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To add a b it of context. They do not want to confiscate housing. They do want to pay landlords, though below current (very high) rates. Also this would only ap

by soonnow 14d ago

To add a b it of context. They do not want to confiscate housing. They do want to pay landlords, though below current (very high) rates. Also this would only apply to private real-estate companies not individual owners. And they can't govern alone, so I think it's unlikely that this plan is actually implemented as originally planned. The likely coalition would contain 3 parties.

dirasieb 14d ago
>it's not confiscation, you're just forced to sell at a price i decide is fair sound logic
- paganel 14d ago
  You need sound logic against the evils of neo-liberalism, there's nothing logic about housing being as expensive as it now is.
  - giacomoforte 14d ago
    It's a reflection of the demand from people who want to live in Berlin.
    - 698969 14d ago
      Correction: It's a reflection of demand from people who already live in Berlin. That's who were allowed to vote in the referendum. They don't care about the elasticity of the market, or the demand from people who would want to live in Berlin in the future. They already have an apartment, and at pretty low prices because nearly everything built before 2014 is subject to rent control, I'd guess most people just voted for it because in their eyes "government promised to take apartment from my landlord and lower my rent even more".
  - tirant 14d ago
    The logic is defined by demand. Currently Berlin is under high demand, and that’s why drives prices up. On top of that many rents, around 12% are paid by the job center, which also drives prices up. That’s around 250.000 housing units paid by someone else’s money. That’s the scandal.
    - paganel 14d ago
      > Currently Berlin is under high demand, and that’s why drives prices up Yeah, I know the written logic of all this, but as things stand right now we didn't have homelessness East of the Wall back in the day, while the West had. That should have been reason enough to throw all this capitalist and pervert logic under the bus, but I understand how come the highly paid programmers in here are happy with the current economic system, homelessness be damned. Which is to say, you're telling me nothing new.
      - tirant 14d ago
        Do you know why there was not homelessness in the DDR? Because it was forbidden by law. You were forced to be put in an institution or directly went to prison. Check Section 249 of the DDR Criminal Code. And by the way, the DDR suffered from chronic housing shortage. People were cramped in barracks with not bathroom and no heating. Technically housed but in actually povert level of housing. It was an absolute disaster.
        paganel 14d ago
        > Because it was forbidden by law. You were forced to be put in an institution or directly went to prison Seems like a very good law, don't you think? And this reminded me of how come one of my favorite childhood books from when I was 3 or 4 here in Romania was about DDR constructors building apartment flats, loved that book and loved the spirit behind it. > People were cramped in barracks with not bathroom and no heating There were? Back in the '70s and '80s? You sure? I don't remember it that way here in Romania back in the '80s, and I know that the DDR had a much better economic condition than us, Socialist Republic of Romania.
- 4gotunameagain 14d ago
  The "free market" (which has been demonstrated to not be free at all) has no place in basic needs such as housing. Rent extraction is utterly counterproductive for a society. Housing should not be a commodity.
  - WithinReason 14d ago
    Who builds the houses then?
    - mschuster91 14d ago
      Governments directly, cooperatives or non-profit organizations. The Churches used to be pretty active in that space as well to invest tithes, with rents paying for common-welfare projects.
      - IshKebab 14d ago
        Yeay communism! They built such lovely tower blocks.
        vrganj 14d ago
        Yeah like that ugly drab city of ... Vienna?? https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-social-housing-secret-how-vienna-became-the-worlds-most-livable-city https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc...
        WithinReason 14d ago
        That's more like social housing: > an income maximum for applicants of €57,600 and can't be bought, only rented
        mschuster91 14d ago
        first of all, Europeans don't need American wages. 57k is comfortable middle class in Austria, especially if you have government subsidised housing. as for the "only rented" part, again, at this level of low rent it does not matter. you're better off renting. And Europeans have actual pension systems, we are nowhere near as reliant on real estate always appreciating in value.
- mschuster91 14d ago
  Most of the affected housing used to be government owned, sold at firesale prices after the CDU Diepgen government thoroughly wrecked the state finances with a banking scandal at the end of the 90s. The large investor landlords purchased the homes and often didn't even do the bare minimum in upkeep. The real estate nevertheless appreciated massively because of Berlin getting more and more popular. It therefore makes sense to nationalize this housing stock, and I'd see a value comprised of "original purchase price, upkeep and inflation-plus-3%-tied appreciation" as fair value. Maybe even less because they extracted 20 years worth of rent payments from the properties already.
  - IshKebab 14d ago
    I don't know if that's really fair though because it's unlikely that the people that benefited from the fire sale are still the owners. It would make more sense just enforce maintenance standards and improve renters rights. You can't really legislate supply & demand.
    - 698969 14d ago
      Still the same companies Deutsche Wohnen and Vonovia but I agree with the second part. Their yearly profits are capped because of the Mietpreisbremse (rent control) law since all the old buildings that they bought would fall under it, so it would've been better to put the money towards either building new state-owned housing or helping the tenants enforce their rights. The laws are there to protect tenants against neglect from the landlord but enforcement takes multiple months which is not a reasonable timeline if you have a problem in your apartment and the consequences for landlord are mostly just reducing the rent for that time by a certain percentage which doesn't make a difference if the rents are already cheap because of the Mietpreisbremse, so it would also be good to introduce fines but not sure if Germany's legal framework allows for that.
  - tirant 14d ago
    The reality is that the actual large-scale sell-off of public housing was carried out under the SPD–PDS (now The Left) red-red coalition led by Klaus Wowereit in 2004. for prices of around 30.000€ per unit.
- bmacho 14d ago
  [edit - deleted]
  - backhold 14d ago
    With the disclaimer that I am neither German nor familiar with the policy under discussion, Confiscation with (some) remuneration is still confiscation. Is your comment satirical?
    - deleted 14d ago
      [deleted]
- monegator 14d ago
