To add a b it of context. They do not want to confiscate housing. They do want to pay landlords, though below current (very high) rates. Also this would only apply to private real-estate companies not individual owners.
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.
They do want to pay landlords, though below current (very high) rates.
In San Francisco, NIMBYs secretly support laws like this. This basically guarantees that many builders will do the math and conclude that it doesn't make sense to build housing in San Francisco.
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.
We live in a society. Everything we do affect others. Therefore there are many different types of affecting. "Confiscate" is a word that has a meaning. This decision is not confiscating, but a different type of affecting. Just as farting on you house would not count as confiscating. Affect: yes, confiscate: no.
Most of the affected housing used to be government owned, sold at firesale prices after the CDU Diepgen government thoroughly wrecked the state finances with a banking scandal at the end of the 90s.
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.
The reality is that the actual large-scale sell-off of public housing was carried out under the SPD–PDS (now The Left) red-red coalition led by Klaus Wowereit in 2004. for prices of around 30.000€ per unit.
Housing should be a commodity. Commodities are fungible, plentiful, and easily tradable.
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.
Who builds all those bridges, roads, power plants, and other public works projects? Maybe them?
Also government formed co-ops. Find people who want a flat and agree on rent before you build it. As the loan is paid off rent becomes substantially cheaper. The second best time to plant a tree is today.
It also doesn't need to be the entire housing stock, just enough to help keep rent low (see Vienna).
Governments directly, cooperatives or non-profit organizations. The Churches used to be pretty active in that space as well to invest tithes, with rents paying for common-welfare projects.
The logic is defined by demand. Currently Berlin is under high demand, and that’s why drives prices up. On top of that many rents, around 12% are paid by the job center, which also drives prices up. That’s around 250.000 housing units paid by someone else’s money. That’s the scandal.
If I'm an entity that has 3000 or more apartments, I would have sold long ago to get to 2999. Basically as soon as I heard rumors of this law, I would have started selling.
> 1. 60% of the Berlin population voted for nationalising (expropriating) apartments from major landlords in a referendum - this is a bipartisan issue
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.
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.
If they try to avoid paying the full price, this will simply be stopped by the courts. If they do this the proper, legal way it will be far too expensive and not do anything useful.
Affordable housing is a very important topic, but this isn't doing anything to fix the current issue.
This headline is alarmist ('far-left' sounds dangerous for some people). And 'nationalise housing' is just wrong.
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.
Well, it is essentially the same-but-modernized party as that which held eastern Germany under the boot of communism for for some 45+ years. They took the route taken by so many communist parties after the dissolution of the Soviet Union by changing their name, here from SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) via PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) to Die Linke (The Left) so that certainly is something to keep in mind. This is the party which built a wall to keep people from leaving their supposed workers and farmers paradise, shooting those who tried to cross over. It may be filled with young women with odd hair colors instead of stodgy old men but the ideology hasn't changed a whit and is ready to add a few more millions to its death toll.
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.
Oh good lord, the utter majority of the Left Party today weren't even alive in the GDR period (and of those that were, a good bunch got yeeted to the BSW). And on top of that, all the other parties have gobbled up their East German Blockparteien as well and we don't label them collaborators either, nor do we call the CDU and especially CSU a Nazi party despite many former NSDAP members ending up there post WW2 (or a ton of them forming the AfD a decade ago).
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.
> 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....
Yet in the US, it was developers following the Levittown model that resulted in tons and tons of single family homes, so I fail to see how the free market is terrible at "pumping out houses fast"?
The market is not terrible pumping out houses fast, but the current market conditions mean that said houses/apartments are not affordable for most people.
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.
Well, think whether the market conditions that lead to it could be recreated today, and then you'll see how the free market fails to deliver a lot of housing fast. Developers have long ago realized it's better for them to pump out fewer houses with more profit margin slower, than lots of houses with little profit margins. They get a planning permission on a giant site for a 1000 houses but only build 50 a year to not disrupt the high prices they can charge for each unit. That's free market for you right now.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Germany doe not have a housing shortage problem, it's another set of problems.
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.
To add a b it of context. They do not want to confiscate housing. They do want to pay landlords, though below current (very high) rates. Also this would only apply to private real-estate companies not individual owners.
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.
They are saying that this is what the want to do. They can't do that because it would be illegal.
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 fix is for the city to be the builder, like it is in Vienna.
The City of Vienna is the largest landlord in Europe. It is also the only major European capital without a rent cost crisis.
>it's not confiscation, you're just forced to sell at a price i decide is fair
sound logic
We live in a society. Everything we do affect others. Therefore there are many different types of affecting. "Confiscate" is a word that has a meaning. This decision is not confiscating, but a different type of affecting. Just as farting on you house would not count as confiscating. Affect: yes, confiscate: no.
Most of the affected housing used to be government owned, sold at firesale prices after the CDU Diepgen government thoroughly wrecked the state finances with a banking scandal at the end of the 90s.
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.
