A Berlin Borough Buying Out Private Landlords

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/08/berlin-rent-control-neighborhood-protection/536325/

by Geekette • 9 years ago

126 155 9 years ago

config_yml• 9 years ago

Other cities do this as well, like Vienna, or Zurich.

jcfrei• 9 years ago

It's always interesting to see which parts of our lives are incompatible with free markets (at least for a majority of society). It's a very peculiar moral that you mustn't evict people from their homes after they've lived in a place for a certain amount of time. It shows that being a renter in a neighbourhood after a while creates some sort of (legally enforceable) kinship that is incompatible with a free market for housing. But I think it's very arbitrary that we don't have a problem saying to outsiders "we won't allow you to live here (even though you'd be willing to pay a lot for it)" however saying to someone "you can't live here anymore (unless you pay more)" is a cardinal sin.

loceng2• 9 years ago

Core survival requirements seem generally incompatible with free markets.

nine_k3• 9 years ago

This is why markets spring up in societies that developed past mere survival of subsistence farming or hunting. The society of Germany is way past that phase, just in case.

stale2002• 9 years ago

This is completely untrue.

Look at the food market. The food market is extremely close to a competitive, fully capitalistic free market.

Do food sellers monopolize the market and charge extremely high prices because food is necessary for survival? No, they don't. Because the free market would force them out of business.

The current free market for food has a variety of different products, from a variety of sellers, all for a very reasonable cost.

This is especially true when you compare it to NON free market industries like housing, where much of the problems are caused by the government limiting supply.

Eridrus4• 9 years ago

One way to look at this is that displacement causes a loss of value, i.e. culture, kinship, etc, to the extent that capitalism is an attempt to maximise value this isn't crazy.

But I think housing is definitely a thing capitalism struggles with because it is a good everyone needs and there is a finite amount of it, so much of it is zero-sum allocation.

Obviously I think we need to invest more in the non-zero-sum parts of it, but it's also a difficult political problem with lots of common goods and externalities.

smikhanov• 9 years ago

What kind of value you think is being lost during a displacement? I’m genuinely interested

smokeyj• 9 years ago

But I think housing is definitely a thing capitalism struggles with because it is a good everyone needs and there is a finite amount of it

I think municipalities that can support high density development are in short supply. High rises are just concrete and rebar. But if there's no transportation, not enough energy, security, etc - then no development will take place. We've left those roles to local government, and I think we should challenge that decision.

The supply of land rebar and concrete isn't that scarce (thanks capitalism). What's scarce is the organization and infrastructure that can sustain a town - and the limited land around it. If there's something that needs more capitalism it's city planning.

Crye• 9 years ago

Externalizing costs is one of the larger problems with capitalism. If I can pollute the environment with out that cost being captured, then I can essentially extract value from others indirectly. If moving people from their homes causes psychological damage or civil unrest, then I can externalize those costs as well.

Regulation is supposed to prevent or limit those externalizing costs. However it's nearly impossible to put value on something like that.

gboudrias• 9 years ago

In my opinion, capitalism in its purest form must thrive on misery (as it must exploit essential needs). This is what a truly free market implies.

What I find interesting (though I don't think this is the point you're making), is that there are still people defending this obvious flaw and marketing it as a feature. But once essential needs are met (i.e. housing, food and security), what's even left? Luxuries, I guess. But even that can vary drastically between periods and societies (is gas a luxury? is higher education a luxury?).

And yet here we are.

nine_k3• 9 years ago

The thing is that other forms have been tried. It turns out that unless a form of society does not have enough capitalist underpinnings, it indeed thrives in misery of most people: North Korea, Soviet bloc, religious tyrannies, aristocracy with indentured servitude, etc.

ThrustVectoring3• 9 years ago

Capitalism thrives on misery only as much as it alleviates it. That's what an increase in prices is - a sign that people are desperate for something and willing to handsomely reward whoever will provide it.

It's why I'm in favor of legalizing price gouging - if someone goes to great personal effort, risk, and expense to buy electrical generators and drive them into a disaster area, that's a good thing and should be rewarded. And when the area has enough generators, the price will fall and the gouging will stop.

