At the world's oldest social housing, rent hasn't changed since 1521

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/hazaras-at-risk-in-afghanistan-the-meaning-of-comirnaty-a-brief-history-of-poppers-nancy-drew-at-91-more-1.6155032/at-the-world-s-oldest-social-housing-rent-hasn-t-changed-since-1521-1.6155041

by pseudolus • 5 years ago

238 194 5 years ago

cbc.ca

nanis12• 5 years ago

To be eligible to live in the village, applicants need to meet three basic criteria: they must demonstrate financial need, have lived in Augsburg for at least two years and be of Catholic faith. ... checks church registers to ensure they're Catholic

So, standard economics at work: If prices are rigidly set at a low level, there will be rationing. There is the non-price rationing.

Roughly 160 residents live in the Fuggerei ... there are about 80 people on the waiting list ... applicants could be waiting years for a callback.

And there is the persistent shortage.

simlan• 5 years ago

And your point is ?

arvindamirtaa• 5 years ago

Things cost money.

Things that don't cost to buy at least as much as they cost to make, are not sustainable by definition and will be riddled with systemic problems like shortage, rationing, etc.

chongli• 5 years ago

I think their point is that this isn't really social housing, it's a perk for a very exclusive group of people. Not all that different from a waiting list for membership to an exclusive golf course.

csomar• 5 years ago

It doesn't work even though the article is trying to portray this as a functional model and a solution to the housing crisis.

Money for maintaining the village comes from investments in forestry, real estate and entrance fees.

It is just a charity with religious requirements.

alisonkisk• 5 years ago

Not just rationing, but discriminating based on personal benefit to the provider.

This is a soul-buying operation, ironic since Catholics aren't supposed to buy and sell souls.

javert4• 5 years ago

Seems doubtful that the patron actually believed that people praying for him would help him in the afterlife.

But maybe I'm totally misunderstanding the medieval mind.

eesmith4• 5 years ago

Is rationing ... bad?

How would raising the rent change the wait time for ground floor housing? By forcing poor people to move out because richer people want to move in?

That doesn't sound like a good thing.

According to standard economics, since there's a demand, why isn't there other, new housing along these lines - where costs are paid for by investments and entrance fees rather than rents?

kiba2• 5 years ago

Only 160 residents can live there, which only helps a small amount of people.

nanis12• 5 years ago

Is rationing ... bad?

Yes. When a good or service is always available to anyone who can pay the price, all one needs to do is find the money and one can get it.

When prices are set artificially low, both current and long term go down which results in perpetual shortages. Since getting the thing now depends not just on being able to come up with the cash, but relies on the pen of a bureaucrat, corruption seeps in and becomes endemic.

This charity is able to get it done by requiring adherence to a specific religion which serves both as a selection and an enforcement mechanism.

If one is tempted to think of generalizing this, I would recommend reading about both Western socialists waxing poetic about USSR's "solutions" to housing shortages and the reality of housing in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, city & urban planning programs as well as architecture schools tend to produce a lot of credentialed people who parrot the former.

brixon• 5 years ago

Since this is not a public service, then no rationing is not bad. In the US, a lot of the homeless shelter are faith based and each only have so many beds to go around each night.

There are not more since someone has to put up the money for the investments. And entrance fees would not likely work for anything new and not novel. Only the government can spend more than it makes.

edouard-harris• 5 years ago

Is rationing ... bad?

Economics 101 often fails to convey the crucial fact about rationing: under any rationing system that isn't a pure random lottery, the only effect of rationing a good is to change the currency in which that good is priced. [1]

For example, I live in Canada. Our healthcare system is single-payer [2], which is isomorphic to saying that it is rationed. So it would not be accurate to say that your access to healthcare in Canada is priced in dollars. But it would be accurate to say that your access to healthcare in Canada is priced in your ability to navigate bureaucracy, the flexibility of your working hours (to snag last-minute appointments), and your family connections who are embedded in the healthcare system as administrators or physicians.

Depending on your personal values, you might consider it good or bad that access to healthcare in Canada is priced in these units. What makes dollars unique is that if you inject more dollars into the free market for a good, then ceteris paribus, you will cause more of that good to be produced. Whereas if you injected more bureaucratic know-how into the Canadian patient population, you'd merely cause more intense competition for the same fixed number of physician-hours.

That is: by repricing a good in non-dollar units, you've removed a lot of the flexibility that would have allowed your system to make more of the good if lots of people wanted it. There are situations when this might make sense to do, and there are legitimate debates to be had around it. But this is the tradeoff you're making when you ration.

