zlacker

It would be rather easy to increase supply of housing. Berlin is full of brown-field sites that could be stacked with housing.

1. Remove density and height restrictions (e.g. "Berliner Traufhoehe").

2. Remove unnecessarily strict building requirements (e.g. "Daemmungswahn").

3. Remove legislation that is too tenant-friendly (e.g. "Mietbremse").

All three serve as breaks to increasing housing supply, the first is a legal impediment, the other two reduce investments.

>>mafrib+(OP)
I guess when you remove 3, you would increase the supply, but only with what you see for example in London: Mostly luxury flats

Doesn't really help getting more affordable flats on the market.

>>thesim+M
Berlin has an extremely affordable rental market, unless you want to live in Mitte or nearby. Even Mitte would be more affordable, if 50-100 floor skyscrapers could get building permission.

I'm not sure how familiar with the London property market. London is currently seeing a large amount of real estate being built, mostly studio, 1, 2 and 3 bedroom. Hardly luxurious. Prices are commensurate with London income levels. Otherwise people wouldn't live in London.

>>mafrib+(OP)
The problem isn't supply, it's supply in Prenzlauer Berg, Friedrichshain, Kreuzberg and Neukölln. If you want a place outside of these districts, you can get a place quite easily.

Increasing supply outside of them, which would be easy because Berlin is surrounded by land you could build on won't change that. At least not without billions of investments in public transport infrastructure, maybe.

Any regulation like building requirements is probably federal, I doubt Berlin has any extra regulation. So there is nothing Berlin can do here.

Removing regulation that is too tenant-friendly isn't popular with voters, it's not going to increase the supply of apartments for students and poor people. This kind of regulation including but not limited to the Mietpreisbremse is also federal law and not something Berlin can do all that much about.

>>mafrib+B1
Before you talk about how affordable Berlin is you need to take the income of people living in Berlin into consideration. You can reasonably live in Berlin but it's by no means extremely affordable.

You also can't arbitrarily increase density of a city as you need infrastructure to go along with all those people. Not to mention that Berlin has many old buildings that are under protection, so you can't just demolish buildings and replace them with skyscrapers.

>>mafrib+B1
>Prices are commensurate with London income levels. Otherwise people wouldn't live in London.

I feel like most people are moving to the outer zones. Buying flats in zone 1-3 is obviously out of reach for most people, even for most developers not working in The City. From what I've seen, even 1-bedroom flats cost at least £310k near Seven Sisters (Zone 3).

I have to admit though that I was mostly looking for flats to rent, not for sale in the last few months so I'm not an expert.

>>DasIch+Z1
There is no human right to rent a 100m2 flat in Mitte for €200 per month.

Even central Berlin is full of brown-field sites that could be developed -- Flughafen Tempelhof most prominently. If you go for Hong Kong style density there, a lot of housing problems would be solved ... Laws can easily be changed if there is political will at the local, regional or federal levels.

However, all this requires a bit of long-term thinking and planning, of which there is little evidence. Instead we get populist measures like "Mietpreisbremse" which hinder new developments.

>>mafrib+D2
Tempelhof cannot be developed because of a plebiscite. What else is there to develop?

>>mafrib+D2
There may not be a no human right to cheap rent in Mitte but most voters probably agree that even people with low incomes should be able to live in the city. Also I think a good argument can be made that rent-seeking behavior by property owners can potentially be in conflict with the constitution.

Flughafen Tempelhof can't be developed, voters have voted directly against it. That law could be changed but to do so would arguably be undemocratic and it would certainly be political suicide for the forseeable future. This also brings up the important point of city planning, cities are more than just housing. You need to take that into consideration.

Also indeed increasing supply is about long-term thinking. You can't increase supply very fast and in this instance you can't increase it fast enough. This means you need something to slow down price increases in the short-term which measures like the Mietpreisbremse or banning AirBnB do.

>>mafrib+B1
A part of the problem in London is the strength of rule of law, which means that rich people from everywhere in the world are storing nest eggs there by buying property, even if they don't live in that property. Almost every dictator, oligarch and prince of an oil-rich country puts in a stake, and smaller-scale money - which is still big scale - also finds a safe haven in the London property market.