The thing we do have to watch out for is deliberately creating a need so that the entrepreneur can swoop in and fill it. I suppose this also applies to many forms of advertising, game design, and website design though, too.

closeparen8• 9 years ago

I always thought of permanence as the differentiating factor between renting and owning. I actually feel less interested in owning, now that I know these "guaranteed right to rent at the same price for life" deals are out there.

em3rgent0rdr3• 9 years ago

yes, an example of one of the many unintended consequences of trying to interfere with market forces.

rwallace• 9 years ago

The problem is that housing is not a free market, and there's an uncanny valley effect: free markets are great, socialism is not without its own benefits, but a non-free market has the advantages of neither and the disadvantages of both.

That is, housing is not a free market because it's illegal to build enough of it to meet demand. Employment is not a free market for a variety of reasons, which means employees don't have enough bargaining power to get remote work. And the U.S. has the special problem that Internet access is not a free market either, political corruption has crippled the ability of rural areas to provide it for themselves, which in turn damages the ability of the economy to provide jobs in areas where there is enough housing.

And as long as all that is true, saying housing can be allocated by the market is just saying 'let them eat cake': an abdication by government of its responsibilities to safeguard the most basic rights of the people.

woah• 9 years ago

The supply of housing is severely limited by non-capitalist forces. It's hard to take it as an example of anything in isolation. If there was enough housing for all the people who wanted to live in Berlin, then it wouldn't be possible to buy a building and raise the rent.

bradleyjg• 9 years ago

Yes, it is a little odd. If a polity thinks that long term residence should covey property rights maybe it should pass laws that encourage or require rent-to-own schemes instead of layering confusing quasi-property rights on top of the rental/ownership dichotomy.

breatheoften• 9 years ago

It is definitely true that cities require many income levels to be sustainable -- preventing monoculture is not just a kind of cultural bias but it is sound economic strategy to keep your city vital and desirable over the long term. There is so much accrued capital into wealthy hands across the world with need to find profitable parking -- allowing your city to become a real estate bubble in service to investment funds is trading short term gains for long term losses.

sbenitoj4• 9 years ago

It's also interesting that people genuinely believe this is going to solve the problem rather than exacerbate it.

There is nothing any politician can do to change the laws of supply and demand. If this district in Berlin is in high demand, they're not going to fix the "problem" of high rents by keeping the supply fixed.

The only solution to this "problem" is to let people build additional housing to increase supply.

Instead of keeping the same people in their current units, overtime what will happen is people who currently rent apartments in this district will start to sub-let their apartments to the people who are willing to pay higher prices, acting as a wealth transfer from landlords to current tenants. And yes this will occur even if it's made "illegal" to sublet these apartments (this exact situation exists in NYC with people who have rent controlled apartments and people still do it all the time).

em3rgent0rdr3• 9 years ago

Ditto.

"The only solution..."

I wonder as a thought experiment, if the city keeps buying more houses to fix the "problem", it might eventually become the dominant landlord, and then in order to raise revenue, it might find that it has to increase rents on its rent-controlled housing...

eecc• 9 years ago

There's a limit to how much you can build out a city before you've permanently disfigured it.

Imagine taking your typical European mid-sized city and starting to allow multiple high rises taller that historical landmarks; or adding purely residential sprawl neighborhoods that distort residents' lifestyle due to long commutes and lack of attractor points outside of downtown.

You've just made a suburban hell out of a human-tailored environment, with the added sin of having destroyed the "experience continuity" which used to be core to community identity. A loss that is permanent and impossible to revert in later generations

I've lived in Rome and Amsterdam, and I know the feeling

closeparen8• 9 years ago

The "problem" is the movement of middle/upper middle class people into cities. High rents and displacement are one consequence of gentrification, but most people who care about those things are opposed to gentrification itself. The only solution is to keep the middle class in sprawl where it "belongs."