  Given it affects PE funds that have gouged up all the supply, yes that is sound logic. My province's capital has 43% of unhinabitated houses. They are not even on the market, as we are in a housing crisis. Vast majority of them are property of large housing groups that are backed by black rock and company. The same firms are manouvering the politicians to get approvals to build modern monstruosities, because there is a housing crisis, but they build only luxury homes thst cost too much and remain unhinabitated. Yes it is sound logic to force big conglomerates to dissolve by law. Law should aim for the public good.
  - m4xp 14d ago
    There should be huge taxes on empty houses. This breaks the supply demand price negotiation, if they can gauge price by 2x they dont care if they rent half the houses.
    - Helmut10001 14d ago
      Such a law existed in San Francisco since 2022 and it was just cancelled by court order. The problem is: there are so many edge cases for empty apartments that it is impossible to account for. In Berlin, e.g., just imagine all the empty apartments in 10 years because no one wants to rent unrenovated, uninsulated apartments because of energy prices. The landlord cannot pay renovation. Forcing landlords to pay an empty apartment penalty doesn't help here.
      - scarecrowbob 14d ago
        I am not a capitalist, but isn't that the kind of problem that capitalism would solve? Wouldn't the landlords would just take a loss and sell the property to avoid penalties?
        Helmut10001 14d ago
        If there is no business model and no one wants to pay, what then? We'd have a lot of vacant properties that would need to be renovated by the city. We see this in lots of places in Germany already, where there simply aren't buyers (because of demographics, primarily). Further, if you devalue properties with such a law, then you'd have a credit/dept property - landlords couldn't pay their dept, if property prices devalue by state law. Lastly, no one would build properties anymore under such a law. .. Cities also rely quite a bit on property and real estate transfer taxes. By reducing property values, cities destroy their own tax base while needing lots of additional money to renovate state-acquired, vacant properties.
aurareturn 14d ago
They do want to pay landlords, though below current (very high) rates. In San Francisco, NIMBYs secretly support laws like this. This basically guarantees that many builders will do the math and conclude that it doesn't make sense to build housing in San Francisco. New large condo buildings have to sell 30% of the units at below market rate. This causes many viable projects to never get built. So laws like this are sold to renter voters as a way to lower housing costs, but NIMBYs secretly love it. Over time, renters pay more in rent because there is less supply due to builders not building. However, a lucky few renters who were here early will get below market rents. Perfect examples of voters voting for a short term fix but pay more in long term. And voting for themselves while screwing future renters.
- vrganj 14d ago
  The fix is for the city to be the builder, like it is in Vienna. The City of Vienna is the largest landlord in Europe. It is also the only major European capital without a rent cost crisis.
  - specproc 14d ago
    Similarly UK cities built their own housing, up until Thatcher and Right to Buy. Costs spiralled out of control after that. Most urgent intervention required in the UK, IMO. We're choking to death on the cost of housing.
  - fileeditview 14d ago
    You would think that people could learn from examples. Sadly it rarely happens.
    - spwa4 14d ago
      The example here being that they would pay a lot more city tax, never own a home, and over a period of decades this would make rent prices go down. If this is what people want, then it seems like the right solution. Short term the only change will be increased taxes and maybe a few lucky renters getting apartments with the number slowly increasing over years and years. Which is pretty much the situation in Vienna (rents are low in Vienna, but for the 20% that get city-owned apartments the rents are very low. Quality is ... let's call it "very old", and there's no choice (can't move up if you have a kid, say). Then housing associations pay like 30% more but less than private. Private rents are about double city-owned apartments as they're called. Only way to become a city renter is to earn less than 58000 in a given year, then wait 5+ years).
fabian2k 14d ago
They are saying that this is what the want to do. They can't do that because it would be illegal. This is not just any law, it's in the German constitution (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_14.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_14.html).
- 4gotunameagain 14d ago
  The article you linked can be clearly interpreted in a way that would make it possible.
  - fabian2k 14d ago
    There is no way that paying below market value here would amount to a fair evaluation of the owner's interests.
    - 698969 14d ago
      If it definitely had to be market value, then the law probably would've been worded differently? It says the compensation is determined as a balance of public good and the interests of those affected, so to me it does read like the compensation can be lower than market value so it'd all come down the courts to determine how much below the market value the state can get away with.
jttnr 14d ago
To add further context: in 2021, Berlin residents voted in a Volksentscheid on whether the government should compulsorily purchase back housing stock from large private real-estate companies. The proposal received 58% support, but the CDU/SPD coalition in office at the time just ignored it. This now at least partially reflects in the votes. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksentscheid_%E2%80%9EDeutsche_Wohnen_%26_Co_enteignen%E2%80%9C_in_Berlin_2021 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksentscheid_%E2%80%9EDeutsc...
- snehk 14d ago
  That's no surprise. Berlin loves free things that others have paid for. They're pretty much the only capital city in the developed world that's a burden and not a benefit to the country as a whole. It's pretty embarrassing. Then they do things like free daycare paid for by other states in the country while those states can't offer it.
  - illiac786 14d ago
    So many shocking statements, so little sources… I’d almost believe the burden one, but you just piled and made the whole thing sound very emotional and not very objective. If you have any kind of stats supporting this, I genuinely would be interested.
    - snehk 14d ago
      Two claims in my post: 1) > They're pretty much the only capital city in the developed world that's a burden and not a benefit to the country as a whole. https://www.iwkoeln.de/presse/iw-nachrichten/matthias-diermeier-henry-goecke-usually-an-economic-driving-force.html https://www.iwkoeln.de/presse/iw-nachrichten/matthias-dierme... 2) > Then they do things like free daycare paid for by other states in the country while those states can't offer it. Look up "Länderfinanzausgleich" and then look up daycare programs and compare them. None of the net payers get even remotely the same even though they're the ones actually paying for it. Both statements are objectively true.

