaps using the proceeds to buy
| investments elsewhere.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| They are absolutely not two separate markets. You can buy
| one and sell it as the other, and you can decide to sell
| the same housing unit as a rental or outright. It's the
| same market. There is no separation between the two.
|
| Increasing owned housing supply decreases property costs.
| Decreasing property costs reduce the costs of renting,
| and they also make buying a house more competitive than
| renting, which is why increasing _housing_ supply, not
| rental supply, drives down rent.
|
| Beyond that, increasing rental supply alone will not
| decrease rent. It's perfectly viable for rents to
| increase despite more rental units if the alternative of
| buying a house got more expensive. See the recent
| increase in rents as property prices increased, despite
| no change in rental supply.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > That's not the economic definition of rent seeking.
|
| It is. In fact, the general economic concept of rent and
| rent-seeking are generalizations of the inherent features
| of real property rents, which are the source of the name.
|
| (EDIT: Fixed egregious touch keyboard vomit, clarified
| "land" to "real property".)
| klipt wrote:
| If you want to collect land rents you would buy assets
| that are mostly land, e.g. empty lots, or even single
| family houses, not apartment blocks where you're paying
| more for the building than the land.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Just FYI, it looks like you might have a typo in your
| post. I usually enjoy your posts and think they're well
| thought out, so I felt the need to point this out.
| rcpt wrote:
| > old apartment
|
| > California
|
| Prop 13. Your friend is doing just fine.
| rogy wrote:
| good? landlording isn't and shouldn't be pitched as a
| risk free investment strategy. I'm glad some landlords
| have finally realised this.
| Beldin wrote:
| > _since Covid has sent demand into the earth._
|
| This needs more context.
|
| Around here, it's nigh impossible to get a place. Social
| housing has waiting lists for over a decade, private
| renting is more expensive than a mortgage, and buying a
| house requires you to overbid. There are (plenty) stories
| of folks overbidding 50kEUR and still not getting the
| house.
|
| If you can afford to buy a house, buy it, divide into
| subunits, charge 80% of mortgage to each of the 5
| subunits.
|
| Anyway, that's what tge housing market looks like here.
| So I'm guessing your experience is from elsewhere.
| javajosh wrote:
| Perhaps you missed the word "commercial" - which means
| renting to businesses, rather than individuals. Covid has
| increased WFH a lot and many small businesses are going
| virtual, and even larger businesses are scaling back
| their physical offices. This has the net effect of
| driving down demand for office space.
| shkkmo wrote:
| It's a bit confusing since you discuss commercial
| properties between two paragraphs discussing housing
| rentals. It isn't specifically clear that your comment
| about low demand only applies to commercial properties.
| humaniania wrote:
| Why would you care about the risks of being a parasite on
| vulnerable people?
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| It's all awesome until the roof needs to be redone or the
| cellar is flooded.
| amelius wrote:
| Yeah, it's completely bad timing, like the situation took them
| by surprise. Doesn't the state employ economists and planners
| to handle these situations properly and timely?
|
| If so, what were these economists thinking? What is the
| profession even worth if it brings a false sense of knowledge
| and security?
| awild wrote:
| Privatisation was seen as a cool thing 10-20 years ago.
| hk-im-ad wrote:
| Real estate rarely decreased in price, especially in Berlin. It
| may turn out to be a good investment.
| lumost wrote:
| The only way for housing to keep rising at its current speeds
| is for buyers to spend a greater share of income on housing
| and for interest rates to fall.
|
| Interest rates are near zero and individuals are spending
| very large portions of their income on housing. Continued
| expectations for high returns on housing will lead to hard
| landings/defaults or pathological cases where renters don't
| pay rent and can't be evicted.
| rastafang wrote:
| Im glad I bought in 2009 because it decreased A LOT
| hk-im-ad wrote:
| Many people's view points are influenced heavily by the
| 2008 financial crisis, which was a exceptionally rare and
| historic event. Demand for housing was artificially
| inflated due to fraud. Do you think demand is being
| inflated now? If so, by what, and what would cause demand
| to shift back?
|
| One possible answer is interest rates being low. However,
| the trend in interest rates towards 0 / negative has been
| going on for over 100 years. I don't see them going up
| significantly ever again.