Geekette2• 9 years ago

This move of certain municipalities buying housing is not in contradiction to increasing supply; it's just one of many tactics being used to address it. I recall recently reading elsewhere that Berlin govt is also planning for building additional housing and conversion of large unused industrial spaces into housing.

noobermin3• 9 years ago

Do you have evidence of your last paragraph ever occurring in such a high frequency to actually matter to people?

bogomipz2• 9 years ago

"It's also interesting that people genuinely believe this is going to solve the problem rather than exacerbate it."

No, nobody believes that this one action is going to solve a housing problem, where did you get that from in the article? The point is that Berlin took a pro-resident stance here which is both encouraging and unusual in the current "developer takes all" policies that many other desirable cities around the world have adopted. Berlin also enacted legislation restricting AirBnB rentals in the city. They understand there is a housing problem and are at least taking actions to address the concerns of the residents and possibly buy some time.

"The only solution to this "problem" is to let people build additional housing to increase supply."

What do you suggest, Berlin gets rid of parks and public spaces and allows high high rise condos to occupy that space instead? Part of the quality of life and charm of Berlin is those spaces. Also there is nothing in this article that suggests that the potential buyers were going to increase the housing supply. Housing is a pretty complex issue and your completely reductionist policy suggestion is absurd and naive.

"And yes this will occur even if it's made "illegal" to sublet these apartments (this exact situation exists in NYC with people who have rent controlled apartments and people still do it all the time)."

This is completely untrue. Firstly there are barely any "rent controlled" apartments left in NYC. They are an endangered species and this idea that people who don't live there are subletting them out at a profit is a complete myth. See the following:

https://citylimits.org/2015/03/09/nycs-endangered-species-a-...

As of 6 years ago rent controlled apartment in NYC were 1.8% of the total stock. And there are significantly less now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_control_in_New_York

jacquesm• 9 years ago

You could do worse than to start with those items listed in the Universal Rights of Man and assume that anything associated with those should never be in any way be something that you'd have to pay for. After all, if they are universal rights then you can't put a $ figure on them.

And then you read that list and you realize that those are exactly the things that are being milked for all they are worth, and often more.

ThrustVectoring3• 9 years ago

Not forming new social bonds is an entirely different thing than breaking existing ones. Yes, it maths out to "these social bonds don't exist", but the latter is far more painful to actual humans.

It's also why there's a significant ethical difference between murder on the one hand, and abortion and birth control on the other.

closeparen8• 9 years ago

Being stuck in a socially dysfunctional and economically stagnant part of the country - one where you're unemployed or underemployed - is a little more severe than "not forming new social bonds," though I see your point.

The place I was born made sense for my parents - barely. It didn't make any sense for me. I'd be in a world of hurt if it weren't for the ability to relocate to somewhere with job growth.

matt40774• 9 years ago

This isn't just about the welfare of current renters. The city (and the people in these quarters) are also concerned about the changes a neighbourhood experiences when the population changes.

What often happens is that these cheap but beautiful areas attract students/artists/etc, who create (or support) lots of businesses and events that make the area attractive. When the lawyers/doctors/etc replace them, they destroy exactly what it was that attracted them to it in the first place.

(I live about 300m from the building discussed in the article)

Jdam• 9 years ago

So from an economic point of view (that is lacking in Berlin in general), which value do the artists and students create and which value is created by doctors?

Fine if the leftist gov wants to sustain their neverland but not if the other part of society (dreaded doctors, lawyers, engineers) has to pay for that.

(also living in Berlin)

rocqua7• 9 years ago

I get that it sucks when this happens to where you live, but is this an actual issue? Why should a neighborhood, once it is made better, be set in stone?

It feels a bit like a nice populist point (ragging on the rich folks displacing the downtrodden trying to pull on their bootstraps). That alone makes suspicious.

scaryclam• 9 years ago

I'm not a landlord, but I recently bought my own home. If I moved on and decided to rent my property out, I may be making a small profit. However, if the housing market changes and the rent no longer covers the cost of the mortgage, I wouldn't say it's a cardinal sin to put the rent up. Most landlords are not professionals with large portfolios. Most cannot afford to keep the property if the costs are not covered. Having rented for many years previously, I'd prefer a rent increase to being evicted because the property had to be sold.

solidsnack90002• 9 years ago

    ...I think it's very
    arbitrary that we don't
    have a problem saying
    to outsiders "we won't
    allow you to live here
    (even though you'd be
    willing to pay a lot
    for it)" however saying
    to someone "you can't
    live here anymore
    (unless you pay more)"
    is a cardinal sin.