by soonnow 14d ago

dirasieb 14d ago

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

paganel 14d ago
You need sound logic against the evils of neo-liberalism, there's nothing logic about housing being as expensive as it now is.
- giacomoforte 14d ago
  It's a reflection of the demand from people who want to live in Berlin.
  - 698969 14d ago
    Correction: It's a reflection of demand from people who already live in Berlin. That's who were allowed to vote in the referendum. They don't care about the elasticity of the market, or the demand from people who would want to live in Berlin in the future. They already have an apartment, and at pretty low prices because nearly everything built before 2014 is subject to rent control, I'd guess most people just voted for it because in their eyes "government promised to take apartment from my landlord and lower my rent even more".
- tirant 14d ago
  The logic is defined by demand. Currently Berlin is under high demand, and that’s why drives prices up. On top of that many rents, around 12% are paid by the job center, which also drives prices up. That’s around 250.000 housing units paid by someone else’s money. That’s the scandal.
  - paganel 14d ago
    > Currently Berlin is under high demand, and that’s why drives prices up Yeah, I know the written logic of all this, but as things stand right now we didn't have homelessness East of the Wall back in the day, while the West had. That should have been reason enough to throw all this capitalist and pervert logic under the bus, but I understand how come the highly paid programmers in here are happy with the current economic system, homelessness be damned. Which is to say, you're telling me nothing new.
    - tirant 14d ago
      Do you know why there was not homelessness in the DDR? Because it was forbidden by law. You were forced to be put in an institution or directly went to prison. Check Section 249 of the DDR Criminal Code. And by the way, the DDR suffered from chronic housing shortage. People were cramped in barracks with not bathroom and no heating. Technically housed but in actually povert level of housing. It was an absolute disaster.
      - paganel 14d ago
        > Because it was forbidden by law. You were forced to be put in an institution or directly went to prison Seems like a very good law, don't you think? And this reminded me of how come one of my favorite childhood books from when I was 3 or 4 here in Romania was about DDR constructors building apartment flats, loved that book and loved the spirit behind it. > People were cramped in barracks with not bathroom and no heating There were? Back in the '70s and '80s? You sure? I don't remember it that way here in Romania back in the '80s, and I know that the DDR had a much better economic condition than us, Socialist Republic of Romania.
4gotunameagain 14d ago
The "free market" (which has been demonstrated to not be free at all) has no place in basic needs such as housing. Rent extraction is utterly counterproductive for a society. Housing should not be a commodity.
- WithinReason 14d ago
  Who builds the houses then?
  - mschuster91 14d ago
    Governments directly, cooperatives or non-profit organizations. The Churches used to be pretty active in that space as well to invest tithes, with rents paying for common-welfare projects.
    - IshKebab 14d ago
      Yeay communism! They built such lovely tower blocks.
      - vrganj 14d ago
        Yeah like that ugly drab city of ... Vienna?? https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-social-housing-secret-how-vienna-became-the-worlds-most-livable-city https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc...
        WithinReason 14d ago
        That's more like social housing: > an income maximum for applicants of €57,600 and can't be bought, only rented
        mschuster91 14d ago
        first of all, Europeans don't need American wages. 57k is comfortable middle class in Austria, especially if you have government subsidised housing. as for the "only rented" part, again, at this level of low rent it does not matter. you're better off renting. And Europeans have actual pension systems, we are nowhere near as reliant on real estate always appreciating in value.
mschuster91 14d ago
