Last night (Monday), ARD (public TV, Channel One) ran Hart Aber Fair (their public forum show). The topic? The housing situation. I've essayed a fair number of observations over this unique German problem.
The basis of this....almost every major urbanized city in Germany is 'short' on affordable housing (1-bedroom, 2-bedroom, 3-bedroom, etc). Part of this issue revolves around a mass sell-off by cities of city-owned pubic housing in the 1980s and 1990s, which the city management system took the profits and drove into parks, road maintenance, and people-projects. The company that bought the apartment buildings? They renovated and raised rents.....so affordability kinda dried up. Another element is land speculation, where lots of open lots exist but the pricing is so far up, that affordable apartment planning is a joke.
So last night, the moderator of the forum had political guests, and agenda people.
The high point of the whole discussion? A leftist agenda person, who made the comment that it was time to seize public housing back away from the companies who've profited.....lower that rent, and refuse to pay the former owners more than 1-Euro. Lots of applause, but reality soon arrives.
Once you enter into this type of seizure (under German law, it's legal).....you have to compensate the former owners. The court system would force this rather quickly. How much would we be talking about? Just in Berlin alone, it's probably in the 20-billion Euro range, for the amount of property they often speculate upon seizing. Across all of German? I would wager that the price tag would go beyond 200-billion Euro. City or state governments capable of paying that? No. Even at the national level....they'd be unable to compensate the owners.
But the commentator who made this suggestion got a fair amount of applause.
One of the great examples of public housing in Europe that 'worked'....comes out of Vienna in the 1950s and 1960s. They built numerous buildings across the city. Renovation-wise, with exteriors....they've done virtually nothing. Along every other decade, they might have improved windows, or bathrooms....but they left the bulk of the buildings in a simple appearance. Rent is developed upon the lines of what you make, and a percentage of that given back to the government. None of their properties went off to private companies. People can whine about the lack of improvement, or 1950s 'look' but they can easily afford the rent.
There might have been some Germans hyped up from last night, but frankly, it's become an unsolvable mess.
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