Pre-existing rights generally count for a lot more than rights that might exist. It has been said that "possession is nine tenths of the law". (Although no one has unencumbered possession of land anymore, in the sense of allodial title.)

Allowing neighbourhoods to be broken up by rich foreigners sets a bad precedent both for current inhabitants and the new ones, who are very likely to find themselves in the same situation well before retirement age (as is happening in San Francisco). City governments are accountable to the people who live there, not the greater good of the One Market, and by serving their interests are merely doing their jobs.

closeparen8• 9 years ago

People who have moved somewhere are not foreigners.

holydude• 9 years ago

Some people prefer this some people dont. I honestly detest interfering like this.

imtringued• 9 years ago

Why? It gives the government financial incentives to build more housing or deregulate zoning laws.

ikeboy2• 9 years ago

As long as they're paying more than the investors offered, it seems fine. Article makes it unclear how the price they paid compares to what the sell price would have been.

em3rgent0rdr3• 9 years ago

Well it may seem fine, however considering that taxes are funding the city's purchases, then it is a bit unfair to the other bidders who are therefore at a disadvantage.

matt40774• 9 years ago

They get right-of-last-refusal on any offer. Meaning they pay whatever the investor was offering.

ikeboy2• 9 years ago

Does the investor have a right to bid higher in that case?

JanSt3• 9 years ago

Berlin is lead by a left-far left-green coalition and gets billions of € every year from the Länderfinanzausgleich. Basically, other germans pay for their citys reckless spending on questionable projects. High rents need more living space, not payed-by-other one

tannhaeuser4• 9 years ago

It's been said the majority, or a large part, of the electorate of Berlin consists of people receiving welfare or other community/state benefits in some form or another, including the large number of state employees living in Berlin. It's a very unhealthy situation going forward, since the government of Berlin must appease that part of the electorate, rather than attracting eg. investors or people who can sustain themselves.

That the state or municipality is an actor on the housing market really is a perversion and outright declaration of defeat on behalf of politicians. With the negative interest rate set by the European Central Bank and thus lack of investment opportunities, and given the growth of population in the metropolitan areas of Germany, you'd think this market should be able to see after itself, like it is in other areas of Germany.

Even more so since housing has traditionally been an investment for people seeking to build up a rent for when they're old, a problem that will come big time to Germany in the years to come, the demographics being what they are.

But social-democratic politicians in Berlin are generally incompetent or corrupt in the extreme; at the expense of other German's money, they rather want to be perceived as acting in the interest of their electorate.

JanSt3• 9 years ago

This so much. Yet, I get downvoted for stating facts by people, who have no idea about the situation.

Xylakant3• 9 years ago

How are employees of the federal government "receivers of state benefits"? It's a job like any other job - they work for money.

rsync• 9 years ago

"It's been said the majority, or a large part, of the electorate of Berlin consists of people receiving welfare or other community/state benefits in some form or another, including the large number of state employees living in Berlin. It's a very unhealthy situation going forward ..."

I am reminded of this quote, which is often misattributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler[1]:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing ..."

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_Fraser_Tytler

mbag• 9 years ago

I'm interested to see how this plays out. Some cities have opposite approach. These are older articles, but it might be a reason why Berlin decided to try new approach: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/31/inside-londo... https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/25/its-like-a-g...

odiroot• 9 years ago

That's too bad, the Kreuzberg part of this dual district really needs a lot of improvement. One may risk saying needs a bit more gentrification.

Geekette2• 9 years ago

This move of certain municipalities buying housing appears to be one of many tactics being used to address housing shortage. I recall recently reading elsewhere that Berlin govt is also planning for building additional housing and conversion of large unused industrial spaces into housing. I wouldn't be surprised if improvement of certain areas is also part of the renovation/conversion tactics used in their housing strategy.

baron8165• 9 years ago

The developed world really needs to start building new cities. People shouldn't be deprived of the opportunity to live in an downtown area just because the people already there feel entitled to their way of life. But, people can lose everything if you economically force them from their homes. That's not desirable either.

