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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.
This is not just any law, it's in the German constitution (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_14.html).
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.
The City of Vienna is the largest landlord in Europe. It is also the only major European capital without a rent cost crisis.
Most urgent intervention required in the UK, IMO. We're choking to death on the cost of housing.
sound logic
Confiscation with (some) remuneration is still confiscation. Is your comment satirical?
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.
It would make more sense just enforce maintenance standards and improve renters rights. You can't really legislate supply & demand.
Rent extraction is utterly counterproductive for a society.
Housing should not be a commodity.
Housing in many countries is not part of a free market but part of a monopoly where the government decides how much, how many, the what and the when the houses can be built. If it was a real free market, the issue would have been long solved.
Housing right now is the opposite of a commodity: it's a boutique investment for individuals whose price is propped up by regulations that artificially limit supply.
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.
Remember the first incentive of any politician is to remain in power not to solve citizens problems. Sometimes there’s overlapping, fortunately.
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.
1. 60% of the Berlin population voted for nationalising (expropriating) apartments from major landlords in a referendum - this is a bipartisan issue
2. This only affects entities with 3000 or more apartments
There's no bi-partisan thing around it: It was the fact that the city has a spcific demographic that voted for it, but the constitutional court revoked it.
Another point: Even during the campaign the group did not explain how it would work given that most of the payments would need to be done at current market rates and the constitutional court will not pass it for obvious reasons.
And on top of that, good luck to make all other states paying it and hoping that the Länderfinanzausgleich will stand.
Affordable housing is a very important topic, but this isn't doing anything to fix the current issue.
Yesterday on TV, I saw mostly hip young people. Elif Erap, the party’s lead candidate, reminded me of Chrissy Hynde from The Pretenders.
This party is not far-left, it is just left. But that is not the point. My point is that a headline about anti-left alarmism hit the HN front page. This is unusual; the HN crowd keep their discussions out of daily politics most of the time. So, this has the smell of importance. Alarm! Far-left!
And this is weird because Germany is in real danger of electing a fascist government at the moment. There is not the tiniest chance of socialist projects coming to power, but the far-right is winning—except for Berlin.
And then an OMG-far-left headline pops up here. This headline was made to push anti-left fear, not to inform the readers.
Of all parties in Germany that have a shot at governing, it is the furthest left. Thus, „far-left“ is not wrong in my opinion.
Nowadays votes by many young people that never lived in Berlin pre-1991.
Far left would be inciting people to outright hang landlords. Much like far right is labeling anarchists as terrorists in the US.
They were junior party in many previous coalitions.
The weird thing this election was: there were like 7 parties with a mayor candidate - and none of them grew up in Berlin.
It is patently absurd that communism is still considered as a legitimate ideology while it should be placed right next to Nazism in the "never again" category. It is responsible for more death and suffering than the latter but those edgy students - who don't seem to learn much at all there in academia - don't seem to know or care.
There were specific reasons historical communism had such a large death toll, and it traces back mostly to the policies that were introduced and the decisions the political elite made.
So I think it's fair to compare actual policies, and not to judge on the basis of whether someone calls themselves a communist, or whether that label gets applied to them.
To my knowledge, Die Linke is not a revolutionary party, doesn't want to force through breakneck industrialization at any cost, and doesn't deny foundational agricultural science.
The CDU and the CSU have nothing to do with the NSDAP.
At some point in time in Germany 30% of the population were either part of the NSDAP or the Nazi Army. Luckily most of them were not war criminals and move on with their lives. And yes, some of them ended in the CDU/CSU but also of the SED/Die Linke.
Just to give you an example, around 10-15% of the DDR state officials had held NSDAP membership pre-1945.
Does that make the DDR a successor of the Nazi Regime? Obviously not. The same about the CDU/CSU.
But Die Linke is still the same party as the SED. Same organization, which just voted themselves into different names.
This is a compilation of an anthologic Reddit post (deleted, but all the links are working):
...
Und wenn dann jemand Nachverdichtung vorschlägt, passiert das hier:
1. Gegen 240 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg [1]
2. Gegen 150 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg (Salzmannstraße) [2]
3. Gegen 105 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg (Joachimsthaler Str.) [3] [4]
4. Gegen 84 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg (Gotlindestraße) [6], dabei wird das erzkonservative Weltbild der Bürgerinitiative unterstützt: „So, wie das Viertel einmal geplant wurde, soll es bestehen bleiben.“ Siehe die Selbstbeschreibung der BI [7].5. Gegen 50 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg (Atzpodinenstraße) [6]
6. Gegen 150 landeseigene Wohnungen in Schöneberg [8]: Dort haben sie Einwendungen gegen den Bebauungsplan formuliert, also aktiv rechtliche Schritte gegen den Wohnungsbau eingeleitet, und ganz offen ihre Position kundgegeben:
7. Gegen 95 landeseigene Wohnungen in Treptow [9]8. Gegen ~60 landeseigene Wohnungen in Treptow [10]:
9. Gegen 30 landeseigene Wohnungen in Friedrichshain [11]10. Allgemein gegen Wohnungsbau in Treptow [12]
11. Allgemein gegen Wohnungsbau in Pankow [13]
12. Allgemein gegen Neubauziele in ganz Berlin [14]
Alles Beispiele von Die Linke, weil das die Partei ist, die eigentlich am härtesten für den sozialen Wohnungsbau kämpfen müsste.
