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Comment by mtmail | Hacker News Reader

The issue here seems to be the landlord.

Yes. It's the so called Berlin issue. If you're lucky enough to find an apartment, you have a good chance of getting a slumlord who does everything to make your life miserable.

I'd buy my own place, if there would be anything available. Probably need to move to another city or country.

How one can still buy into Berlin's hype in 2025?! Fuck their rental market, their landlords, three months deposit for completely empty apartment without even lightbulbs, copyright trolls, rundfunkbeitrag, rude customer service, schufa. Turn around and walk away.

You forgot the government who spends billions to 3km of motorway a few people uses. To an airport that is one of the worst in EU and almost a decade late. And of course now cut from arts because of all this.

And every single construction project takes forever. And costs a fortune. And it is impossible to build housing fast enough.

The reason to be in Berlin has always been its great art scene. Now they are actively destroying it. What's left is a few Rossmanns and an Edeka.

> To an airport that is one of the worst in EU and almost a decade late.

The delay is inexcusable but the resultant airport seems pretty good. Why do you consider it one of the worst in the EU?

I have one memory departing from the low cost carrier terminal at Schönefeld. The toilets were broken and the security was saying in broken English to the passengers "this is what you wanted, it's your own fault". I'm not even interested in checking how that miserable place looks right now.

Try to fly from Helsinki, Munich, or even Frankfurt and you notice how bad BER is.

I regularly fly from Munich, indeed more often than from Berlin, and occasionally from Frankfurt. This doesn’t really help me understand what makes it “one of the worst in the EU”.

> completely empty apartment without even lightbulbs

This is such an interesting cultural divide. As a German moving abroad, I was shocked to find ugly light fixtures already on the ceiling. I’d wanna make the space my own and not live with my landlords decor choices.

Yeah apartment takeover and bringing in suitcases in darkness, carrying a flashlight, is such a unique German experience.

This is what you get when you have rent control. Landlords are going to maximize profits somehow, and if they can't increase rents, they'll decrease costs and try to find ways around the rent cap to squeeze tenants anyway. There's a gap between market price and regulated price, and that tension causes a lot of issues. Not that non-regulated pricing has no issues either, but at least it's a bit more up-front about the way in which you're getting squeezed.

Also how bad the Berlin government is and has always been. It's almost a crime how they sold almost all the public housing to private investors. The outcome of this has been slow regression of Berlin. From an interesting and pioneering artist haven to a boring and ugly catastrophe. Like, what's really left when all the interesting things are gone?

Money and jobs. But yes, the government really took cheap housing for granted and made no effort to keep it that way. Actually they took measures to destroy unused housing. But that's government for you. Even left-wing government hates cheap housing.

Part of the issue is that the landlord gets any say whatsoever about a public utility.

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