I don't really think this has much significant impact on the housing shortage and pricing there, but some part of the housing stock there is owned by people who don't actually live there, and who can afford to keep it vacant just in case they need to move in one day.

>>DasIch+D8
>> voters probably agree that even people with low incomes should be able to live in the city

Why exactly should they? I mean, I don't want to forcibly remove them, but there are many cities in Germany other than Berlin.

If one city is getting richer and richer, then the average price of an apartment goes up. More rich people start comming, because they see oportinity to do business there. At the same time poor people have a choice of moving to smaller, more affordable cities.

The biggest pitfall of a mankind is that we cannot grasp that the world is constantly changing. Life itself is a process of constant change. Just because your parents lived in Berlin and you were born in Berlin does not imply that things have to stay this way forever.

Trying to stop the flow of time and inevitable change is what makes us miserable.

>>mamon+xu
Your plan is marvellous! It would also have the very positive side effect that I'd only have to interact with other rich people who understand me better. For instance I think I'd be able to make much better smalltalk with the waitress selling me coffee in the morning if she was also rich. And the poor people in the poor people cities would probably also prefer to only mix with their own kind.

Why hasn't anyone thought of this before!

>>doener+l6
Berlin is jam-packed with undeveloped brown-field sites.

Get rid of the restrictions on height, and build 50 - 100 floors Hong Kong style, at least in the center.

Tempelhof shows the stupidity of the Berlin voter. The refusal to develop even a small part of the airfield was almost exclusively justified with fears of "gentrification". Congratulation voters, you have just voted yourself into higher rents. (Also, one could have a new "Volksbefragung", in the light of the dire need for more housing in Berlin.)

>>ptaipa+Uj
I agree that some property is left empty, but this is extremely rare. There are just not enough lazy Billionaires that can afford this. In most cases empty means unable to sell or rent out. You'll notice that most developments in London these days (e.g. [1]) are mostly small studios, 1 or 2 bedrooms. That's because large luxury penthouses are hard to sell, there is little demand.

Most buyers of such property (whether private or investment funds like Deka-Immobilien or BlackRock Global Property or Brookfield Property Partner or one of the many others) do this as an investment vehicle with a particular risk/reward structure. They will absolutely have to rent out these properties, and indeed, when they fund property construction projects, as they have been on a massive scale in London in the last decade, they do so to cash in on rent.

[1] http://www.themadison.co.uk

>>thesim+k2

   £310k near Seven Sisters

That's not expensive relative to London income levels, given that property is typically financed over 25 years or so, basically over the most productive phase of one's working life, so it's paid off roughly when one retires. Most young people don't think long-term: they just look at the price and their current annual salary, and see a mismatch.

Maybe it's good this way, because unless you realise that a property is a serious long-term investment, and that the target is to save for retirement, they probably don't have the financial maturity to make such a large purchase and should stick to renting.

Note that property always reflects income-levels of the working population. That's because they are the ones that buy / rent property. Rent and property prices are strongly correlated, because it's fundamentally a risk/reward trade-off: when you buy you take on a fair amount of risk: heating may break down, the roof may leak, you might not find tenants in time, tenants may ruin the property, not pay rent etc etc (From bitter experience I can tell you that "may" really means "will"). Tenants don't carry this risk, hence need to compensate for this risk transfer. That's why renting appears to be more expensive.

Focussing on foreign billionaires who buy-to-leave-empty distorts how the property market works. The real question is: what percentage of their income is the average person willing to invest in property / rent. This is remarkably constant.

>>DasIch+D8

   people with low incomes should be
   able to live in the city.

Steglitz, Spandau, Koepenick, Lichtenrade are all in the city. And all have excellent public transport that gets you to Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg etc in a few minutes. People should live so as to minimise commuting. Since most of those in the centre tend to be either well-paid or tourists, it's fine that they also form the majority of those who live there (either long-term or transient).

>>mafrib+qU
Yes, the billionaires get a lot of blame but in terms of numbers, they are insignificant.

I would imagine that a much bigger issue is old people who are in a care home or a hospital, unable to live in their old place, but not willing/able to give it away either.

At least over here (Finland) this is the major reason for "empty" apartments in central areas of cities.