The reality is that the actual large-scale sell-off of public housing was carried out under the SPD–PDS (now The Left) red-red coalition led by Klaus Wowereit in 2004. for prices of around 30.000€ per unit.
I don't know if that's really fair though because it's unlikely that the people that benefited from the fire sale are still the owners.
It would make more sense just enforce maintenance standards and improve renters rights. You can't really legislate supply & demand.
The "free market" (which has been demonstrated to not be free at all) has no place in basic needs such as housing.
Rent extraction is utterly counterproductive for a society.
Housing should not be a commodity.
Housing should be a commodity. Commodities are fungible, plentiful, and easily tradable.
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.
Yes, the grandparent scored an own goal with their aside
>> The "free market" (which has been demonstrated to not be free at all)
The Berlin rental market suffers under strong government intervention, and would benefit from being much freer.
Who builds the houses then?
Who builds all those bridges, roads, power plants, and other public works projects? Maybe them?
Also government formed co-ops. Find people who want a flat and agree on rent before you build it. As the loan is paid off rent becomes substantially cheaper. The second best time to plant a tree is today.
It also doesn't need to be the entire housing stock, just enough to help keep rent low (see Vienna).
Governments directly, cooperatives or non-profit organizations. The Churches used to be pretty active in that space as well to invest tithes, with rents paying for common-welfare projects.
Yeay communism! They built such lovely tower blocks.
Yeah like that ugly drab city of ... Vienna??
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc...
You need sound logic against the evils of neo-liberalism, there's nothing logic about housing being as expensive as it now is.
The logic is defined by demand. Currently Berlin is under high demand, and that’s why drives prices up. On top of that many rents, around 12% are paid by the job center, which also drives prices up. That’s around 250.000 housing units paid by someone else’s money. That’s the scandal.
It's a reflection of the demand from people who want to live in Berlin.
Before knee jerk reacting to this
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
If I'm an entity that has 3000 or more apartments, I would have sold long ago to get to 2999. Basically as soon as I heard rumors of this law, I would have started selling.
Entity = owner?
> 1. 60% of the Berlin population voted for nationalising (expropriating) apartments from major landlords in a referendum - this is a bipartisan issue
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.
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.
[delayed]
If they try to avoid paying the full price, this will simply be stopped by the courts. If they do this the proper, legal way it will be far too expensive and not do anything useful.
Affordable housing is a very important topic, but this isn't doing anything to fix the current issue.
This headline is alarmist ('far-left' sounds dangerous for some people). And 'nationalise housing' is just wrong.
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.
> This party is not far-left, it is just left.
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.
Decades ago, when I was still living in Berlin, the predecessor party of Die Linke (the PDS) was made up of creepy former GDR officials.
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 sounds super alarmist. Bit it’s not: the party only got 25%, so they will have to make a coalition with other parties to govern.
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.
Well, it is essentially the same-but-modernized party as that which held eastern Germany under the boot of communism for for some 45+ years. They took the route taken by so many communist parties after the dissolution of the Soviet Union by changing their name, here from SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) via PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) to Die Linke (The Left) so that certainly is something to keep in mind. This is the party which built a wall to keep people from leaving their supposed workers and farmers paradise, shooting those who tried to cross over. It may be filled with young women with odd hair colors instead of stodgy old men but the ideology hasn't changed a whit and is ready to add a few more millions to its death toll.
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.
Oh good lord, the utter majority of the Left Party today weren't even alive in the GDR period (and of those that were, a good bunch got yeeted to the BSW). And on top of that, all the other parties have gobbled up their East German Blockparteien as well and we don't label them collaborators either, nor do we call the CDU and especially CSU a Nazi party despite many former NSDAP members ending up there post WW2 (or a ton of them forming the AfD a decade ago).
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.
Hmm, I got curious and read Wikipedia:
> 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....
Yet in the US, it was developers following the Levittown model that resulted in tons and tons of single family homes, so I fail to see how the free market is terrible at "pumping out houses fast"?
The market is not terrible pumping out houses fast, but the current market conditions mean that said houses/apartments are not affordable for most people.
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.
Well, think whether the market conditions that lead to it could be recreated today, and then you'll see how the free market fails to deliver a lot of housing fast. Developers have long ago realized it's better for them to pump out fewer houses with more profit margin slower, than lots of houses with little profit margins. They get a planning permission on a giant site for a 1000 houses but only build 50 a year to not disrupt the high prices they can charge for each unit. That's free market for you right now.
Then the govt. should build new homes; I'm not sure that taking homes from people ("nationalize") creates supply.
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.
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] 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/
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?
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.
And the party agrees with you: https://dielinke.berlin/vergesellschaftung/
> »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.
It's not from people, it's from corporations that rent out 3000 or more apartments.
We did but stopped in the 90s after the infamous Neue Heimat scandal that got brought upon us by the Conservatives.
Same story in NZ.
Germany doe not have a housing shortage problem, it's another set of problems.
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.
Berlin has a massive shortage. Vacancy rates are at about 1.5%. Functioning housing markets are at about 3%.