| rastafang wrote:
| yeah, I tripled my "investment" in 10 years, I might be
| biased... the only thing I regret is not getting a more
| expensive home
| ric2b wrote:
| At some point they can't go lower because it becomes
| cheaper to store physical money than to pay negative
| interest rates, so it will stop somewhere.
| yunohn wrote:
| That's exactly... the problem? Housing shouldn't be an
| investment, for corporates nor the government.
| DamnYuppie wrote:
| Realestate is a commodity so it is unrealistic to think
| that it wouldn't have value and it would increase overtime
| as supply and demand fluctuate.
| hk-im-ad wrote:
| Even if it's not an investment, housing will likely always
| have a price ratchet, so it's still not terrible for the
| government.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| If the price goes up any more than inflation long-term,
| we've still got a problem.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| One of the problems of 2021 is that money printers went
| _brrrr_ with such intensity that some people are losing
| faith in future purchasing power of their local currencies
| and stick any free money into bricks and mortar.
|
| Also, where I live, the official inflation is now like 4
| per cent, but gosh, so many things are massively more
| expensive than before (food in restaurants maybe 40 per
| cent, some construction material even 100 per cent more
| expensive than before), that it makes people distrustful of
| official figures.
| djrogers wrote:
| > Housing shouldn't be an investment, for corporates
|
| If it's not, you're essentially going to eliminate
| privately owned rental housing.
| yunohn wrote:
| I'd be really happy with communal non-private rental
| housing. Corporates already do a bad job, I don't see why
| they should make massive money from limited land
| resources.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Just like cars depreciating eliminated privately owned
| car rentals.
|
| Oh, wait, no it didn't. Housing is the only thing
| miraculously protected from depreciation because making
| it depreciate would hurt chances at reelection.
| yunohn wrote:
| This is a great point. Physical houses deteriorate and
| get damaged, just like vehicles. But their value /always/
| goes up.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| "rampant corporate ownership" - what exactly makes it
| "rampant"? It is just ownership.
|
| I live in Berlin and for the most part, the houses really just
| sit there. They are not on a rampage or anything.
| yunohn wrote:
| Rampant:
|
| (of something bad) getting worse quickly and in an
| uncontrolled way
|
| <https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rampant>
| kartoshechka wrote:
| SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1
| of the JSON data
|
| ayyy spa for a static content site
| richwater wrote:
| Anyone who thinks you can take this model and apply it to
| America, with all the evidence we have of horrific public
| projects, is quite literally insane.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| And in ten years, Berlin will sell them back for cheap to another
| firm...
| dathinab wrote:
| A lot of people say that "more houses need to be build" to fix
| it.
|
| The problem is less "not having apartments" but "not having
| affordable apartments".
|
| A a lot of "housing" had been build in the recent years but
| hardly any of it increased the "supply of affordable housing".
|
| Most had been very expensive "luxurious"(1) living spaces, from
| small one family houses to large "luxus" apartments.
|
| At the same time a lot of affordable living space has been
| converted into non affordable ones or removed from the rental
| marked.
|
| Reasons for this are many fold and include:
|
| - Prices in Berlin had been unrealistic low, so once they started
| rising/people realized it they rose fast attracting a lot of
| speculative investments, speeding up the price rise and level
| above what it should have been.
|
| - Stupid formulated laws around "energy" renovations turned out
| to be a perfect backdoor to circumvent existing limitations about
| how much rent can rise, especially if combined with little
| continues wide spread Illegal acting allowed massively bumping
| prices in short time.
|
| - Certain tax changes done ~7 or so years ago increased
| renovation cost massively, and the price boom and building (of
| non affordable housing) boom made it hard to build/renovate
| affordable housing for people just owning a small number of
| apartments).
|
| - Also maybe thinks like Aribnb had a bad effect, but I can't
| judge this.
|
| So what should be changed IMHO:
|
| 1. Change the energy renovation law to not be trivially abusable.
|
| 2. Make regulations which favor affordable rentable living space
| over all other versions (also favor it over office space).
|
| 3. Change certain laws about tax handling of losses from "rent",
| i.e. there are people which but absurd prices on apartments with
| the intent of them to not ever be rented because they bought them
| for speculative investments and selling a unrelated one is
| easier/better. If a apartment is in a area with a deficit of
| (affordable) living space you should not be able to tax-deduct
| losses because you werent able to rent out an apartment. (Similar
| the kind of "buy to sell at a higher price later" behaviour
| should be illegal.).
