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Far-left party wins Berlin election, pledging to nationalise housingreuters.com
72 points•theanonymousone•10 days ago•152 comments•
#party#berlin#left#far#election#housing#pledging#nationalise

152 comments

soonnow10 days ago
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.

jttnr10 days ago
To add further context: in 2021, Berlin residents voted in a Volksentscheid on whether the government should compulsorily purchase back housing stock from large private real-estate companies. The proposal received 58% support, but the CDU/SPD coalition in office at the time just ignored it. This now at least partially reflects in the votes. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksentscheid_%E2%80%9EDeutsc...
snehk9 days ago
That's no surprise. Berlin loves free things that others have paid for. They're pretty much the only capital city in the developed world that's a burden and not a benefit to the country as a whole. It's pretty embarrassing. Then they do things like free daycare paid for by other states in the country while those states can't offer it.
aurareturn10 days ago

  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.

vrganj10 days ago
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.

nextaccountic10 days ago
There's a way to get yourself out of that gridlock: just subsidize housing. The builder gets money from both the buyer and the government, so he will be happy. The buyer will have low income and wouldn't be able to buy a house otherwise, so he will be happy too. And the government will actually have fulfilled its role for a change.
illiac7869 days ago
Is there data that market rate has zero margin left when it comes to renting?

Genuinely interested. Where I live, I have received direct reports that there is almost zero margin between building cost and market price (buying). But buying and then renting still has a good ROI, although a longer term one.

I don’t get it, it goes against the market self regulation, but real estate is very twisted in this respect.

fabian2k10 days ago
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).

4gotunameagain10 days ago
The article you linked can be clearly interpreted in a way that would make it possible.
dirasieb10 days ago
>it's not confiscation, you're just forced to sell at a price i decide is fair

sound logic

monegator10 days ago
Given it affects PE funds that have gouged up all the supply, yes that is sound logic.

My province's capital has 43% of unhinabitated houses. They are not even on the market, as we are in a housing crisis. Vast majority of them are property of large housing groups that are backed by black rock and company.

The same firms are manouvering the politicians to get approvals to build modern monstruosities, because there is a housing crisis, but they build only luxury homes thst cost too much and remain unhinabitated.

Yes it is sound logic to force big conglomerates to dissolve by law. Law should aim for the public good.

mschuster9110 days ago
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.

bmacho10 days ago
[edit - deleted]
paganel10 days ago
You need sound logic against the evils of neo-liberalism, there's nothing logic about housing being as expensive as it now is.
4gotunameagain10 days ago
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.

throwawaydeutsc10 days ago
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.

atoav10 days ago
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.

tirant10 days ago
Unfortunately solving the housing crisis will remove any incentive to vote for the Left or the Socialist Party.

Remember the first incentive of any politician is to remain in power not to solve citizens problems. Sometimes there’s overlapping, fortunately.

karmakurtisaani10 days ago
I don't believe this is basically ever the case. The reality is more like that simple promises often collide with messy reality, and the compromise solution ends up solving a fraction of the original promise.
tpm10 days ago
Why didn't CDU "solve the housing crisis"?
rkachowski10 days ago
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

throwawaydeutsc10 days ago
> 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.

69896910 days ago
The constitutional court revoked the "Mietendeckel" law which is a different one (rental cap for all apartments in the city).

This sort of nationalisation has never been to trial.

aurareturn10 days ago
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.
WithinReason10 days ago
Or just split into multiple entities with 2999 houses each
poilcn10 days ago
Entity = owner?
rkachowski10 days ago
realistically a large corporation or concern
M95D9 days ago
It could be handled differently, more acceptable to right-voters, a lot cheaper to implement (actually brings more money in taxes) and with the same outcomes: tax housing progressively.

It works like this: First house owned by someone - normal tax, second house - 10x tax, 3rd house - 20x tax. Applied to legal persons too, but not to commercial spaces.

A family with two adults could own two houses or apartments (one each) and still pay normal tax. A rich person with 3 houses could keep his most valued property with normal tax, rent two and still be profitable. A real estate company would have no choice but to sell.

fabian2k10 days ago
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.

aniviacat10 days ago
Why would it be stopped by the courts? The constitution explicitly allows expropriation for the public good. It also explicitly says the compensation amount shall account for the interests of the public. (GG Article 14 Point 3)

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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