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Comment by oleganza | Hacker News Reader

My impression of Berlin (living there for the last 2 years) is that there's plenty of space, plenty of new housing already built and plenty of new construction still going. SF, NY, Paris and London are way more crowded and under-housed in comparison. Shitty one-story supermarkets are really just a sign of abundance of space and not enough demand (yet). Among big European cities the rent seems low. You can buy an super-duper-lux apartment for ~$1M in the very center of the city that in the next 10 years can easily go for $5M if Berlin is to continue to grow the way it does.

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Surely a rent cap is a clear sign that there is demand though?

A rent cap is a clear sign that the capitalist system is broken and we need a better system to match the housing needs and supply without feeding into heartless vampires who'd rather have empty apartments than rent them at a reasonable price.

Quite the opposite actually.Increase capitalism and reduce government control and you get more housing.

That's not how it turned out in the UK. As this graph illustrates, when the local government authorities were prohibited from building more housing, from the 1980s onwards, the private sector didn't pick up any of the slack: https://i.stack.imgur.com/MmJ5N.png

The capitalists instead decided to optimize for steadily increasing the price of housing by restricting supply, so these are now primarily seen as an investment with nearly-guaranteed returns, rather than places for people to live.

Another piece of data, from the Netherlands, where office space vacancy has significantly increased since making squatting illegal back in 2010: https://en.squat.net/2016/05/27/netherlands-housing-crisis/

> an investment with nearly-guaranteed returns, rather than places for people to live.

Or "magic coin-shitting machines", as Charlie Brooker so pithily put it.

Yes, as we can see from the very great examples of where this approach worked perfectly. Now every one is perfectly housed in decent conditions and for cheap in United States or South Korea. We all know the dozens of thousands of homeless folks in San Francisco and around really want to live in slums or on the streets, and their situation has nothing to do with speculation, gentrification and AirBNB. /s

Are you South Korean? What do you know about South Korea's real estate?

Either way I would say housing in Japan (considering all the constraints) seems to work great.

> Are you South Korean? What do you know about South Korea's real estate?

No. Very little. Just read articles over the years saying they are facing similar issues of real-estate bubble and speculation and that prices in Seoul are getting close to those of New York.

And what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

I think the discussion of the rent cap is more complex. In every city there's some distribution of wealth and there are plenty of people who are sensitive to rent. Then, gov orders businesses to shut down, a lot of people lose money, then gov starts playing games with various ways to buy love of voters, rent cap is one of those things.

Similarly, minimum wage is typically bumped after inflation already made its way, so most of the people are over the threshold anyway and won't be thrown out of their jobs. And those who will — are valuable voters who can be made highly dependent on state unemployment programs.

Berlin needs much more new housing. I keep an eye on the market both for buying and for renting , and the prices for buying have exploded upwards at the same time as the number of flats for rent has steeply declined.

Empty ugly spaces (not Parks or Public squares) are a symptom of a lethargic bureaucracy, not a healthy thing.

Berlin is also full of empty spaces for historical reasons. Previous rulers intentionally built some things big and far apart for their capital, WW2 left even more unused spaces after the rubble was cleared and during the cold war only some parts got rebuilt. So even compared to most smaller German cities, Berlin has a low density overall.

Not enough demand for high priced apartments != not enough demand for affordable accommodation. In fact, they're literally in opposition.

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