Tag Archives: Housing

We’re From The Berlin City Government

March 10, 2021 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Heconomy, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The “red-red-green” city government. And we’re here to help.

Control

A disaster foretold – After a year, Berlin’s experiment with rent control is a failure. Rents may be down, but so is the supply of homes.

”I WORRY ABOUT Berlin,” says Rolf Buch, a born and bred Rhinelander. The chief executive of Vonovia, Europe’s biggest residential-property firm, thinks that the city’s policy of capping rents has achieved very little good, but caused severe collateral damage. Even if the federal Constitutional Court declares the rent cap unconstitutional in the next few months, as many expect it to do, Berlin will not go back to the status quo ante. Protests are here to stay, Mr Buch reckons.

 

The Rents Won’t Be the Only Things That Will Freeze

December 10, 2019 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Heconomy, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Building will come to a complete standstill in Berlin too.

Berlin

But Berlin’s red-redder-green politicians (SPD, the Left Party, the Greens) don’t know anything about building (look at the state the city of Berlin is in). They can only tear things down. Oh, yes. And redistribute. They will redistribute for as long as it takes to get anybody who’s got anything to get out of town.

Berlin Builders Hit the Streets in Backlash Over Rent Freeze – The German capital’s government is trying to ease the burden on tenants after a property boom caused rents to double over the past decade. However, critics of the plan — including economists and large landlords — have said the only way to address growing demand for housing is to build more homes.

The rent-freeze legislation will start its passage through Berlin’s parliament this week and is expected to come into force in the first quarter of next year…

The city’s plans “threaten to cause considerable damage to both the housing market and Berlin as a whole,” IW institute economists wrote in a recent report for the Christian Democratic Union party, which is in opposition in Berlin and opposes the measures. Scrapping the plan is “urgently needed from an economic perspective to prevent wider damage to the Berlin economy,” they added.

German Of The Day: Eigentum

June 20, 2019 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Heconomy, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hustle (Hoax), Hypochondria, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

That means property. But property doesn’t mean much in Germany anymore. At least not in Berlin under its current “red-red-green” city government.

Property

Another word you might be interested in here is Enteignung.

German officials facing protests and endless complaints about threats to affordable housing in the nation’s capital have decided the solution may be a five-year ban on rent increases and fines as high as $550,000 for violators.

Officials in Berlin, a city of about 3.7 million residents long known for its affordable housing options, announced this week that they plan to temporarily freeze the rents charged on publicly and privately owned apartments in a bid to halt runaway gentrification.

“It will scare away investors who will find alternative markets with less regulation. It’s a socialist and populist attack on the free market and it’s not going to lead to a single new apartment being built.”

 

Redistribution Is Da Solution (Again)

June 3, 2015 By in Habitudes, Heconomy, Helplessness, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

The next step backwards: Berlin has a new law prohibiting landlords from demanding rents that are more than 10 percent higher than the area average, in an attempt to keep housing affordable in a city that’s attracting 50,000 new residents a year. The rule relies on a disputed index — known as the Mietspiegel — that critics say is a statistical crapshoot.

Rents

“The rent brake is essentially a transfer of wealth from landlords to tenants. Berlin will become less of a destination for international investors because capital doesn’t like to be constrained.”

Same Old Problems Caused By Same Old Solutions

November 14, 2014 By in Habitudes, Heconomy, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Rent control still rocks. Just ask the people looking for a place to live in Hamburg, for instance.

Rents

The German government’s Mietpriesbremse (rent control plan)  – it’s “sozial,” as in “for free”  –  has alarmed landlords who are now raising rents even higher than they already had been, “vorsorglich” (preventitively).  Imagine that. Bad landlords.

It’s always the same old thing. There is a shortage of apartments. This increases the rents. New apartments are needed. That is why the government steps in “to help” by imposing price controls called rent controls. That is, the government ensures that the shortage will remain by making new housing construction unprofitable for those who would otherwise build the new housing (I know, profit is a dirty-ugly-yucky word but we haven’t found a better one yet). The shortage is sustained and increased by rent control, the supposed solution.

But don’t worry. Elections will come around soon enough and the same politicians who fixed that first problem will have new proposals for fixing the one that followed, all inexplicably like. And they will get reelected – by the very same people they screwed in the first place. Now that’s what I call sozial.

“Durch die Ankündigungen ohne konsequente Umsetzung hat die große Koalition die Kosten immer wieder angeheizt.”

German Of The Day: Zweckentfremdungsverbot

November 22, 2013 By in Home Cooking Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Now that’s a German word for you. And no, not just because it has Verbot on the end of it, although that certainly helps.

SPD

Zweckentfremdung means misappropriation, and in this case the Verbot has to do with using apartments for something they were not meant to be used for; for renting. Well, actually, this particular misappropriation Verbot means renting them at a high rate to those awful and dreadful tourists who come to Berlin for a limited time instead of renting them out for much, much less to people who will be paying that much, much less for a much, much longer time. Which is, uh, better.

You guessed it, we’re back here in Berlin again and trying to rent your property for the most the free market will give you is an absolute sin in these parts and must be stopped immediately. And that’s what the Berlin SPD is now trying to do with this here new-fangled, old school Socialist-type Zweckentfremdungsverbot. And you and I both know that it will be yet another roaring success. Until it backfires and gets quietly repealed a few years down the road again, that is.

Experten setzen große Hoffnungen auf das Verbot. Denn dann sind Vermietungen an Touristen und Firmen künftig nicht mehr möglich.

PS: That picture up there kills me, too. Being willing to pay 500 euros (roughly $675) to someone who finds an apartment for you is considered a complete Skandal here so that’s why “the state” needs to jump in and take those 500 euros from somebody else to pay, so-to-speak, only it will be more like 5000 euros then, which is then OK.