Thread

1. throwawaydeutsc · 1789973605 · focus · HN ↗

   I used to live in South America (mid-tier city), living here in Berlin my will never understand how such intelligent people in general (no irony or sarcasm) never thought in a collective sense that if you have a market with a rigid supply in terms of availability (not occupied homes with no incentives for renting), it never made a serious planning for building.

   I was travelling to some big cities (between 70% of size of Berlin to 4x its size) and you can find a plethora of options since something modest that can fit in a minimal income (salario minimo) to nice appartments.

   Here we had in the last 7 years 55K units made, but in my home city alone we had more than 470K in a single city; if you're willing to be 1 hour away by car you can find apartments that the normal berliner never would have access in his/her entire life.

   Not to dunk on berliners, but once you're in the environment where people do real housing at scale you will see a small magic in terms of prices for the legacy supply dropping.

   1. atoav · 1789974010 · focus · HN ↗

      Has to do mostly with the historic environment of the country. Berlin was a split city, so after the 90s it abstained mostly from what it perceived as dangerous political experiments. Also die Linke was basically seen as a continuation party of the GDRs SED, and as such didn't have the greatest of reputations in that city (shooting/jailing people that want to move out will do that miraculously).

      Die Linke today is a completely different generation of people and drawing any direct line to the SED is mostly wishful thinking by polemic conservatives.

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