Isn't it amazing how short politicians' memories are? It's been only 30 years since the GDR (German "Democratic" Republic, aka East Germany) collapsed. In the

Isn't it amazing how short politicians' memories are? It's been only 30 years since the GDR (German "Democratic" Republic, aka East Germany) collapsed. In the GDR, all rent was regulated to a "fair" level. The result was a universal scarcity of housing, and existing houses were decaying, because nobody would invest any amount of money into maintenance. The best housing available in the 1980s were those ugly and uncomfortable apartment buildings made from mass produced concrete slabs, which everyone just remembers as socialist architecture. And "available" meant you had to wait for many years. Still, the alternative was to live in a house built in 1910-1930 and not maintained since 1950. There is no place in the world that could document this failed policy better than Berlin: the contrast between East Berlin (ugly ruins) and West Berlin (nice houses) is striking, even today. But the Berlin senate decides to go with socialist thinking again. However, that was to be expected after the Berliners voted the old Socialist Unified Party (renamed twice, but otherwise unchanged) into the senate.