|
| 4. Add a legal method the state can use to punish organizations
| which en-mass do a lot of systematic small illegal things which
| each on themself are not worth opening up a law suite and affect
| a different person, like systematically trying to increase rents
| slightly more then average every time.
|
| 5. Maybe (idk, only if it matter) auto-sync databases of
| platforms like Airbnb with residential databases to auto detect
| abuse.
|
| 6. Undo mistakes of the past where Berlin reduced affordable
| housing programs.
|
| (1): Price wise, not necessarily quality wise.
| nkmnz wrote:
| treasure trove of data about the berlin housing market:
| https://guthmann.estate/de/marktreport/berlin/
| nkmnz wrote:
| For everyone not familiar with German rental markets: Berlin is
| quite cheap compared to other big and small cities. From cities
| as big as Munich to smaller ones like Mainz, most cities are more
| expensive (except for those in the former GDR). Cheap(er) rents
| are part of the reason why people move to Berlin - the more the
| Senate does to control rent, the more people will want to move to
| Berlin. The only way is to increase supply - or rebuild the wall
| ;-)
| Tenoke wrote:
| It's gotten way closer than even 5 years ago. I 'overpay' as an
| ex-pat in Berlin but my rent is within 10% of the average
| Munich rent (unless it's risen there recently as well) for a
| comparable place.
| nkmnz wrote:
| Interesting. I guess it's a more high end rental? I don't
| know the High end markets in both places that well, but I
| know it's much more expensive for students and others with
| low income to live in Munich (which has risen recently,
| indeed) than it is in Berlin. But the gap might be closing
| nevertheless.
| ritchiea wrote:
| Real estate and flat purchase prices have been rising
| faster in Berlin than anywhere else in the world over the
| last five or so years. The rental market is also rising,
| there's a growing startup sector and lots of international
| immigration. There is a housing crisis in central Berlin
| within the ringbahn where demand far far outreaches supply.
| Going to a Berlin flat viewing is an exercise is intense
| competition. Rental prices are rising accordingly.
| skohan wrote:
| It wouldn't have to be. Finding a flat is extremely
| competitive in Berlin, so it's not uncommon for agencies
| and unscrupulous landlords to take advantage of
| "Auslanders" who might not be aware of rent control laws.
|
| When the rents were temporarily lowered to the "fair rate"
| during corona, and everyone could see what they should be
| paying, this was eye-opening for a lot of my friends.
| nkmnz wrote:
| What do you mean by "fair rate during corona"? The local
| government broke the federal constitution by limiting
| rents in a way it has no jurisdiction for. We should be
| very happy that our constitutional court prevented
| further unlawful behaviour.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| Or run the city into the ground, make it unattractive enough to
| repel the people who want to move there. That approach may even
| work out - Socialism succeeded doing that before already.
| e12e wrote:
| > most cities are more expensive (except for those in the
| former GDR).
|
| So, Berlin is much more expensive than other cities in former
| GDR?
| luckylion wrote:
| Yes, but it's much cheaper than West-German cities.
| e12e wrote:
| But Berlin is in east Germany.
| [deleted]
| ArmandGrillet wrote:
| Instead of buying what they sold two decades ago for practically
| nothing, they should have built more supply.
|
| Open Google Maps and check Kreuzberg, a district of Berlin. South
| of it is Tempelhofer Feld, 355 hectares (a third of Kreuzberg), a
| discontinued airport next to the city only used for people to
| bike and do barbecues. It's an old airport so it looks bland and
| there are smaller parks right next to it offering the space to do
| barbecues and play with your dog. It's been a decade that this
| airport is not being used yet it's still in that state.
|
| Paris' housing crisis is mostly due to the road surrounding it
| (le Periph') but Berlin doest not have that yet housing is
| getting more expensive extremely fast, faster than in Paris
| actually.
| nicbou wrote:
| Tempelhofer Feld is a green space where people can meet,
| exercise, and enjoy their free time without being expected to
| spend money. Berlin's green spaces is one of its strongest
| assets. Don't let that city turn into a concrete hell.
|
| I'd much rather see Kleingarten disappear than public spaces.
| [deleted]
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| They wanted to build just on a small stripe on the side of
| it, it is not as if they would have to fill the whole place
| with houses. But even that was shot down via
| "Volksentscheid".
