Rent Mess?

There's this rental pricing game going on in Berlin (just within the city government itself, run by the SPD, Linke Party and Greens)....shift apartment rental prices to a standard.

Depending on the age, and condition....the standard rent would be set between 3.42 Euro per square meter....up to 7.97 Euro.  At 4 Euro, and 70 square meters (2-bedroom size)....you'd only be paying 280 Euro for rent.  At the 7.97 Euro....it'd be roughly 560 Euro.   You could be talking about rent prices dropping by 50-percent in some cases. 

Reaction in the city?  The CDU and FDP{ folks say that if it's signed off and forced....it's unconstitutional.

The problem existing in Berlin, and most of the major urbanized 'zones' in Germany is that low-cost apartment construction has come to a virtual end.  Unless you are the speculator and the city is leading you to a deal for property, and part of this is to force you to build on a 2nd property an affordable housing project.....then there's little interest.  The profit for renting low and affordable housing simply doesn't exist.

Housing projects on renovation?  That's another part of the story.  If you have a property built in the 1970s and it's time for some real renovation....when the job is done, you can figure that the rent is going to double, or they might just convert it over to a condo situation that you can't afford either.

If the Berlin city policy is allowed to stand?  Those companies holding ownership over the affected properties will consume significant 'losses' and start dumping this over to marginalized companies with zero interest in maintaining or fixing issues.  So the fix simply goes to create new problems in the next decade?  Yes.

All of this leads back to the 1980s and 1990s when various German city governments quietly gave up ownership of housing projects (social-housing) and sold the units for profit to companies to 'manage'.  The cities took the unit profits and plowed them into various other programs to 'please' voters.  It's rarely laid out in detail, and if Germans began to realize that they were 'bought-off' two or three decades ago, to lay out this current rental cost chaos.....they'd go ballistic.