People often mistakenly think that if the price of a good is opaque, then the good must not have a price. This is incorrect. What's more, if you believe it, then you're almost certainly getting over-charged. And very unfortunately, this mistake tends to be most common among less sophisticated folks — who are the very folks that rationing was intended to protect in the first place.

[1] And unfortunately, real human-managed bureaucracies are not reliably pure random lotteries, even when they are supposed to literally be pure random lotteries. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Pennsylvania_Lottery_scan...

[2] More accurately, big subsets of our healthcare system operates under single-payer. Many services like eye doctors, dentists, etc. are private.

kiba2• 5 years ago

Yeah. This is not really social housing.

It does makes me wonder how low the price of social housing can go while still being sustainable either to be subsidized by the government or payable by tenants.

Land use policies, that is transportation and housing makes up about 30% of the cost in the average American budget, which suggests living in America is pretty expensive.[1]

1. https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-household-budget

cies2• 5 years ago

Came to the same conclusion that "catholics only housing" cannot be social housing...

zaarn4• 5 years ago

Will point out that this housing is hardly sustainable, it's paid for from the remainders of Fugger's wealth (he is the richest man in the world, accounting for currency changes and inflation) as well as donations from the church (probably in order not to be dragged to court for late debt payments, the church borrowed a lot from Fugger).

hef198982• 5 years ago

Well, it is considered the oldest social housing offering in the world.

jka2• 5 years ago

Are there any statistics on the number of units of livable accommodation in the world, per country?

nanis12• 5 years ago

Define "livable accommodation".

That aside, in the U.S., there is https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs.html

dbingham4• 5 years ago

Those things happen in markets with price signals too. Rationing and persistent shortage are happening in housing markets around the world broadly.

It's kind of a given that any social housing like this is going to have a limited number of rooms. And as a result, only so many people will be able to live there.

That's not some clear proof of market theory. Because the other half of market theory - about how price signals drive behavior of rational actors - doesn't hold up.

thebean11• 5 years ago

Do you have an example where rationing is occurring without price controls? I don't have experience outside of the US, but in the two US markets with probably the biggest housing shortages (SF, NYC, maybe Austin nowadays?), if you give me 8k a month I'll find an apartment tomorrow.

bellyfullofbac• 5 years ago

Ah, Mr. Fugger, richest man in the world, the Catholic Church borrowed so much from him (and fleeced their followers so much in order to pay him back) that Martin Luther got so mad and nailed his manifesto to a church door and created Protestantism:

https://nypost.com/2015/07/26/meet-historys-richest-man-who-...

I wonder if his name is the origin of the swearword...

morpheos137• 5 years ago

St. Peter's Basillica wasn't cheap.

What Luther was specifically mad about was selling indulgences (certificates of forgivness for certain sins) to pay off Church debt.

throwaway14356• 5 years ago

are those transferable assets? i want one to mix in with the framed diplomas

coldcode2• 5 years ago

Indulgences were not the big money maker for people at the top, it was selling benefices that made Popes and other church leaders rich, i.e. selling Church offices for huge sums (hey you want your nephew to be a Bishop or Cardinal, sending in X ducats). Why fleece poor people when you can fleece the rich, they have all the money.

belter7• 5 years ago

"To be eligible to live in the village, applicants need to meet three basic criteria: they must demonstrate financial need, have lived in Augsburg for at least two years and be of Catholic faith."

Is this legal? I mean the faith part...

vxNsr• 5 years ago

Why not? You can do that in the US too.

RuggedPineapple• 5 years ago

Absolutely. The German constitution mandates students be able to obtain religious education in public school as part of regular curriculum, prohibits the government from interfering in any religious organization and mandates that the government collect member tithes as part of tax collection for any religious group registered as a PLC at their request.

The ruling party of Germany is expressly religious, the Christian Democratic Union. There's religious pluralism in Germany and all religions have the same benefits, but the idea of what those religions may do is not so intuitive from us in North America.

bernardom• 5 years ago

The book The Richest Man Who Ever Lived is riveting. The guy bankrolled kings, wrote a collections letter to the Holy Roman Emperor, etc. etc.

prox• 5 years ago

Who are the bankrollers of today? Do they still exist?

coldcode2• 5 years ago

Luther did not first nail his thesis to the door, he mailed them first, and had no intention of starting anything. Nailing things to a church door was common practice so that others could read things (no newspapers). Also Luther was only one of thousands of priests, bishops and monks who complained the Popes at the time were ignoring the faith and the people (which they were). He didn't invent Protestantism, he's just more famous than the others.

javert4• 5 years ago

Complaining to the Pope is not equivalent to taking the further enormous leap of breaking away from the Catholic Church.

