Berlin Voters Asked The City To Tackle Rising Rents. The Plan Is A Long Shot

[10023]

Originally Posted by biguc

Do any of you private property crusaders want to see the streets, parks, sewers, watermains, and sidewalks of your cities privatized? You could work really hard, buy your piece, make sure someone has to pay you every time they walk, drink, shit.

We already accept a significant social component in our cities. There's no good reason we can't have a substantial social component to housing too. Successful models exist.

Enough with the red scare/"people who want affordable rent are lazy" nonsense. Nobody is talking about communism but you.

No because that would be insane. There is private property and there are commons. That makes perfect sense.

Actually I remember a very drunken argument in my early 20s with a friend of a friend who was arguing for just that. We were at a bar in TriBeCa and he was honestly saying the street outside should be owned and maintained by “the people on the street”. I was drunk enough to bother trying to actually debate him. It was bad.

[jd3189]

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

I'll just address health care. I have worked 36 hours straight at times. I have watched people I came to actually love die because they had incurable diseases. More than a few times I actually cried when I got home. And almost every day I wondered if decisions I made or things I did were correct. Feelings of inadequacy go with the territory if you aren't an egotist.

Like most people, I'm no saint. Many people here think I'm a jerk I expect (and few make that clear almost daily). So I have to admit I wouldn't have done any of this and rather would have done something with regular hours and decisions about something like money rather than peoples' lives if it didn't pay well. If you think doing what people in health care do shouldn't involve profit (or relatively high pay), you are dreaming. Saints aside, nobody puts themselves through what doctors and nurses do for peanuts nor do they put the hours and sweat others put into late nights in a lab inventing new drugs or tabulating data for a research project (or the thesis it took to qualify them to do the work). Yeah, the work can certainly be fulfilling but not enough to have to worry about paying your own mortgage or putting your kids through college on top of everything else.

So I think your comment is just ignorant.

As for landlords, that's no fun either IMHO which is why I've chosen not to get involved in it. Who needs calls from bitchy tenants at all hours?

I can understand the struggle you went through, but I don’t see how that overrides the dignity of patients or (in this thread) tenants.

There should be a balance. I’m going to be dealing with the same things you have dealt with for the past several decades but I don’t want to build the same attitude that you and other physicians and higher professionals have taken up.

Yeah, people should get some profit, but it’s still problematic when it comes to goods and services people may actually need to survive. Why should some people get screwed over high rents and medical bills?

I honestly wouldn’t even blame all the people involved. I would go after aspects of the system itself.

[10023]

Originally Posted by chicago river

Ok rich boy. I know poor people don't count to you but they do WAAAAAAAAY worse in this country than any other country of comparable wealth. I don't care that you Lucille Bluth, and Mr. Burns would have to wait a little longer for care in a civilized country.

Yes. The bottom 10-15% (ie, the uninsured) is worse off in the US healthcare system than they would be in the UK. But the next 70-80% are better off in the US (the top 10-15% in both countries are probably fine). At least US insurers now have to cover pre-existing conditions - in the UK they do not.

Actually I am top 10-15% and I would actually be better off in the US. I’ve got a foot problem that may need surgery, but it’s gotten to that point over a couple years, and my insurance through my employer won’t cover it. The NHS would not perform the procedure until early 2023 (seriously what I was told). So I’m paying out of pocket.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by 10023

Yes. The bottom 10-15% (ie, the uninsured) is worse off in the US healthcare system than they would be in the UK. But the next 70-80% are better off in the US (the top 10-15% in both countries are probably fine). At least US insurers now have to cover pre-existing conditions - in the UK they do not.

Actually I am top 10-15% and I would actually be better off in the US. I’ve got a foot problem that may need surgery, but it’s gotten to that point over a couple years, and my insurance through my employer won’t cover it. The NHS would not perform the procedure until early 2023 (seriously what I was told). So I’m paying out of pocket.

I don't know about that. Americans might have better/ more cutting edge health care but access is a whole other story as health care is expensive and all it takes is one major illness or accident to wipe someone's finances out.

[dave8721]

Originally Posted by 10023

Yes. The bottom 10-15% (ie, the uninsured) is worse off in the US healthcare system than they would be in the UK. But the next 70-80% are better off in the US (the top 10-15% in both countries are probably fine). At least US insurers now have to cover pre-existing conditions - in the UK they do not.

Actually I am top 10-15% and I would actually be better off in the US. I’ve got a foot problem that may need surgery, but it’s gotten to that point over a couple years, and my insurance through my employer won’t cover it. The NHS would not perform the procedure until early 2023 (seriously what I was told). So I’m paying out of pocket.

My wife had a pretty standard surgery a couple of years ago and hot hit with a $5k bill. She had insurance but that is the normal deductible max payment for surgeries. How often does that happen in the UK?

[C.]

I'm so confused with what's happening in this thread.

it started with a proposal for Berlin to expropriate privately-owned apartment buildings to ensure they remain affordable for residents. Something that can be done in theory, but will probably be very costly. Where it stands now, I don't know. lol

[10023]

Originally Posted by dave8721

My wife had a pretty standard surgery a couple of years ago and hot hit with a $5k bill. She had insurance but that is the normal deductible max payment for surgeries. How often does that happen in the UK?

