There's also the question of how people that do not work for one of those high paying tech companies are supposed to pay for their housing.
If people here put half the energy in fighting for fairer remuneration for their work rather than whining about the raising rent and property prices that come with being a desirable city and country...
The only reason they're able to do this is because of years of fairly extreme mercantilistic policies combined with struggling economies in other parts of the EU (Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and to an extent Ireland).
It works out for Germany in the short- and medium-run, but it's bad for the EU as a whole.
It's also bad for Germany in the long run, because even if extreme mercantilism were sustainable in a free market in the long run (spoiler: it's not), excess surplus means, by definition, that the government is underinvesting in public infrastructure. It takes a while for the effects of that to become evident, but Germany is starting to see hints of it already, and if these policies continue, it'll become much more pronounced.
I simply see many good and skilled workers paid way too little. How am I earning as much as a med tech with 12 years experience after being in IT proper for 2 years ? The answer lays, admitted within my limited view, in the skilled labor force simply accepting middling pays. Which is maybe harder to pull off in the IT branch it attracting more workers not ready to simply accept lower pays for their work.
In the end I have colleagues with way more experience than me earning less than me simply because they asked for less...Somehow its more a kind of established cultural thing and companies / management taking good advantage of it. Lets not pretend C levels are badly paid in Germany XD.
In recent years (decades, actually), we seem to have dropped the ball in the counter-centralisation game, maybe as a consequence of reunification.
The solution is to build more housing to alleviate the pressure. This way you can keep the rents low without pumping up just a few salaries.
And in a city like Berlin the situation is vastly different from SF. Public transport and biking work like a charm so housing doesn't have to be smack next to the headquarters.
Companies want to reap the benefits of coming to a city with a qualified workforce but the disbenefits get to be "enjoyed" by everyone else around there. Tragedy of the commons. They should be supporting the housing market if they want a good reception.
Full disclosure: I'm saying this as one of the people who enjoys such benefits while some people around me bite the bullet.
Giving people a more even chance at winning musical chairs is nice, but how about just making more chairs?
So a fundamental ability to compete is IMHO a basic requirement for building more chairs.
If salaries go up without housing being addressed directly, you get what's happened in SF: everyone middle-class and down being pushed out by high rent prices, because they're all competing for the same limited amount of space.
The "american dream" of a massive house for every couple can't survive the 21st century without triggering a revolution.
Plus, Berlin likes to protect their heritage; often tearing down and rebuilding whole neighborhoods turned out to be a very bad idea.
As I mentioned further downthread: This is especially pronounced in Kreuzberg, the whole district was supposed to be torn down and turned into a planned utopian living quarter. The Kottbuser Tor was supposed to be turned into a highway crossroad and the buildings there stem from those plans.
Reminds me of this
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like...
Come to a European city and walk through streets with hundreds of years of history for some perspective. Then you can advocate to tear it all down and build it all up for some passing tech bubble fad straight to their faces and see what kind of response you get.
"these rich young people" are people, too
If not where and how do you relocate them? Where does that money come from? How about the apartments that are privately owned? How does that work?
As it is, Kreuzberg, the district we're talking about, the population density is 15,000/sq km, about half the density of Manhattan, and about twice the density of San Francisco as a whole.
SF is home and I love it, but not all of it is as worth protecting as my nimby friends think. The Richmond, the sunset, ingleside, bayview / hunter's point, South SF .. Most of that wastes space, and could easily be rebuilt to be as dense and beautiful as Paris or Barcelona, but it would require courage and a more social government than what we actually have.
There are no "massively sprawling single-family zones" in the area.
Maybe you could do just a modicum of research before you call "B.S." on people.