Most of the affected housing used to be government owned, sold at firesale prices after the CDU Diepgen government thoroughly wrecked the state finances with a banking scandal at the end of the 90s. The large investor landlords purchased the homes and often didn't even do the bare minimum in upkeep. The real estate nevertheless appreciated massively because of Berlin getting more and more popular. It therefore makes sense to nationalize this housing stock, and I'd see a value comprised of "original purchase price, upkeep and inflation-plus-3%-tied appreciation" as fair value. Maybe even less because they extracted 20 years worth of rent payments from the properties already.
- IshKebab 14d ago
  I don't know if that's really fair though because it's unlikely that the people that benefited from the fire sale are still the owners. It would make more sense just enforce maintenance standards and improve renters rights. You can't really legislate supply & demand.
  - 698969 14d ago
    Still the same companies Deutsche Wohnen and Vonovia but I agree with the second part. Their yearly profits are capped because of the Mietpreisbremse (rent control) law since all the old buildings that they bought would fall under it, so it would've been better to put the money towards either building new state-owned housing or helping the tenants enforce their rights. The laws are there to protect tenants against neglect from the landlord but enforcement takes multiple months which is not a reasonable timeline if you have a problem in your apartment and the consequences for landlord are mostly just reducing the rent for that time by a certain percentage which doesn't make a difference if the rents are already cheap because of the Mietpreisbremse, so it would also be good to introduce fines but not sure if Germany's legal framework allows for that.
- tirant 14d ago
  The reality is that the actual large-scale sell-off of public housing was carried out under the SPD–PDS (now The Left) red-red coalition led by Klaus Wowereit in 2004. for prices of around 30.000€ per unit.
bmacho 14d ago
[edit - deleted]
- backhold 14d ago
  With the disclaimer that I am neither German nor familiar with the policy under discussion, Confiscation with (some) remuneration is still confiscation. Is your comment satirical?
  - deleted 14d ago
    [deleted]
monegator 14d ago
Given it affects PE funds that have gouged up all the supply, yes that is sound logic. My province's capital has 43% of unhinabitated houses. They are not even on the market, as we are in a housing crisis. Vast majority of them are property of large housing groups that are backed by black rock and company. The same firms are manouvering the politicians to get approvals to build modern monstruosities, because there is a housing crisis, but they build only luxury homes thst cost too much and remain unhinabitated. Yes it is sound logic to force big conglomerates to dissolve by law. Law should aim for the public good.
- m4xp 14d ago
  There should be huge taxes on empty houses. This breaks the supply demand price negotiation, if they can gauge price by 2x they dont care if they rent half the houses.
  - Helmut10001 14d ago
    Such a law existed in San Francisco since 2022 and it was just cancelled by court order. The problem is: there are so many edge cases for empty apartments that it is impossible to account for. In Berlin, e.g., just imagine all the empty apartments in 10 years because no one wants to rent unrenovated, uninsulated apartments because of energy prices. The landlord cannot pay renovation. Forcing landlords to pay an empty apartment penalty doesn't help here.
    - scarecrowbob 14d ago
      I am not a capitalist, but isn't that the kind of problem that capitalism would solve? Wouldn't the landlords would just take a loss and sell the property to avoid penalties?
      - Helmut10001 14d ago
        If there is no business model and no one wants to pay, what then? We'd have a lot of vacant properties that would need to be renovated by the city. We see this in lots of places in Germany already, where there simply aren't buyers (because of demographics, primarily). Further, if you devalue properties with such a law, then you'd have a credit/dept property - landlords couldn't pay their dept, if property prices devalue by state law. Lastly, no one would build properties anymore under such a law. .. Cities also rely quite a bit on property and real estate transfer taxes. By reducing property values, cities destroy their own tax base while needing lots of additional money to renovate state-acquired, vacant properties.