It’s going to cost me more than that to get a simple foot surgery (with scans, etc) if I want to be able to walk or run without pain before 2023.

[10023]

Originally Posted by C.

I'm so confused with what's happening in this thread.
it started with a proposal for Berlin to expropriate privately-owned apartment buildings to ensure they remain affordable for residents. Something that can be done in theory, but will probably be very costly. Where it stands now, I don't know. lol

Yes.

It sounds like a non-starter from a practical standpoint. Either it will be eye-wateringly expensive (if owners are compensated) or set up a protracted battle in Germany courts (since Germany is not the Soviet Union).

The way to create more government owned housing, if that is what you want to do, is of course to build it.

[jd3189]

Yeah, building more government housing is necessary. But what if NIMBYs or other groups build roadblocks against that, which they often do in the US?

And, yeah, most US cities outside the major top ten or so are inexpensive. Many of those cheaper cities are also economically stagnant or struggling. People live where the jobs are and most of the jobs are still in the biggest metros.

[biguc]

Originally Posted by C.

I'm so confused with what's happening in this thread.

it started with a proposal for Berlin to expropriate privately-owned apartment buildings to ensure they remain affordable for residents. Something that can be done in theory, but will probably be very costly. Where it stands now, I don't know. lol

Here's a video. You can turn on closed captioning to get English subtitles.

• Video Link

To summarize (I'm including some numbers here that aren't in the video but are available in a pdf here), governments in Germany are allowed to pay less than market rate when expropriating. Market rate for these properties is about 36 billion Euros. The Berlin senate has thrown out a series of numbers to estimate the value of the buildings plus improvements, less appreciation since the private owners bought them from Berlin. These come in at around 18 billion. The current tax assessment of the properties is 11 billion.

DW&co Einteignen wants to charge a "fair rent"--about 4 Euros per square meter. Building maintenance costs something like 2.20 a square meter; the rest is available to service debt. Currently, Deutsche Wohnen & co charge about 7 Euros per square meter. At current rents, Berlin could afford to pay about 24 billion. To pull off fair rent they can only afford 8-9 Billion.

I don't know if that's realistic. 11-18 billion does, however, seem possible. And they'd still be able to charge affordable rents. To be honest, Berlin isn't really lacking very affordable places--very poor people already qualify for subsidized housing, which remains abundant*. The problem is that there's a widening gap between those rents and what's available on the market. Being sort of poor, or even middle-income, means you struggle to find decent places with affordable rent.

One more general point: I wouldn't expect things in Germany to work like they do in Anglo countries. Germany has a far murkier, more nuanced interplay between the public and private sectors. For example, Germany has multiple public health insurance providers, but they aren't really public--they're independent non-profits subject to price regulations. They're also deeply embedded in German society--it's been like this since the 19th century. Economic liberalism isn't an essential part of the culture like it is for us Anglos.

* Don't take me as any kind of source on this, but as I understand it, they figured out a clever system to pull this off. Between getting trashed in the war and then being under siege/socialism for the next 45 years, Berlin housing was generally low quality--shared bathrooms, coal stoves, leaky roofs, that kind of stuff. This is the other side of the romantic image of 1980s bohemian paradise--Tilda Swinton and Nick Cave were living in dumps.
Anyway, Berlin offered subsidies to modernize buildings, but the owners had to keep rents down and make the places available to the qualifying poor. Building owners got to save their buildings, and the city secured a deep supply of affordable housing.

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by biguc

Here's a video. You can turn on closed captioning to get English subtitles.

• Video Link

To summarize (I'm including some numbers here that aren't in the video but are available in a pdf here), governments in Germany are allowed to pay less than market rate when expropriating. Market rate for these properties is about 36 billion Euros. The Berlin senate has thrown out a series of numbers to estimate the value of the buildings plus improvements, less appreciation since the private owners bought them from Berlin. These come in at around 18 billion. The current tax assessment of the properties is 11 billion.

(...)

Who builds in Berlin? I understand Germany has a low ownership rates and I imagine building construction is aimed to investors (like those companies) that wants to rent those places. If this expropriation, specially way below market value, who would build in such scenario?

Down here in São Paulo developers build on demand: if the market asks, buildings going up as it happens right now. Even though Brazilian economy has a strong state regulation, welfare state is quite robust, construction is very market oriented. 99% of buyers are individuals, not those real estate companies, buying for living there or to rent for other people.

As people pointed out above, it seems to me that less intrusive way to keep housing affordable is building more, be the City of Berlin, being private contractors.

[10023]

Originally Posted by jd3189

Yeah, building more government housing is necessary. But what if NIMBYs or other groups build roadblocks against that, which they often do in the US?

And, yeah, most US cities outside the major top ten or so are inexpensive. Many of those cheaper cities are also economically stagnant or struggling. People live where the jobs are and most of the jobs are still in the biggest metros.

This is much less of an issue in Europe than in the US (or to a lesser extent the UK). That’s part of why they have better trains than we do (eg, why Spain was able to build a national high-speed rail network in the last 20 years).