For a number of months, I've essayed about housing shortages in Germany.....mostly all in highly urbanized cities (Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, and so on). It's at a point where the political parties have promised some remedy, but mostly fallen into a pit of issues that can't be resolved.
One curious thing which the major cities have admitted, and it begs questions.....after WW II.....going up to the 1970s, cities across Germany built 'social housing' (apartment buildings without a lot of glitter) which were rented out at sums of money which the city felt 'fair'.
An odd thing started in the 1990s, which no one much talks about. A lot of these apartment buildings (remember, they were built and financed by the city management themselves)....weren't lined up for renovation as the 1990s arrived, and the cities really didn't have the money to bring them up to the next level that people expected. Cities made this odd decision.....they sold the apartment buildings...to a commercial company called 'Deutsche Wohnen Gruppe'. This company did the logical step.....they went into renovation projects, but they raised the rent. As a commercial company, they had to not only be responsible for the property, but they had to make some kind of profit..
So you'd have a 500 DM (still in the 1990s, remember) apartment, which underwent renovation, and then the landlord company said with the new 'look'.....800 DM was now the new rent. So across Germany, apartments started to escalate. Where people couldn't afford their old apartment, they went looking for another place, and they crowded up the scene for 'affordable' housing.
In recent months, there's been this chat in Berlin (not the Bundestag, but the city folks)....about expropriation (meaning the city would take your property). The discussion at the city level is that it's time to go and seize the old properties and revert this mess back to them
The discussion here is that as a company in a city (like Berlin).....once you go over ownership of 3,000 apartments)....that would be the point where the city would seize your assets (over the amount) and run them as a non-profit situation.....meaning just basic rent.
You can imagine an 2-bedroom apartment going for 1,200 Euro currently ($1,400) on the monthly rate, and the city would just say 800 Euro (cutting a quarter of the rent) and in their mind, the crisis would 'end'.
Issues? Well...Focus went and talked about this effort. The experts say, just in Berlin alone....they'd need 25-to-40 billion Euro. Here's the curious thing....the city presently is around 60-billion Euro in debt. What bank would cover this? None. How much property tax would you have to create to make this interesting for the banks to cover the loan? Don't even bother talking over that topic....it'll freak people out.
If you did start to expropriate the property....would anyone go and build regular apartment housing? I suspect that idea would rapidly come to a closure, and people would only build for high-end condo sales.
It's curious.....all this chatter in the past six months.....Burgergeld, pension woes, reform of welfare payments, and expropriate of public property......all requiring adding up to hundreds of billions over a decade, and really no way to grab that money....leaving people to stand there talking about some fantasy repairs, but grumbling because nothing ever gets fixed.
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