My proposal for new cities involves strictly limiting the foot print to enable it to be completely walkable. That would mean you don't have any cars, which is good for many reasons. A lot of what local governments do is complicated by having to service so many different residences over a wide area (think sewage and water, mail, policing/fire protection, road maintenance, etc). If you mostly just build up, then that all becomes much easier, which means government can be much smaller and cheaper. And I think the city becomes much more livable, as a large area around the city is green space, and the streets can be taken over by open air restaurants/cafes/bars on weekends.

hashmal• 9 years ago

Depends where you live, in many areas around europe you just don't have enough lands for new cities.

baron8165• 9 years ago

I'm envisioning these new "microcities" would be about a mile and a half to two miles in diameter. You should be able to walk from one end to another in ~30 minutes. But they'd still be able to hold +100-500K people. The footprint would be small enough that you should be able to fit it anywhere. Even small European countries have a bit of farmland that could squeeze one of these cities in it.

jimmaswell4• 9 years ago

In a lot of cases, just "building up" more would probably lead to the population density getting too high, and I think the point is often missed that not everywhere has ground suitable for the foundations taller buildings need.

Really, cities seem like a "necessary evil" to me and I hope they become less important and somewhat phased out as employers realize they can replace a lot of expensive city office space with telecommuting. I dread the thought I might have to move into one for a job soon until I have enough experience on paper to get steady remote jobs - I've been to a lot of cities for conventions or just passing through and I don't understand what possible appeal they have.

I'm half inclined to believe a lot of the people waxing romantic about cities have never been to one. You get harassed for money all the time and every time I go to a convention I hear stories of people getting assaulted for refusing, they don't look nice unless you're looking on from miles away at a few skylines like NYC's with the new WTC, you have to be a lot more on guard and pay more attention to your surroundings, everything is more expensive, and all the stores/restaurants are overcrowded a lot of the time.

It's a mystery to me why there's such an attitude against suburbs on HN. Sure, suburban town development is technically less resource-efficient than packing everything together like you're designing a circuit board to be mass-produced, but I don't think it's worth the cost.

baron8165• 9 years ago

Then don't build everywhere. Only build in places that have ground suitable for the foundations taller buildings need. If we're building new cities, we can make some wise decisions on where to do that beforehand.

Not everyone has to live in one of my cities. If you don't like population density, then you can live somewhere else. But the problem we have now is that there are a lot of people who want to live in densely populated places, but can't because the cost of living is too high.

dionidium• 9 years ago

People aren't going to want to stop living near other people any time soon. Not everybody likes living in big urban areas (as you demonstrate), for the same reasons that some people really like social events and others don't. But the people who like dense social networks really like them and don't want to live in the suburbs.

You're extrapolating too far from your own preferences. I don't like watermelon, but I don't generalize from that to a future where something replaces watermelon. I assume people are eating watermelon because they do like it.

barrkel2• 9 years ago

The best things about cities come from density combined with diversity. Having a lot of diversity means there's lots of niche interests; having a lot of density means those niche interests have enough adherents to come together to create communities; whether they're specialist shops, restaurants, discussion groups, music, theatre, political movements, sexual interests - whatever - the more niche your interest is, the more likely you'll only find like-minded people in a city.

I could say I don't understand why people don't live in cities. The countryside is boring - if you're not interested in the outdoors, there's nothing to do. Suburbs make some sense for people in middle adulthood to raise children in a safer environment without being too far from the city, but otherwise they're just a space / commute tradeoff, getting more space for your money than somewhere closer.

pjc504• 9 years ago

Cities come in a wide variety of sizes.

3pt141592• 9 years ago

I want to kickstarter a city in Canada. Something along the major fiber lines somewhere nice and fun and pretty. Probably either between Toronto and Ottawa or somewhere out in BC.

