Far-left party wins Berlin election, pledging to nationalise housing

I’d almost believe the burden one, but you just piled and made the whole thing sound very emotional and not very objective.

If you have any kind of stats supporting this, I genuinely would be interested.

I shouldn't have to subsidize my neighbor's rental just because they chose to live in my city.

Most urgent intervention required in the UK, IMO. We're choking to death on the cost of housing.

It would make more sense just enforce maintenance standards and improve renters rights. You can't really legislate supply & demand.

Confiscation with (some) remuneration is still confiscation. Is your comment satirical?

Housing right now is the opposite of a commodity: it's a boutique investment for individuals whose price is propped up by regulations that artificially limit supply.

Housing in many countries is not part of a free market but part of a monopoly where the government decides how much, how many, the what and the when the houses can be built. If it was a real free market, the issue would have been long solved.

It can be solved, you just need to do it without ideology. Die Linke is not that type of party, quite the opposite.

The guy is notoriously known for paying below minimum wage and setting the worst working conditions possible to maximize profits.

They made a law that forced companies in the meat processing industry to have certain standards if they reach a certain number of employees.

So he opened 250 companies on a weekend and split up the workforce to stay below the limits.

Then they just changed the law to declare multiple entities with below the limit they set under same ownership to become a "super entity" with even stricter regulations.

The government has the monopoly on violence of any form. That does not just include that they can send the police after you to hit you with batons, they can also make sure you’re drowning in administrative work and taxing the shit out of you, and the guy threatened to leave the country and just open meat processing in Poland and Bulgaria as well.

In the end, all his threats to leave the country and just do the whole processing in Poland and Bulgaria were empty. They simply told him someone else will just take over, because the profit was still great after the new regulations, and they were going to ban him from doing business on the German market by simply banning his product for food safety reasons.

This is the same thing with a different product. Investors threaten to no longer invest and build housing, but they will just fall in line and shut up in the end, because capitalism dictates that if you no longer want to make good profits because they took away your ability to make ridiculous profits, someone else will just do your business under the new conditions and gladly take the good money over no money at all.

The CDU and the CSU have nothing to do with the NSDAP.

At some point in time in Germany 30% of the population were either part of the NSDAP or the Nazi Army. Luckily most of them were not war criminals and move on with their lives. And yes, some of them ended in the CDU/CSU but also of the SED/Die Linke.

Just to give you an example, around 10-15% of the DDR state officials had held NSDAP membership pre-1945.

Does that make the DDR a successor of the Nazi Regime? Obviously not. The same about the CDU/CSU.

But Die Linke is still the same party as the SED. Same organization, which just voted themselves into different names.

It costs a lot of money to build a new apartment building because land where you are allowed to build is regulated by the State. Also the State requires many regulations that increase unnecessarily the costs, and most of all in the name of the ideology.

For example, housing standards of Japan and the US, which are way cheaper and still serve two of the richest countries in the world, would never be allowed in Germany. That makes housing unaffordable and drives people into poverty.

Source?

Deutschlandatlas says that Berlin has whole 2 percent of empty apartments for all reasons, which is less then half of German average [0]

Some of those apartments are being remodeled, some are just in the period where the previous tenant moved out and the next moved in.

There are 16 thousand long-term empty apartments, which looks like a huge number, but it is only 0.8 percent of the total. [1]

Even if those 16 thousand apartments could be all put to market (some have legal barriers, like being part of a complicated litigation), that easing would not last even for a single mayor's tenure. Last year alone, Berlin grew up by 17 thousand people. [2] It was not an extraordinary year.

ALL that money that the Linke wants to sink into old housing should be spent to build new one, just to accomodate the arrivals.

[0] https://www.deutschlandatlas.bund.de/DE/Karten/Wie-wir-wohne...

[1] https://www.berlin.de/sen/wohnen/rechtliches/zweckentfremdun...

[2] https://www.statistik-berlin-brandenburg.de/106-2025/

Fighting against these companies will only drive prices higher. It is stupid.

Areas that are attractive to live always have low vacancy rates, because there's a reason that people want to live there.

The assumption that 'as many people ought to be able to live in a neighbourhood as should want to live there' - implied by the 'vacancy rate' issue just means 'every attractive area turns into Hong Kong'.

While there can be very good reason for more building as well - socialized housing is almost never the answer to that. It has a role in some situations, but generally not on the aggregate like that.

Usually this will have to do with permits, regulation - and frankly workers. Nobody wants to do the kind of labour necessary to build homes, and it's extremely hard to find workers to do that kind of work, which to anyone paying the least bit of attention should be a pretty big paradox.

'City overflowing with people who want homes to live don't want to make homes in which to live'

Probably there's a lot of bureaucracy to clean out and that's a good place to start.