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I think the referendum against building in Tempelhof saw
| right through the project and understood what its end goal
| would have been: it would have created apartments that
| those being priced out of Berlin wouldn't have been able to
| afford. The losses would be socialized (namely, the park)
| while the benefits would go to the wealthy.
|
| For those unfamiliar with the situation I found this
| article [1] which, biased as it is, I think accurately
| reflects the opinion of the common Berliner at the time. If
| the plan had proposed 100% social housing, I bet the story
| would have been different.
|
| [1] https://www.exberliner.com/features/opinion/everyone-
| is-lyin...
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| But that is nonsense - apartments are apartments, even if
| wealthy move into those apartments, it would free the
| apartments they previously lived in. Also, it would be
| money for the city.
|
| Also it is not just social cases who have problems with
| high rents in Berlin. You suggest the majority of people
| in Berlin want only more social housing, implying most of
| them are social cases themselves?
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I think most Berliners would read your comments as "it is
| a good thing that we give a part of our public park to
| the rich because they'll give us their less-desirable
| apartments in return. Like trickle-down economics, but
| for apartments". And if the current situation is any
| indication, those rich people will keep their old
| apartment and rent it, or sell it to foreign investors.
| Either way, say goodbye to ever owning a place in the
| city where you grew up.
|
| As for the second part: Berliners feel that the city
| should belong to those that lived there when no one
| wanted to, and recognize that those people are probably
| not rich. Kicking the hairdresser that lived there for 40
| years to make room for the tech bro is not generally seen
| as a positive development. Social housing would ensure
| that the city remains in the hands of its citizens.
| notanzaiiswear wrote:
| So most Berliners know nothing about economics?
|
| The park would not be "given to the rich", presumably the
| parts open for building would have been sold to "the
| rich", with the money benefitting every Berlin citizen
| (ideally - but we know our government her is composed of
| very good people, right?).
|
| Also what does it matter if the "rich" rent out their old
| apartment? What is needed is supply of apartments. Per
| supply and demand, more supply means lower prices.
|
| Do the people expect to live in luxury apartments for
| little money?
|
| And it is very touching that nobody wanted to live here
| 40 years ago and the people held on. But then they could
| have bought their living places for very little money.
| Also the whole place was subsidized by the USA as a stand
| against the Soviet Union. The people staying benefitted a
| lot.
|
| There already is a construct for the place where you live
| belonging to you: it is called "buying your own place to
| live". If you choose to rent instead, you signal that you
| don't necessarily want to stay forever.
| skohan wrote:
| Honestly one of the things I like most about living in
| Berlin is the fact that local politics manage to
| represent the public good effectively. I'm a well paid
| tech worker, so I would be fine either way, but I'm happy
| that my neighbours who are hairdressers or hand workers
| can also enjoy a good quality of life here. I would hate
| for it to become a playground for the rich like London or
| Manhattan.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| How is that anything other than NIMBYISM?
| skohan wrote:
| There's plenty of development which could happen in Berlin
| without touching Tempelhof.
|
| From my perspective, the worst use of land in berlin is the
| Schrebergarten[1]. These are little free standing "houses"
| with a garden which some families own and spend time in
| during the summer. I live close to a canal on the south-
| east side of Berlin, within the ring, and there are several
| patches of these within 10 minutes biking from my
| apartment. This is very well-located land, and from what I
| can tell it goes completely unused 6-9 months per year, and
| at best sporadically during the summer months.
|
| I understand that this is very traditional in Germany, but
| the idea that some of the most desirable land in Berlin is
| being used for some families to use a handful of weekends
| per year is just crazy. At least Tempelhof is public and
| serving hundreds or thousands of people every day.
|
| [1]: https://www.dw.com/en/a-brief-guide-to-german-garden-
| colonie...
| mmarq wrote:
| Tempelhofer Feld is for the most part an abandoned field, if
| half of it were used to build housing a problem would be
| solved and no damage would be done.
|
| The issue there is the usual weird coalition between
| landlords that don't want more residents (if they live there)
| or more competition (if they rent their flat) and the fringe
| of the green/left that is worried about urbanisation,
| gentrification economic activity.
| jounker wrote:
| It's not abandoned. It's an incredibly heavily used park.
