Thread

Far-left party wins Berlin election, pledging to nationalise housing

72 points · 152 comments · theanonymousone

expedition32 · 1789971086 · focus · HN ↗
After WW2 all European countries had massive housing shortages. It was not capitalism that solved it but heavy government involvement. In a span a few decades millions of people were re-housed. The free market is remarkably terrible at pumping out houses fast.
1. andsoitis · 1789971679 · focus · HN ↗
  Then the govt. should build new homes; I'm not sure that taking homes from people ("nationalize") creates supply.
  1. usernametaken29 · 1789972625 · focus · HN ↗
    But it does. There’s immense amount of houses that are unused because they’re part of speculation, and it’s easier to leave them empty than to deal with tenants and their rights. This is an extremely well documented, systemic issue in large European metropolis and especially in Berlin. Forcing existing property to be used immediately adds supply, and it also lowers prices. Exactly the things large property developers do not want. But I don’t give a shit what they want. I want affordable rent.
    inglor_cz · 1789973465 · focus · HN ↗
    immense amount of houses that are unused because they’re part of speculation, ... This is an extremely well documented, systemic issue in large European metropolis and especially in Berlin.
    Source?
    Deutschlandatlas says that Berlin has whole 2 percent of empty apartments for all reasons, which is less then half of German average [0]
    Some of those apartments are being remodeled, some are just in the period where the previous tenant moved out and the next moved in.
    There are 16 thousand long-term empty apartments, which looks like a huge number, but it is only 0.8 percent of the total. [1]
    Even if those 16 thousand apartments could be all put to market (some have legal barriers, like being part of a complicated litigation), that easing would not last even for a single mayor's tenure. Last year alone, Berlin grew up by 17 thousand people. [2] It was not an extraordinary year.
    ALL that money that the Linke wants to sink into old housing should be spent to build new one, just to accomodate the arrivals.
    [0] <a href="https://www.deutschlandatlas.bund.de/DE/Karten/Wie-wir-wohnen/046-Wohnungsleerstand.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.deutschlandatlas.bund.de/DE/Karten/Wie-wir-wohne...
    [1] <a href="https://www.berlin.de/sen/wohnen/rechtliches/zweckentfremdungsverbot/" rel="nofollow">https://www.berlin.de/sen/wohnen/rechtliches/zweckentfremdun...
    [2] <a href="https://www.statistik-berlin-brandenburg.de/106-2025/" rel="nofollow">https://www.statistik-berlin-brandenburg.de/106-2025/
    usernametaken29 · 1789974013 · focus · HN ↗
    Thanks for actually proving my point! 2% of 2.07 million residential buildings is 54 thousand empty buildings. Let’s say an average number of 2 people per building. Hey, we could house 100 thousand people today. I think that would solve the annual 17 thousand growth for the coming years. And you’ve done nothing, spent nearly no money, no planning involved. Just a single law to force people to rent, and everyone will have housing. Hmm, crazy isn’t it?
    inglor_cz · 1789975740 · focus · HN ↗
    It is not buildings, but apartments. And you completely la-la-ed your way around what I wrote and considered them ALL as long-term speculatively withheld apartments, while only about a THIRD of them are. Which means that only about two years' growth could be accomodated like this. Then, what? Given that the city has spent all its money on buying out old stock?
    Zero unoccupied housing is unachievable anywhere but in a dilapidated slum, because apartments must get remodeled from time to time. If you remodel an apartment every 15 years and it takes three months (a rather optimistic timeline), you already have 1,6 per cent of the housing stock out of the market inevitably, because 3 months is 1/60th of 15 years. If anything, only 2 per cent of the Berlin apartments being out of the market indicates that they already don't get enough maintenance!
    Then you have pauses between tenants. If an average tenant stays for 8 years and it takes about a month to fix the most basic things once he moves out, and find new people, then you have 1 per cent of the housing stock momentarily unoccupied just due to this. Again, Berlin having only 2 per cent of the stock out of the market indicates that the changing of tenants is already overoptimized, with not enough time to vet new ones and fix smaller things: one moves in on the heels of another.
    Then you have a certain small percentage of apartments being part of litigations, either commercial or inheritance-related. Inevitable. Companies split, people die, and not everyone has their papers in Ordnung.
    You seem to be claiming that all those mechanisms can be compressed to zero, and that all the apartments that are unoccupied due to them can be put on the market by fiat. How? Will you ban apartment remodeling? That's the way to produce - fully occupied - ghettoes.
    698969 · 1789976004 · focus · HN ↗
    Berlin already has fines against letting an apartment sit empty without reason, if they're empty, they're empty for a reason or eating the fine is cheaper than the cost of renting it out.
    tirant · 1789976162 · focus · HN ↗