I don't know the history and would love for someone to fill me in, but I'm just not convinced that you are right to downplay Luther's role.

AlanSE3• 5 years ago

I just finished reading this book, and the point I'm making comes almost directly from that.

https://www.twelvebooks.com/titles/patrick-wyman/the-verge/9...

Luther grew up in a mining community, where people where crass and confrontational. He had a frank, direct, and powerful rhetorical style that was forged in that environment. While he had several career options, a lightning strike made him get superstitious and become a monk. He was good at it. Take these 2 things - book smarts and an argumentative edge, and now a new twist enters the story...

The printing press!

The printers were in it to make money. His impact on history wasn't nailing a thing to a church door. The guy ran circles around the Church defenders because he replied quick, effectively, and he was the darling of the printers who controlled the medium.

It's not just about having the best argument, it's about fitting the format of the medium. Luther would deliver retorts in the space and time frame that the printers wanted. You can easily imagine how this would drown out the defenders of the Church (especially since it's salacious) and impact public opinion.

But that phase only lasted so-many years. Before long, the situation got out of his control, and that's kind of when you might say Protestantism started.

dredmorbius• 5 years ago

Luck is a key component in success.

That doesn't mean success, or those who succeed, aren't successful. Or don't serve as icons for the movements or initiatives they are known for.

There are many flaws with the Great Man theory of history. But reflexive rubbishing of it serves little use either.

Better is to have an understanding of what factors contributed to a breakthrough. And if that is chance, luck, timing, or a coincidental confluence of factors including emergent technologies, then yes, give those credit.

Real history is complex. It doesn't fit on postcards. Any less-than-comprehensive account is a map, not the territory.

Maps remain useful.

spywaregorilla2• 5 years ago

What swear word?

52-6F-62• 5 years ago

"That Fugger kicked me out of the housing project because I missed my last 3 eucharists"

lqet2• 5 years ago

At the time of his death in 1525, Fugger's personal wealth was equivalent to 2% of the GDP of Europe. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Fugger

dahart• 5 years ago

I wonder if his name is the origin of the swearword…

Interesting thought, but I don’t think so. The F word predates Mr Fugger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuck#Early_usage

lqet2• 5 years ago

Wiktionary lists as an interesting possible origin of the German equivalent "ficken" the sound it makes when two things rub against each other ("fffppp, fffppp, fffppp"). [0]

[0] https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/ficken

stronglikedan• 5 years ago

I wonder if his name is the origin of the swearword...

Maybe it was his mother.

giardini• 5 years ago

"Mother Fugger'?

How canst thous speak thus?

ginko• 5 years ago

What's with all the completely unrelated keywords in the article link?

Tomte3• 5 years ago

My guess: the poster did a copy&paste mistake (the URL up to the last / is valid and shows the Afghanistan article), but the CMS used by CBC only looks at the last part, so it's still successful.

Bootvis• 5 years ago

It's just how the site works, not a mistake by OP. If you go to the Afghanistan article and click to the link to the article you'll get the link that was posted to HN.

I'm not sure why the previous page is tracked like this but I guess they have their reasons.

dansky• 5 years ago

I walked around at the Fuggerei when I was in Augsburg back in 2019.

Here is a video forwarding to the entrance: https://youtu.be/cECanw-2SQw?t=3100

IkmoIkmo• 5 years ago

In a world with ubiquitous housing, there is no need for social housing, because that which is ubiquitous (oxygen) is affordable.

In a world with scarcity, social housing protects the poor against unaffordability. That's commendable. However, scarcity also means there is not enough for everyone.

Inevitably that means you get a group of poor winners (who obtain a social home) and a group of and poor losers (who remain on a waiting list for a social home).

Those on a waiting list are relegated to the non-social sector: paying market rates. The more social housing there is, the smaller the private housing market is, the higher the rent prices.

Thereby, the scarcer the situation is, the more unaffordable housing is, the bigger the calls for social housing, and the more the differences between winners & losers is exacerbated.

That's what we see develop in many cities . Some pay absolutely nothing, others pay way too much. The winners and losers group is often partially arbitrary. The benefits of rent-control are distributed unequally, some receiving rent-controlled benefits for decades, others remain on a waiting list for decades, while earning just as little. In many European cities waiting lists are >10y, in Amsterdam for example it's about 14y.