Pre-plan things like fiber to every home, smart measures to promote walking / biking, and promote reasonable density (3 to 5 storeys as the default height). Have cool things like a free regular bus to natural areas where people can swim or hike (cheaper than building olympic size pools, no?). Very strict building standards for things like building materials and sustainability. No suburbia or aboveground highways.

gruez• 9 years ago

Have cool things like a free regular bus to natural areas where people can swim or hike (cheaper than building olympic size pools, no?).

If this is in Canada, wouldn't the water be cold for most of the year? An indoor Olympic pool works year round.

pjc504• 9 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_movement

The trouble with "designed" rather than "evolved" cities is that they tend to be a bit soulless, and inevitably the design reflects whatever the prejudices of the builders were at the time. Hence the famous roundabouts of Milton Keynes, one of the very few cities of the UK that really accommodates car culture.

Personally I think it would be simpler to try to distribute jobs across the existing cities a bit. The UK is over-focused on London and France over-focused on Paris. The US is larger so the effect is spread over the top 5 cities, but we still see that in order to start a tech business people think they "must" move to SF.

stevenwoo2• 9 years ago

I'm kind of hoping Amazon's new HQ goes some place not on the coast just to jump start jobs inland somewhere.

ajdlinux• 9 years ago

I live in Canberra, a planned city that in many ways is amazing and wonderful - but it too suffers from the assumption of the time that cars were the way of the future, as well as assumptions about population growth that didn't quite pan out.

We've ended up with a city of 400,000 that's 40km from north to south and 15km east to west. Public transport is, as a result, highly problematic, and pushes by government to increase housing density (which I think is quite a sensible idea) meet with some resistance.

Planned cities aren't necessarily bad on the whole though - I will quite happily take "soulless" over "gridlocked" and "clean" over "gritty" any day. Canberra may be a bit "soulless", but the more organic cities around us have a very different set of problems with their own negative impacts on livability.

makomk• 9 years ago

Building new cities doesn't do much good so long as all the jobs keep becoming more and more concentrated in a handful of existing major cities. There are already existing cities that are more affordable, but so long as the jobs aren't there...

dirtbox• 9 years ago

This is an incredibly US-centric way of looking at it, the rest of the world really doesn't have the same problems as the US in any of these areas. I lived in Berlin for a time and many places in the UK and around Europe and really none of this applies. People live where the work is, commutes are generally under 30 minutes.

The US owes it's "walkability" or lack of due to Blockbusting by property developers in the 50s that used racism to drive the middle classes out of the cities into the newly built suburbs. No such thing happened anywhere else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting

closeparen8• 9 years ago

Maybe so, but there seems to be a consensus that moving back to the neighborhood your grandparents fled is immoral (gentrification).

stevenwoo2• 9 years ago

I was only there a week but when I was in London 20 years ago, a sizeable number of the people in the office lived an hour or more away by train. The first data I could find bears out that London is different from the rest of the UK. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-13627199

brandur• 9 years ago

The US owes it's "walkability" or lack of due to Blockbusting by property developers in the 50s that used racism to drive the middle classes out of the cities into the newly built suburbs. No such thing happened anywhere else.

I think that might've been a factor, but it's an overgeneralization. In Canada, we didn't those race relations problems to anywhere close to the same degree, and yet big Canadian cities are just as sprawled as their American counterparts.

For my money, the major problem with the US and Canada is for the most part, we got to start fresh. A lot of the expansion happened in the age of the automobile, and at the time, we built what we thought we wanted — large suburbs and big arteries to take us between them. This worked pretty well in the beginning, but the further we spread, the more obvious the realization that the design doesn't scale [1].

In Europe, a lot of cities were built pre-car, and although they've seen significant change in the interim, large parts of the original geography are left over. There are some places that consciously designed their infrastructure well even if it was against the grain for the time (e.g. anti-car protests in the Netherlands that led to modern bicycle-friendly Amsterdam; also, Copenhagen), but a lot of it is a historical accident which turns out to have led to better livability than anything our city planners have done on purpose in 100 years.