aurareturn 14d ago

They do want to pay landlords, though below current (very high) rates. In San Francisco, NIMBYs secretly support laws like this. This basically guarantees that many builders will do the math and conclude that it doesn't make sense to build housing in San Francisco. New large condo buildings have to sell 30% of the units at below market rate. This causes many viable projects to never get built. So laws like this are sold to renter voters as a way to lower housing costs, but NIMBYs secretly love it. Over time, renters pay more in rent because there is less supply due to builders not building. However, a lucky few renters who were here early will get below market rents. Perfect examples of voters voting for a short term fix but pay more in long term. And voting for themselves while screwing future renters.

vrganj 14d ago
The fix is for the city to be the builder, like it is in Vienna. The City of Vienna is the largest landlord in Europe. It is also the only major European capital without a rent cost crisis.
- specproc 14d ago
  Similarly UK cities built their own housing, up until Thatcher and Right to Buy. Costs spiralled out of control after that. Most urgent intervention required in the UK, IMO. We're choking to death on the cost of housing.
- fileeditview 14d ago
  You would think that people could learn from examples. Sadly it rarely happens.
  - spwa4 14d ago
    The example here being that they would pay a lot more city tax, never own a home, and over a period of decades this would make rent prices go down. If this is what people want, then it seems like the right solution. Short term the only change will be increased taxes and maybe a few lucky renters getting apartments with the number slowly increasing over years and years. Which is pretty much the situation in Vienna (rents are low in Vienna, but for the 20% that get city-owned apartments the rents are very low. Quality is ... let's call it "very old", and there's no choice (can't move up if you have a kid, say). Then housing associations pay like 30% more but less than private. Private rents are about double city-owned apartments as they're called. Only way to become a city renter is to earn less than 58000 in a given year, then wait 5+ years).

fabian2k 14d ago

They are saying that this is what the want to do. They can't do that because it would be illegal. This is not just any law, it's in the German constitution (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_14.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_14.html).

4gotunameagain 14d ago
The article you linked can be clearly interpreted in a way that would make it possible.
- fabian2k 14d ago
  There is no way that paying below market value here would amount to a fair evaluation of the owner's interests.
  - 698969 14d ago
    If it definitely had to be market value, then the law probably would've been worded differently? It says the compensation is determined as a balance of public good and the interests of those affected, so to me it does read like the compensation can be lower than market value so it'd all come down the courts to determine how much below the market value the state can get away with.

jttnr 14d ago

To add further context: in 2021, Berlin residents voted in a Volksentscheid on whether the government should compulsorily purchase back housing stock from large private real-estate companies. The proposal received 58% support, but the CDU/SPD coalition in office at the time just ignored it. This now at least partially reflects in the votes. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksentscheid_%E2%80%9EDeutsche_Wohnen_%26_Co_enteignen%E2%80%9C_in_Berlin_2021 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksentscheid_%E2%80%9EDeutsc...

snehk 14d ago
That's no surprise. Berlin loves free things that others have paid for. They're pretty much the only capital city in the developed world that's a burden and not a benefit to the country as a whole. It's pretty embarrassing. Then they do things like free daycare paid for by other states in the country while those states can't offer it.
- illiac786 14d ago
  So many shocking statements, so little sources… I’d almost believe the burden one, but you just piled and made the whole thing sound very emotional and not very objective. If you have any kind of stats supporting this, I genuinely would be interested.
  - snehk 14d ago
    Two claims in my post: 1) > They're pretty much the only capital city in the developed world that's a burden and not a benefit to the country as a whole. https://www.iwkoeln.de/presse/iw-nachrichten/matthias-diermeier-henry-goecke-usually-an-economic-driving-force.html https://www.iwkoeln.de/presse/iw-nachrichten/matthias-dierme... 2) > Then they do things like free daycare paid for by other states in the country while those states can't offer it. Look up "Länderfinanzausgleich" and then look up daycare programs and compare them. None of the net payers get even remotely the same even though they're the ones actually paying for it. Both statements are objectively true.