Second, the benefits of rent-control take away various healthy market-based incentives. My dad for example lives on welfare in an apartment with 3 bedrooms, by himself in the capital city, and pays 1/3rd of the market rate. He has no incentive to seek out smaller housing which suits his needs just fine. Similarly, he does not make much use of the cultural offerings in the capital city that makes this place popular and expensive: theatre, bars, cinema, restaurants etc, he would be fine living in a smaller town without them. Yet, he has no incentive.

A market based rent for my dad would indeed make it unaffordable for him. At the same time, the market price is a way to allocate supply & demand efficiently. My single retired dad has no demand for the size and location of his home, yet it is in extreme demand by others. The high market rate rent of say $2k a month, if applied, weeds out those who're unwilling to pay the price of $2k worth of opportunity costs (high value for my dad) in return for 3 bedrooms in the capital city (low value for my dad, who'd decide to move in), and lets those who's calculus is different (high value for young urban professionals) move in. Rent-control destroys that efficiency.

Second, it obviously puts a cap on prices and rental returns. Price elasticity of supply is at least somewhat elastic (more in the US than say, the Netherlands, but still). If industry X has fixed prices and industry Y doesn't, ceteris paribus you'd expect most investments in production/supply of industry Y because the returns aren't capped. Rent-control in this sense can limit housing construction, exacerbating the problem further down the line. (This is less applicable to Europe which has more high-density built up areas that are more land-constrained than the US. As such, higher prices don't always translate into more construction, which means the downsides of rent-control are smaller in this respect).

I'm a big fan of rent-control, but it has to be balanced with (partial) incentives. There seem to me some easy mechanisms that should be applied to bring more balance.

1) Rent-control is not enjoyed permanently, such as in many countries is the case. Instead, one gets 8 years of rent-control, after which you must move, or pay market rate. This brings balance to the current situation where one person has a rent-controlled apartment forever, and another is on a waiting list for 16 years. While de facto forced eviction after 8 years is obviously bad, it's a lesser evil compared to the above distribution of scarce rent-controlled units.

2) If a rent-controlled unit has 3 bedrooms and you live there alone, you lose some of the rent discounts. It's okay to live as you like, alone or with others. It's not okay to live alone in a home that can house multiple people, and expect others (the government/taxpayer or landlord) to subsidise you, while there's people on waiting lists for decades. We actually have a lot of real estate, in almost all countries the number of people per home has been dropping for decades, while the average home size has been increasing for decades. Yet there is a scarcity of housing, in part because people occupy larger homes than they need. Particularly if the home is subsidised and rent-controlled, that shouldn't be acceptable.

3) Rent-controlled rates should have market-based foundations. In the Netherlands for example, a rent-controlled unit in Amsterdam or a shrinking village of 500 people, is governed by the same maximum rental rates. Despite the fact that market rates might be 4-5x as high in Amsterdam. It's important to subsidise the poor. It's also important not to take away every single incentive, and create 1 price for a thousand different locations which are all in wildly different demand. If homes in city A and B are priced similarly due to rent-control, but many want to live in A, those who're indifferent to living in city A will occupy homes unnecessarily. If minor price differences are allowed and A is slightly more expensive than B, it'd incentivise those living in A who're indifferent to A or B, to move to B due to the lower prices, freeing up in-demand homes in A. Rent-control is commendable but it should allow for some level of market rates, still.

Hope the post makes sense as some of it is written from an EU and even national/city-level perspective that doesn't apply everywhere in the same way.

pydry8• 5 years ago

Second, the benefits of rent-control take away various healthy market-based incentives. My dad for example lives on welfare in an apartment with 3 bedrooms, by himself in the capital city, and pays 1/3rd of the market rate. He has no incentive to seek out smaller housing which suits his needs just fine.

Whereas if you allow market rate on all apartments you've given landlords collecting rent an incentive to impede all kinds of property development which might bring rents down with NIMBYism.

If they are leveraged landlords who risk going underwater on their mortgage if too much supply comes on the market you've created a veritable NIMBY zealot who will show up to every town planning meeting and throw sand in the gears of new development and vote down every social housing program that might impede supply.

Will your dad? Doubtful.