    I just bought a house in Germany. It will remain unused for around 6 months due to renovation. It is naive to believe that any empty house is empty due to speculation.
    My grandmother died some years ago, my family wanted to sell the house as they didn’t need it. It took 3 years to sell it because it’s in a location with no demand plus 6-12 months to arrange the inheritance legal details. You would say, the price was too high then! It was sold for €30K, a garden farmhouse with 6 bedrooms, garden and garage.
    It’s inevitable that some houses are out of the market for some time due to many different reasons.
    vrganj · 1789974215 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't know what you're trying to achieve by comparing it to the total. It's not about the proportion of empty houses to full ones, it's about the proportion of empty houses and people with no house. The full ones are a problem already solved, there's no point in pulling that into the comparison.
    usernametaken29 · 1789974636 · focus · HN ↗
    We’ve established how many empty houses there are and how much further demand there will be, and guesstimated that with the current empty apartments, we can cover almost 6 years of the cities growth. That is, if you do absolutely nothing but to force people to rent their homes. Now in reality, we’ll do more than that. Both the government and public sector are and will continue to build houses. But those are just projections. The existing houses, well, exist. So let’s make sure we use them. Whenever this argument comes up people get extremely defensive for no good reason whatever. It will make a significant impact to the housing market if we force stalled housing to become available. Sure, we can and must do more than just that, but why not start with the cheapest and easiest thing we can today? Because it’s someone’s private property and we can’t even demand they rent it out in a housing crisis???? Come on now. Stop the madness.
    inglor_cz · 1789977091 · focus · HN ↗
    How many private investors will be willing to build any new houses in a city which just forcibly bought thousands of houses from someone else?
    The government may (let us forget, for the sake of the argument, that all major parties in Germany are NIMBY in practice), but for what money? The forced buyout was not free, the German constitution won't allow for that. They may even be sentenced to pay the full market price. That alone will make Berlin bankrupt.
    vrganj · 1789977187 · focus · HN ↗
    You talk as if there wasn't a historic example just next door for how well government buildout of apartments could work.
    The City of Vienna was a place of misery and slums before their socialist party built out enormous amounts of high-quality housing stock, financed by high taxes on luxury goods.
    It to this day tops global quality of live rankings as a result.
    We have the empirical data. No need to speculate.
    inglor_cz · 1789977863 · focus · HN ↗
    Vienna BUILT the stock, and I am all for Berlin building the stock themselves. That is both constructive and adds more units to the market. But it is also rare, as most others want to take instead of building. Try finding another example like Vienna, you won't. It is all take, take, take, take and preciously little make, make.
    Die Linke is a heavily NIMBY party which just wants to change ownership of existing housing stock forcibly. That won't alleviate any pressure in a city that gains almost 20 thousand new inhabitants yearly.
    Are you paying attention? The main plan of the Berlin Left is to expropriate existing housing stock. Given that this is Germany and they cannot just take someone's stuff without due compensation, this will put the city on the verge of bankruptcy if not over it, and they will have no money left to build anything even if they wanted to, which they don't, because any development baaaad.
    BTW much of the earlier privatization was caused by the previous Berlin town halls spending on unsustainable boondoggles which almost bankrupted the city already. People have short memory. The city sold its remaining housing stock to pay for the spending spree of former mayor Klaus Wowereit.
    vrganj · 1789978318 · focus · HN ↗
    You're losing track of your own argument. You just decried expropriation because they would chill private development.
    I just demonstrated why that is not an issue, since public development produces better results anyways.
    The chilling effect on private builders would be a plus with that context, since it would drive down costs for public buildouts.
    Your point on expropriation costs is also oversimplifying things. The German constitution says that a price has to be found by weighing interests. Nowhere does it specify markets as the mechanism for doing so, nor the weighting of public interest vs that of the expropriated.
    inglor_cz · 1789978755 · focus · HN ↗
    The German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe has a long track record of making very conservative judgments, and everyone in Germany knows that. The possibility that it would sentence Berlin to compensate the owners in full is absolutely real.
    Hence I don't believe that the Linke will even try. They will form a coalition government and agree behind closed doors that they will let this one simply slip; sorry, the Greens got cold feet.

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