| People skate and kite board on the old runways. The are
| community gardens. Portions of the fields are breeding
| sides for locally threatened bird species. The list of
| things that happen there goes on and on.
|
| Tempelhofer field is one of the jewels of the city.
| ratww wrote:
| It's not abandoned. I was there earlier and it was full of
| people having fun and exercising.
|
| People need the space. It's not fair to force a whole city
| to live their lives entirely in 25m2 apartments, if more
| apartments are built, there's a chance more will go to
| speculators. I, and a large portion of Berlin, would rather
| force speculators out.
| luckylion wrote:
| > People need the space. It's not fair to force a whole
| city to live their lives entirely in 25m2 apartments
|
| What? Berlin has _lots_ of parks and public areas, much
| more than Munich and slightly more than Frankfurt or
| Dusseldorf.
|
| You make it sound like Berlin is full of cramped
| buildings and someone is trying to take away the last
| open space. That's absolutely not true.
| mmarq wrote:
| It doesn't have to be speculators, whatever that's
| supposed to mean, it could be social housing built and
| managed by the city council.
|
| And, of course, "half of it" was a hyperbole.
| ratww wrote:
| My issue with it is that it won't help with the problem
| at hand. Sure, it might help tip the scale of rent
| prices, but lack of units or even rents are not the issue
| in Berlin. Sure, it's way more expensive than before, but
| rents are still payable.
|
| The issue is that it's very difficult for individuals to
| acquire housing units. My apartment costs about 1500x its
| monthly rent to acquire (EUR400 vs EUR600k min). Which
| means it's now a lousy investment for people wanting to
| live in it (since they won't be saving any money unless
| live to be 150 years old), and for people wanting to buy
| a small number of properties to rent (same deal).
|
| Since real estate is traditionally kind of a "future
| insurance", for old people not to have to rely on pension
| to live, it also makes the future a lot grim and
| uncertain for people who'll have to rely on public
| pension for a place to live.
|
| Getting more units in the market will only make things
| worse for those people: rent prices will make it
| impossible for them to own, and won't make sense for them
| to own to rent.
|
| Individuals not being able to acquire apartments also has
| the side effects of things like crazy rental terms (not
| difficult to see the best apartments with limit of 6
| months rental) or even empty units because they're used
| for commercial renting only. Across the street from me
| there's a 50-unit condo that's fully empty. I know that
| because I used to live there and for a while I was the
| only tenant. It costs about EUR2000 a month vs my EUR400.
|
| I don't know what's the endgame of speculators. Maybe
| they're waiting to own everything so that they can jack
| up the prices? Maybe they're merely taking opportunity of
| the low interest rates to pay for those things in 100
| years? Is that investment companies buying it to force
| people into private pension?
|
| I don't know. I just know that the issue is a lot darker
| and I don't see "the market" solving it by itself without
| creating even more problems. I know this is a very
| sensitive matter to some people but I just don't see "the
| market" doing anything positive if left by itself.
|
| EDIT: As user _probably_wrong_ put below, "the losses
| would be socialized (namely, the park) while the benefits
| would go to the wealthy."
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Speculators generally want to constrain supply as much as
| possible. That's good for their investment.
| ratww wrote:
| They also have the power to acquire anything new showing
| up, which is exactly what happened in the last ten years.
| I can't explain their end game as it doesn't make sense
| to me, but what Berlin needs is not more units, but
| rather more units that are affordable to non-speculators.
|
| As user _probably_wrong_ put it below, "the losses would
| be socialized (namely, the park) while the benefits would
| go to the wealthy."
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Speculators as an aggregate voting block want less
| supply. This might seem counter intuitive since it is
| simultaneously true that a new development is an
| investment opportunity.
|
| What we need is more units. The affordability to non-
| speculators follows from that, which is just supply and
| demand playing out. If you double supply via high rise
| apartments, the value is guaranteed to drop
| significantly. Increasing supply by removing regulations
| around apartment construction also reduces the incentive
| to buy to invest. Who would want to invest when the
| supply is liable to increase?
| mejutoco wrote:
| If somebody reading this has never been to Tempelhof, I
| would recommend (please allow me) to think of it as a Park.
| It is a big area for leisure, with some portable stands for
| coffee, community gardens, small sport courts, bbq area and
| grass. And the old airport runways right in the middle of
| it to run, skate, ride the bike, etc.