---

[1] It's still not obvious to everyone, but as commute times continue to go up, I believe that broader consensus will form.

anovikov2• 9 years ago

One shouldn't forget that suburbisation was a Cold War move - a very effective one and something Soviet Union could not even remotely afford to follow. Quite likely that it eventually prevented nuclear war by making it clearly unwinnable for the Soviets.

alexasmyths• 9 years ago

"that used racism to drive the middle classes out of the cities into the newly built suburbs."

I'm sorry, but this is not fair.

For whatever reasons (and ironically, after major civil rights advances) - many urban areas on the US became massively violent.

Rates of violent crime increased 600% (robbery) [1] in America overall during the 1960-1980. That's quite a radical increase. And again - note that this was a time of ostensibly major civil rights progress.

To wit - the increase in violence was not so much in rural areas, it was urban, ergo, there was even more than an 600% increase in crime. This was an era of increasing literacy and access to education for all Americans, including those who were underpriveledged. And this was way before Regans+Clinton strategy of mass incarceration.

It's deeply unfair to suggest that a family - of any race - that decides to move to the relatively affordable, calm suburbs, where they can own a full home and have a backyard, and avoid the massive increase in crime - is somehow 'racist'.

If your neighbourhood violence increased by more than 600% over the span of 10 years, and you were having kids, you might just decided to move somewhere else.

[1] http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

I don't think 'walkability' is a thing in any US city other than the one's established before cars, sadly.

On the subject of the article - if the Government is banning the sale of private property, or worse, forcing property sales - this is a problem. Banning to international investors - sure. Buying up land, sure, if they want. But banning sales from Germans to other Germans, or forcing sales to the government - no way.

llukas• 9 years ago

You just described medieval city. Most of EU cities have such part in city center.

raverbashing• 9 years ago

There are plenty of cities with diminishing population who could use a renovation

But of course they never heard of avocado toasts so big companies avoid moving there

rocqua7• 9 years ago

I wonder what the zoning laws are like in Berlin. Specifically, I wonder if zoning laws prohibit small homes that allow for pretty good high-density housing. Such zoning laws could contribute to the high rents in the center of town.

In any case, this method is much better than rent-control. There is still then monetary incentive to skip on maintenance, but the institution should insulate from that. The biggest potential downside I see is a slowing of development in general. That might obstruct development of cheap rents more than it saves.

In general I wonder what prevents building higher, cause you can build high and cheap and if there is demand, why not?

lobotryas• 9 years ago

To answer your last question:

1) The type of land in which you are building. Some can't support high-rises or can only do that at great expense (which defeats the purpose of building high).

2) Infrastructure. It's easy to cram a lot of people into one building but it becomes harder to alleviate traffic or ensure access to things like shops and health care.

matt40774• 9 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean by "small homes". Here, take a look at the house I live in, which is very typical of the buildings in central Berlin: https://www.google.de/maps/@52.4952517,13.4168985,3a,75y,199...

Generally, Berlin has mixed zoning with retail on the street level, apartments above, and offices and small manufacturing in the back. You can't build higher than what you see in the photo (the old limit for fire ladders), unless it's in an area with other higher buildings already.

Rents are rising as a return to normal. Most people pay around $1.2/ft^2 (sorry, I have no idea what unit the US uses for rent)

rocqua7• 9 years ago

For small homes I'd say < 40m^2 spaces, getting as small as 25m^2. Those allow young single people to live where they want at prices they can afford. A related factor is required parking space. Such space, when there is no demand, makes high-density housing take up much more land.

danohu2• 9 years ago

Berlin is pretty dense, even without skyscrapers. Tightly-packed six-storey buildings can get you very high density (look at Paris for a more extreme demonstration). The area of Kreuzberg I'm in now has the same population density as Manhattan (28,000 people per square kilometre), despite not having anything more than 7 storeys high.

Housing everywhere in Berlin -- especially new-build -- is very dense. Importantly that's true throughout the city, not just in the centre.

Keeping Berlin so dense is an impressive achievement, given that it's surrounded by flat, empty countryside. Partly it's because of the cold war division of the city. But mainly it's cultural -- most Berliners are happy with apartments rather than individual houses.