Rent control wasnt ever a clean, ideal fix (land value taxes are) but they're a band aid solution to rent seeking driven evictions - especially of the frail and elderly.

gruez11• 5 years ago

Whereas if you allow market rate on all apartments you've given landlords collecting rent an incentive to impede all kinds of property development which might bring rents down with NIMBYism.

that assumes rent control actually brings down rents (overall), and landlords aren't baking it into the price. When the government forces landlords to give tenants an indefinite call option on housing (ie. rent control), I doubt landlords are just going to carry on business as usual. The call option has a cost, and that will be incorporated into the cost of future tenants' rents.

rory3• 5 years ago

Whereas if you allow market rate on all apartments you've given landlords collecting rent an incentive to impede all kinds of property development which might bring rents down

This incentive still exists if only some of the apartments are market rate, right?

imtringued• 5 years ago

Speaking of land value taxes, I fully understand that homeowners do not want to be kicked out but there has to be a middle ground.

A progressive land tax would tax owner occupied housing less but then collect the shortfall when the owner sells his land. If for any reason the owner cannot pay, he can apply to defer taxes for 5 years which then result in eviction if the taxes are still due and the property will automatically be upzoned to prevent future evictions.

Land owned by companies does not qualify as owner occupied to prevent share deals.

Property investors will face increasingly higher land value taxes the more land they own in a single location. The idea is that instead of investing in thousands of plots in the same top 10 cities they will have a presence in multiple different cities. This should result in competition between landlords instead of regional consolidation like ISPs have done in the US.

And now the cherry on top. Deduct paid land value taxes from taxable income of the tenant or owner occupant. Finally, lower income taxes across the board and remove the deduction.

Ok, enough about land value taxes. The reason why I personally am against rent control is actually the reason why a minimum wage works. Supply and demand aren't perfectly inelastic. Raising the minimum wage turns the government into a union. But the real question is, who does this hypothetical union serve? People imagine that it will help minimum wage workers but that is just a story to sell the policy. The truth is that it works because the only people impacted by the policy are the poor. Any market distortion that the minimum wage achieves primarily benefits those who are below the previous level. If corporations are cash rich they can simply afford the higher wages so unemployment isn't as big a deal as the theory tells us. The downside of losing jobs that pay less than minimum wage may be overstated because those jobs merely save the government a few dollars on welfare but do not contribute to a meaningful existence.

Now, if a minimum wage has an impact on the poor then who does rent control have an impact on? Rent control is a price ceiling. Who is paying the most for rent? Of course, those who can afford high rents. There are lots of high end apartments that are simply not meant for low income people in which reliable and affluent tenants live in. Yet rent control starts with the most expensive housing first. Poor tenants are usually paying bottom or mid end housing. It doesn't reach them at all. What often happens as a result is that landlords raise rent on low and mid end housing to compensate for losses on high end housing. In my opinion people who advocate for rent control simply do not understand the policy they vote for.

It's a ban on renting in a market that badly needs more rental units.

em500• 5 years ago

To make the economics clearer: the Netherlands has a national rent ceiling of €737 for social (rent-controlled) housing (and very long waiting lists in all the cities). In Amsterdam, the market rent for a 3 bedroom is probably around €1500 to €2000 (tough social housing are usually worth a bit less due to somewhat lower quality). Your dad is subsidized in-kind by probably around €800/months, but he's forced to consume it in the form of a very specific dwelling which he apparently doesn't value all that much. If he had the choice, he'd probably rather take the €800 (or even less) in cash and move somewhere else. But that option is politically infeasible due to the bad optics, even though economically it would be a Pareto improvement.

standardUser• 5 years ago

"If he had the choice, he'd probably rather take the €800 (or even less) in cash and move somewhere else."

This is how Section 8 vouchers work in the US. But unlike most welfare programs, the vouchers are limited and only a small portion of people who are eligible can get one.

LambdaComplex• 5 years ago

In a world with ubiquitous housing, there is no need for social housing, because that which is ubiquitous (oxygen) is affordable.
In a world with scarcity, social housing protects the poor against unaffordability. That's commendable. However, scarcity also means there is not enough for everyone.

And in a world with landlords, housing can be both ubiquitous AND scarce! (At least in the USA, the number of vacant homes greatly outnumbers the number of homeless people in the country)

saddlerustle• 5 years ago

It's a joke to suggest housing is ubiquitous in the US. The number of vacant homes in most metros in the US is less than one year's population growth, and as a fraction of housing stock at historical lows.

goodpoint2• 5 years ago

Correct. Landlording introduces additional competition in the housing market, making buying and renting costs go up, and that's why it's profitable even when a lot of homes stay empty and a lot of people struggle to survive.

Add to that a political system that takes the side of large investors...

woah• 5 years ago

This is a repeatedly debunked myth that does not stand up to the slightest scrutiny.

