From London and other overpriced cities, we often look to Berlin as a beacon of progressive housing politics. Renting in the capital, as some 84% of households do, is associated with secure, unlimited, rent-controlled tenancies. Berliners have rallied behind moves to freeze rents and expropriate hundreds of thousands of apartments from corporate landlords. But in the last few years, Berlin’s housing crisis has escalated to unprecedented proportions, with median asking rents across the city rising by 21.2% in 2023 alone. Far from “poor but sexy”, as it was once dubbed by its own mayor, Berlin now has one of the most overheated property markets in the world.
The reasons for Berlin’s housing crisis are complex,
Always amazin’ how lefties insist they’ve got really great policies it’s just that the outcome isn’t what they desire for some strange reason.
You know, the kulaks – the productive farmers – are wreckers so we’ll disposses all of them and bugger me, why’s everyone dying of starvation?
Not a mention of the “shadow rents”, aka backhanders, that are common, maybe even universal, in the controlled rent sector of Berlin.
Berlin is fast becoming a city that prioritises the needs of investors and landlords over those of tenants. What was once an affordable haven for alternative culture is becoming inaccessible for those unable to shell out thousands on rent, excluding the low-income groups that made the capital what it is today. Closing the loophole is just one small measure towards removing Berlin’s housing from the grasp of financial actors and re-empowering tenants. In the long run, this will require more fundamental structural changes. As campaign groups gear up for a second referendum on the expropriation and socialisation of 240,000 apartments owned by large companies, hope is not lost. But Berlin’s loophole demonstrates how the role of housing as a source of wealth and income continues to be prioritised over its function as a social necessity, even in a city widely heralded for its progressive housing politics.
‘Re-empowering tenants’ which normally eventually involves expropriation as the endgame. No mention of immigration as a driver of demand which seems to be the norm. Nothing about the Great Replacement or Net Zero driving equity and bond prices into the ground and removing sources of income. The analysis would disgrace a sixth form student.
‘Poor but sexy’.
So at one time, poor bohemians would live in Berlin as it was a cheap big city to live in. Cheap rents and all the benefits of a big city such as culture, cafes, bars, etc. Now that Berlin has recovered from the cold war and is once again the capital of Germany, the bohemians are being priced out of the rental market as they are in competition with normal people who have real jobs.
I have no sympathy. Move out or pull your finger out and get a real job.
“But it’s my Yuman Right to be a useless “arty” tosser!”
“Of course it is. There’s a garret. Go and starve in it.”
One of my kids is out there at the moment, training as a lawyer (sorry).
The price of accommodation did slightly take my breath away: she’s in a shared flat with two others, in a nice but not top area – Islington rather than Kensington.
It’s near the centre but in a slightly bohemian area with bars etc, not yet completely taken over by rapists and terrorists, and she has a balcony and stuff.
€2200 pcm.
I remember Berlin from twenty or thirty years ago and it was cheap as chips.
In her case it’s complicated by the fact that she’s on a work permit and everything has to be properly registered (and fair enough).
The Germans she knows are often renting in the black market which is substantially cheaper (also fair enough IMO).
I suspect it’s partly rent controls and partly people wanting to live in an ever smaller proportion of the city because they object to being mugged and raped the minute they leave their door.
In shocking news, Socialism does not do what it says on the tin. Film at 10.
Yeeah glods. I’m glad I wasn’t drinking at that line. I charge £750pm for a whole 3-bed flat in Sheffield.
Dare I ask – is it the normal German flat which is just bare stripped to the walls, and the tenant has to fit everything, carpets, cooker, fridge, sink, bath, toilet????
It’s strange how progressive societies rapidly become backward. Must be something to do with Einstein and the speed of light. Or the interference of the far right…
The influx of overpaid civil servants may also have had a effect on demand.
€2200 pcm.
Cripes. You could get a one-bed in a half decent bit of London for that. In fact you could a one bed in Singapore or Hong Kong for that (possibly a bit teensy in the latter).
@Grist
It’s the gravitational effect of that much …. something… concentrated in one place
That nice Mr Einstein had something to say about it.
Come to think of it, the mass wailing of somebody else’s fault could fit the bill for Hawking radiation
I was reading recently how Germany’s Greens and left parties want to extend the scheme across the whole of Germany. Coincidentally it wasn’t long after I’d been reading about how Milei’s reforms had brought more property on to the market and reduced rents.
What is it about rent controls that so excites the left despite all the evidence I thought to myself and resolved to ask my son and DiL as their bona vides should at least give them an insight. They met at Occupy Bath where my son became de facto leader and she’s a long standing Green Party member who wanted to work for them and stood against JRM in 2017 as the Green candidate.
I asked them on Saturday when they came round for a curry and to be fair to them they don’t understand it either. She muttered about her sister in law having a massive rent and a landlord who did nothing, but that’s a different issue and he’s going to do less than nothing if his rents are effectively capped.
It’s still a mystery.
salamander,
“So at one time, poor bohemians would live in Berlin as it was a cheap big city to live in. Cheap rents and all the benefits of a big city such as culture, cafes, bars, etc. Now that Berlin has recovered from the cold war and is once again the capital of Germany, the bohemians are being priced out of the rental market as they are in competition with normal people who have real jobs.”
But also, artists don’t need to be near the capitals now.
Once upon a time, if you were a musician, you had to live within a short trip of the concert hall, actors near the theatre. If you were an artist you had to live within travel range of the gallery (so, walk), writers lived somewhere in LA so they could get in a cab and drive to the studio with their script.
If you have to send your novel to your editor there is almost nowhere you can’t work. If you have power, internet, you can write your novel there. You can do the bulk of the work of composing and arranging an album from a laptop in Cleethorpes or Devizes. Once you’ve got it about right, you go to somewhere like Peter Gabriel’s studio in Wiltshire and do a proper professional recording of it for a week.
@jgh
Dare I ask – is it the normal German flat which is just bare stripped to the walls, and the tenant has to fit everything, carpets, cooker, fridge, sink, bath, toilet????
No, it’s fully-furnished, and that includes all bills, and she didn’t have a lot of choice – it was a sudden secondment and she had to take what she could get. Plus, as I say, it’s a in a nice/nicer area. You can definitely do it cheaper, but not much (you can also, amazingly, do it more expensively).
“Occupy Bath”? Isn’t it already occupied by the smuggest people on the planet?