|
| On one side it also has the actual airport building. They
| have very interesting historical tours there.
|
| You can see a couple of representative photos here.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2018/08/11/634394533/the-site-of-the-
| ber...
| wearywanderer wrote:
| No offense but that park looks like crap. Can't the city
| at least plant a few trees?
| sagichmal wrote:
| Tempelhofer is an enormous asset of the city and turning
| half of it into apartments would be a disgrace.
| [deleted]
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| You could just as well argue NYC should start to use Central
| Park for new housing...
| ArmandGrillet wrote:
| Manhattan's population density is already 17 times higher
| than the one in Berlin so no, I wouldn't suggest that.
| biggerfisch wrote:
| Berlin is also super unevenly populated and includes
| several forests. If you compare the density of the actually
| populated areas, like Mitte, you are still under Manhattan,
| sure, but only by a factor of 4 - which is extra impressive
| given the near complete lack of tall buildings in Berlin.
| Neukolln (which borders the area in question) is even more
| dense - about half as much as Manhattan [1].
|
| Its unfair to compare Manhattan which apart from Central
| Park is nearly 100% urban to Berlin, which is significantly
| larger and includes many areas with widely distanced houses
| and forests.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitte_(locality) [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuk%C3%B6lln_(locality)
| aqme28 wrote:
| That doesn't make sense. If it's 17x less dense in Berlin,
| then it sounds like there's still a lot of room to build
| that doesn't involve taking away the parks.
| luckylion wrote:
| A lot of the available space is woodland and on the
| outskirts of Berlin. People want to live in the center,
| not further out (they already can do that, once you cross
| over into Brandenburg in the north, the competition for
| flats is much lower), that's why such a giant piece of
| land in a sought-after location would be a great idea for
| development, while some even larger piece of land out in
| the middle of nowhere where nobody wants to live isn't.
| black_13 wrote:
| You could
| abliefern wrote:
| > Instead of buying what they sold two decades ago for
| practically nothing, they should have built more supply.
|
| "Instead"? It's not an either-or choice.
| mejutoco wrote:
| Berlin is not a very dense city, maybe because of the backyards
| (almost every block has a backyard for trash containers and
| bikes, maybe an elevator) in most blocks and the green spaces.
|
| In the last years I have seen also a lot of floors being added
| (to the last floor) of buildings that allow it, to gain one
| more floor.
|
| Your comment about periphery made me think of something. Berlin
| is surrounded by Brandenburg, which is even less dense. So
| Berlin has space to expand, unlike other cities (like
| Barcelona, much denser).
|
| In my mind the solution would be to build affordable housing in
| Brandenburg (there is space there) and on the edge of Berlin.
| ben_w wrote:
| While I'm sure there's something better that can be done with
| the Tempelhofer Feld site than currently (even trees in the
| grass between the runways would make it better, IMO), the large
| number of green spaces -- including Tempelhofer Feld itself --
| is one of the things I like about Berlin.
|
| Separately, given the large mostly empty expanse of Brandenburg
| surrounding Berlin (and the really low house prices I see there
| on immobilienscout24), I think improved transport connections
| are more critical: improving connections to the surrounding
| area makes the surrounding area more available for commuting.
| For example, there are routes from Eberswalde or Frankfurt an
| der Oder to parts of Berlin which are faster than reaching
| those parts of Berlin from elsewhere in Berlin, so improving
| existing routes would enable lots of the existing room outside
| the current city to become more city.
|
| I have no idea what the political issues with this might be,
| not just with "would people like this?" (I can't even determine
| that effectively in my original country) but also with "can
| this even be done, given Berlin is a different state?" (I have
| yet to learn anything beyond the most superficial about German
| politics).
| einpoklum wrote:
| Why buy rather than expropriate? Berlin has lots of people with
| no apartments, and the commercial corporations have apartments
| without permanent residents. Instead, Berlin is funneling ~200K
| EUR of public funds x 14,750 to partially rectify an allocation
| anomaly of Capitalism.
|
| (If you're against expropriation - it could just be a massively
| high tax on apartments owned besides the one you physically live
| in; or a strong de-criminalization of squatting of such
| apartments, including allowing for registering as the resident
| based on actual residence etc.)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-18 23:01 UTC)