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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

> The only way to keep rents this low in the face of rising demand is public housing that is rented out below market rates to low income tenants, or via a lottery.

Or you know, build more housing.

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Pretty hard to do in a dense city and doesn't help very much. Unless kill Berlin's character and transform the city center into a collection of skyscrapers, demand for the city center will always far outstrip supply. Berlin is not San Francisco, where large parts of the city center are single family homes with two stories or less.

Berlin really isn't that dense, and it's surrounded by Brandenburg, which is a whole bunch of flat, empty land. Furthermore, the rail network exists to handle extra capacity, so there really are no more physical constraints on building further.

At some point you’ll run into construction cost limits for multistory dwellings. I don’t know how close Berlin is to that point but given how much cheaper their rent is than other major cities they’re probably doing a better job than most of building housing.

There's a good reason most of the most-expensive places are on tight costal areas like SF and Manhattan, where outward expansion is possible without making any positive internal changes. Just constantly pushing out from the middle via gentrification instead of any realistic market development to match demand.

Not to mention NIMBY-heavy political systems which are common in urban areas... they are always extremely hostile to new development. Which of course benefits current residents in the short term but is a disaster for everyone in the long run.

Construction cost limits are almost always not caused because of the cost of building the actual building.

The costs instead come from the extra rules and regulations placed on builders, by people who really do not want more houses to be built.

Berlin is not close to this tradeoff point. Tokyo's special wards have a population over twice as large as Berlin in an area about 2/3rds as large as Berlin.

Construction costs are not the same everywhere. AFAIK the ground Berlin is built on is not suitable for tall (=heavy) buildings.

> At some point you’ll run into construction cost limits for multistory dwellings.

And Berlin is light years away from that. A 30 storey apartment building there is already counted as a "skyscraper," while Chinese are about to start talking about 50 storey as "a new norm" in some more expensive parts of the country.

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