Auch Neubau im Außenbereich wird nicht gerne gesehen: 5.000 Wohnungen auf der Elisabeth-Aue sollten verhindert werden [15].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20211015205615/https://www.tages...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210202231844/https://www.links...
[3] https://www.facebook.com/linke.lichtenberg/photos/a.16689808...
[4] https://www.archivebuttons.com/articles?article=https://www....
[5] https://archive.is/a8QVo
[6] https://web.archive.org/web/20220926185744/https://www.berli...
[7] https://web.archive.org/web/20220926184054/https://www.nachh...
[8] https://web.archive.org/web/20220119200234/https://www.links...
[9] https://web.archive.org/web/20220927182345/https://mobile.tw...
[10] https://web.archive.org/web/20220928214930/https://www.dieli...
[11] https://web.archive.org/web/20220307125359/https://leute.tag...
[12] https://www.dielinke-treptow-koepenick.de/politik/aktuelles/...
[13] https://web.archive.org/web/20210910093835/https://www.die-l...
[14] https://www.rbb24.de/politik/beitrag/2022/05/berlin-bauen-ge...
[15] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/baustopp-fur-den-klimasch...
> Levittowns are six large suburban housing developments, three of which are actually named "Levittown." They were created in the United States (including one in Puerto Rico) by William J. Levitt and his company Levitt & Sons. Built after World War II for returning white veterans and their new families, the communities offered attractive alternatives to cramped central city locations and apartments. The Veterans Administration and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) guaranteed builders that qualified veterans could buy housing for a fraction of rental costs. Under Levitt & Sons, Levittown housing would maintain racial covenants that excluded non-White would-be buyers.
Italics added. Seems the government was somewhat involved in the US too. Of course, now the reason "the free market is terrible at pumping out houses" is government regulation too....
The average rent in Berlin (and other German cities) is not very high but that's because a lot of flats still run on a very old contract. If you're moving to Berlin, finding an apartment is incredibly difficult, even if you're willing to spend a lot of money. My grandmother lives by herself in a 90sqm flat in a really nice area and pays 400 Euros a month. In the last 10 years she tried to find a smaller flat (30-40 sqm) for herself but the cheapest she could find was 750. So she stays where she is and just doesn't use 2 of the rooms she has except for storage. In the meantime, a friend of mine moved to Berlin and couldn't find a decent 60sqm flat for less than 1400 Euros. The only way to get those affordable rents is either knowing someone who is moving out or getting super lucky by finding and getting it through a public ad.
Massenbesichtigung (mass viewings) are not uncommon. The agent will publish a public timeslot and literally hundreds of people lined around the block will show up to view a single flat.
It costs a lot of money to build a new apartment building because land where you are allowed to build is regulated by the State. Also the State requires many regulations that increase unnecessarily the costs, and most of all in the name of the ideology.
For example, housing standards of Japan and the US, which are way cheaper and still serve two of the richest countries in the world, would never be allowed in Germany. That makes housing unaffordable and drives people into poverty.
> »Durch Enteignung entsteht keine einzige neue Wohnung.«
> Das stimmt, aber darum geht es auch nicht.
The nationalization is not about supply, but to stop the price hikes. They also want to invest in new affordable homes at the same time.
Or so they claim.
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] https://www.deutschlandatlas.bund.de/DE/Karten/Wie-wir-wohne...
[1] https://www.berlin.de/sen/wohnen/rechtliches/zweckentfremdun...
[2] https://www.statistik-berlin-brandenburg.de/106-2025/
Fighting against these companies will only drive prices higher. It is stupid.
They will have to wail until after WW3 because Russia is openly threatening action, European governments are trying to prepare their citizens, German populists want to return to 'normal relations' with Russia, which means 'use our money to invade and kill everyone to the East of us, just not us'.
Germany and Europe is in for a very rough ride.
Were it not for the war situation, then we could say this is 'healthy political turmoil' - but this is at a time when outside parties will take advantage of European disunity.
Areas that are attractive to live always have low vacancy rates, because there's a reason that people want to live there.
The assumption that 'as many people ought to be able to live in a neighbourhood as should want to live there' - implied by the 'vacancy rate' issue just means 'every attractive area turns into Hong Kong'.
While there can be very good reason for more building as well - socialized housing is almost never the answer to that. It has a role in some situations, but generally not on the aggregate like that.
Usually this will have to do with permits, regulation - and frankly workers. Nobody wants to do the kind of labour necessary to build homes, and it's extremely hard to find workers to do that kind of work, which to anyone paying the least bit of attention should be a pretty big paradox.
'City overflowing with people who want homes to live don't want to make homes in which to live'
Probably there's a lot of bureaucracy to clean out and that's a good place to start.