First, the number of vacant homes. The vast majority of these at any given time are vacant because they are on the market, someone has signed a lease but not moved in yet, or they are undergoing repairs. Of the homes that are legitimately vacant, many of these are in very poor shape, and in areas where no one wants to live. Suggesting that these homes are a solution to homelessness means that you want to send homeless people to live in condemned structures with no running water an hour outside of Detroit.

Second, the number of homeless. The number used in this factoid is only the number of chronically unhoused, often mentally ill homeless. These people need a lot of support and medical treatment. Sending them to live in a random vacant home, much less one with no running water an hour outside of Detroit, is not going to help them. But people spouting this factoid don't actually care about the homeless. They are simply a prop for a cute political point. If you counted the true number of homeless, sheltered, and housing-insecure folks, this dumb factoid wouldn't sound as good.

Third, the entire concept. Vacancies are lowest in the areas in the country with the highest homeless populations. So the entire implication that some evil (probably foreign) real estate investors are causing homelessness is baseless. The reality is that vacancies are mostly associated with how competitive the real estate market is, which is associated with the economic opportunities in an area vs the supply of housing. Higher vacancies means it is easier to find a place, which means that landlords get nervous and drop the rents. There was a very clear demonstration of this in San Francisco during 2020 when a lot of renters left. Rents dropped by 1/4 or more, while vacancies rose.

OneTimePetes• 5 years ago

One requirement is to do a "Fürbitte" aka a prayer for the fugger so he can get forgiveness and remain in heaven/ leave purgatory. At least that is what i ve heard.

loeg• 5 years ago

It covers this in more detail in the article.

Original residents of the Fuggerei were asked to offer three prayers a day for Jakob Fugger and his family. …
"Jakob Fugger says they have to pray for him. Our administrator always says he is in heaven and will see if you do that. You are responsible for that," said Herzog.
In other words: that part of the deal is between residents and God.

h0nd• 5 years ago

1€ to live there for a year. 6.5€ to visit once.

What is going on there?

martin_a• 5 years ago

The Fuggerei is really nice to visit and walk around. There's also a little museum house so you can have a look inside one of the rather small houses and a permanent exhibit in the old bunker of the Fuggerei.

Keeping it up and running is cross-financed by the entry fees.

Also the 1 Euro is not the whole truth. Residents will have to pay so called "Nebenkosten" (auxillary costs) for electricity etc. like with any other flat.

Compared to Augsburgs rent levels it's still very cheap to live but I'd prefer not to do so.

Source: Lived down the street for a few years.

ajay-b• 5 years ago

It is always helpful when you have a wealthy supporter.

orblivion3• 5 years ago

Residents pay about $1.30 — or 0.88 euros — per year for their apartments

The Euro didn't exist in 1521. Wikipedia doesn't even list what the currency was back then:

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

I suppose it would have been priced in some sort of metal back then, and the first official currencies would have been on a metallic standard.

pweezy• 5 years ago

From the original article:

Fugger charged residents one Rheinischer gulden a year, the equivalent of one month's salary at the time.

orblivion3• 5 years ago

Ah, sorry. I tried skimming and searching for some specific like that.

zaarn4• 5 years ago

Back then Germany didn't exist quite yet as country. Fugger charged people in Augsburg in Rheinische Gulden.

orblivion3• 5 years ago

I was still expecting that Wikipedia would list the historical currencies in the area, and they did list some. Presumably there was continuity of culture over the centuries despite political bodies and boundaries.

zaarn4• 5 years ago

Hey I live just a street down from there. It's an interesting place and Fugger was certainly one of the more interesting people to grace the face of the earth, though it looses it's charm if you see it on your daily commute.

peterburkimsher• 5 years ago

Like happened with the Doom port to desk phones, this is being discussed over on the BeWelcome forums!

https://bewelcome.org/forums/s23259/

BeWelcome is like CouchSurfing but free and open-source. I heard about the Fuggerei from Paul, a guy in Singapore, a few months ago, who I met at the Asia-Pacific weekly meetup (every Thursday, 23:00 NZDT = 6 pm Jakarta = 7 pm UTC+8).

https://bewelcome.org/activities/3343

It's so interesting to hear the same topics coming up. Although I'm not Catholic, and the idea of segregating housing based on religious views bothers me, I like the idea of investing in a community by sharing freely. The Fuggerei outlasted several political forms in Germany!

At the world's oldest social housing, rent hasn't changed since 1521

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