Politicians religiously promise to maintain the 'berliner mix', where zoning encourages housing and commercial use in the same area, and keeping a social mix by having affordable housing everywhere. A new higher-density mixed-use zone category ('urban area') has just been introduced nationally, largely at Berlin's request.

neokya• 9 years ago

I am quite not sure how it would be expensive for existing residents even after sale to so called foreign investor. As far as I understand, in Germany, rents are fixed for existing residents and landlord can not evict them (few exception exists, probably won't work for investors).

That 10% increase rule is only for new tenants.

detaro3• 9 years ago

Rent can be adjusted up to match prices in the area (with a limit of 15% increase per 3 years), and modernizations are a valid reason to increase prices above that. Which is the typical gentrification scenario Berlin is worried about: old buildings are bought, improved to a more luxurious standard and then rented at accordingly higher prices.

evv• 9 years ago

What a small world. Until tonight I had never been to Kreuzberg, let alone Berlin. My friend recommended this as one of the more hipster neighborhoods. After realizing that this building is only a 25 minute walk away, I decided to go around and take a few photos of it and the surrounding neighborhood:

https://imgur.com/gallery/cSpgv

This area has a fun vibe and it's easy to see why it's rising in popularity.. my Airbnb host grew up here and told me that it used to be very poor. This particular building is well painted, but doesn't really stand out.

As someone who grew up in Palo Alto, gentrification just feels so.. normal. Although it's priced out most of my friends and family, I've always seen it as something inevitable.

This is such a strange precedent to set.. how many of these dwellings is the city prepared to buy? How can they possibly stop the free market?

danielfoster• 9 years ago

I am curious how this decision will impact the neighborhood and city in the long-term. Unless the city spends more to educate existing residents or finds a way to bring in a more qualified workforce, higher-paying jobs won't come to the city and tax revenue will stay flat. I'm afraid this will hurt the city more in the long-run than any gentrification would.

This is probably also infuriating to other parts of Germany, which pay substantial subsidies to Berlin and a few other poorer states.

JBlue42• 9 years ago

This is probably also infuriating to other parts of Germany, which pay substantial subsidies to Berlin and a few other poorer states.

It can be annoying but that's what being a unified country is about. Can't say those of us here in California or in NY are too happy about our massive subsidies that go to the red states that accuse us of being full of "welfare queens" but that's the cost of being a country.

Boothroid2• 9 years ago

I've thought in the past about the possibility of a network of enterprises that would seek to eliminate or at least minimise profits and to exclude profit making companies from participation in the network. For example, the Goldman Sachss of this world would find the doors firmly shut via some kind of legal structuring. The eventual goal would be to drive profit out of the system completely, which surely would convert all profit into pure inefficiency, and thus slowly destroy the profit making enterprise as a viable model. Intrigued therefore to see this and also a report on TV about how Hamburg voted (narrowly) to take back control of their electricity network, and how this has the big power companies seriously concerned, no doubt because their parasitic extraction of profit is threatened.

As may be obvious I am not an economist, so anticipate and welcome the flaws in my idea being pointed out!

rocqua7• 9 years ago

Forcing out profit means there is less money for reinvesting. This would mean your network would fall behind in the quality it provides, until the profit enterprises are a better deal, even after their profit is extracted.

You could go against that by having the intention of turning a profit but committing to reinvesting, but that is still extracting that profit. Moreover, it encourages the same exploitative behavior.

In general, profit isn't bad. Trades are only made when both parties are better of afterwards, so in principle, more trade means everyone is better off. The devil lies in the balance between how much better off both parties are.

Boothroid2• 9 years ago

OK, so then include a percentage of price for reinvestment and eliminate all other profit? Or put all of this profit into a socialised pool? Also for-profit competitors would be effectively shut out of the network by agreement. The vision would be vertical integration with minimal profit at each step, thus opportunities for concentration of wealth are minimised. Interestingly this seems to be happening to a degree with Amazon, where profits are arbitraged out of the system (though to varying degrees between participants).

A Berlin Borough Buying Out Private Landlords

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