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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

> won't want to start a family while living in the relative instability of rented accommodation

it should be alleviated by making rental accommodation more stable - such as a longer term contract. What if you had a 30 year contract rental (with built-in, but known ahead of time increases).

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in germany and austria time limited renting contracts are illegal. renting is always month to month, but landlords have no rights to evict anyone ever unless they do damage to the property or fail to pay their rent for at least a few months, and they still may have to sue to actually make the eviction stick. the only exception is landlords who only rent out a single home, and they can prove that they now need that home for themselves (or for their kids). these are not common though. most landlords are agencies that manage multiple properties.

so as long as you pay your rent and don't do anything illegal or damaging, you can't be evicted. the worst that can happen is a rise of the rent, but even that is often limited to not go beyond the average market rate for the area.

>in germany and austria time limited renting contracts are illegal

No they're not illegal. In Austria you see time limited rental contracts all the time, usually 3 years. It's rare to find unlimited rental nowadays as landlords want to make money.

oh, sorry, i just looked it up. you are right. austria does allow time limited contracts. 3 years is the minimum, however. you can't have shorter time limits. also after the first year the tenant may terminate the contract any time (with 3 months advance notice), the landlord may not. and there is another interesting detail: time-limited contracts must be 25% less than comparable unlimited contracts. this however is rarely enforced unless the tenant notices. (they can get back overpaid rent for up to 10 years).

germany doesn't allow time limited contracts. there are only two exceptions. a time limited contract is allowed if the landlord can claim to need to use the property themselves after the end of the contract (which they can only do if they don't have multiple properties to rent), or if they have plans to tear down or renovate the building.

Yeah, but finding a decent place to rent in Germany is the real problem.

It's nearly impossible as everyone is locked into their rental units and will never move.

You basically have to wait for someone to die.

but that's a problem everywhere that doesn't build enough new units to meet the demand. and i don't think it is any easier to buy a place. nor is it any easier to find a place to rent in the US.

Sorry but no, it IS much easier to find a place to rent in the US.

In Germany, the scarcity is so high that realtors can afford to ghost you left and right despite you having money and then when you finally get to view an apartment there's like 80+ people viewing it and only the one with the best portfolio (full of your private info that they normally shouldn't be allowed to have) gets it. This madness is nowhere near what it's like in the US.

That’s just a mortgage with extra steps…

not the same - a mortgage require a deposit. Renting will be cheaper, because a deposit is basically a capital cost (that people comparing renting and buying don't take into account).

A common problem with rent control (can’t raise rent to match market) in cities is the landlord stops doing maintenance or starts moving in folks who are dangerous or threatening to tenants to get them to leave.

> starts moving in folks who are dangerous or threatening to tenants to get them to leave

Seems a high risk, desperate maneuver. What's the end-game for the landlord? A building full of drug dealers, in perpetuity? Keeping maintenance up to city code could be a burden, and the insurance company might start to get wise.

Usually the dangerous folks are people on the payroll, and the end game is selling the property to someone else to be turned into something higher end once the normal tenants are out.

Sometimes it’s just to have tenant churn to allow them to get higher rents. Rent control for long periods of time can cause very large disparities between current market rents and what a tenant is paying (thousands/mo). The dangerous folks aren’t usually obvious when first checking out a unit.

At least in NYC, there is a lot of reputed Mafia involvement in real estate.

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