alt Hacker NewsThat's not true. I just now went through the Wahl-o-Mat for Baden-Württemberg (because there are elections there this Sunday, March 8). From the 38 questions, there are two that directly address the housing crisis:
> Die Mietpreisbremse in baden-württembergischen Städten und Gemeinden soll abgeschafft werden
> Länger leerstehende Mietwohnungen sollen ihren Eigentümerinnen und Eigentümer konsequent entzogen und vermietet werden.
Why do you think those options are not good options to address the housing crisis? Are there other levers? Of course, but Mietpreisbremse (freezing rents) and Leerstand (empty houses) are certainly key levers. And the point of the Wahl-o-Mat is to give you an indication over overlap, not to list and let you decide on single political initiatives.
> That's not true
What exactly is not true?
> Are there other levers? Of course, but Mietpreisbremse (freezing rents) and Leerstand (empty houses) are certainly key levers.
They are not the key levers, which everyone with basic knowledge of economics should understand immediately.
Regardless of whether certain segment is operated by market, by regulation or by combination of two, it is always about supply matching the demand. If you have more demand than supply, either prices will increase or you enter the state of deficit, where non-market mechanisms will decide who will get home and who will not. In either case prolonged state of reduced supply leads to crisis. Neither of those levers does solve problem of supply reliably. There’s simply not enough empty homes on the market to consider efficient management of them a solution. Rent controls also do not help here, because they actually reduce supply, by creating black market of subleases and reducing mobility (people stick to their regulated contracts).
The solution to the problem requires multiple reforms at once, which will fix short term and long term supply:
1. Dramatically deregulating supply side and reducing NIMBY influence. Project approvals should not take 7 years as in Berlin Friedrichshain and should not be blocked by survival of some rare toads like in Berlin Pankow.
2. Streamlining microdistrict planning, where one project includes construction of thousands of homes along with the necessary infrastructure. May include rapid construction tech (Plattenbau 2.0). It is not enough to build one building here and there, we need to build a lot more.
3. Shifting from majority rental to majority ownership model in which mobility is supported by market, low commissions (remove notaries, reduce taxes) and fast registration of property rights. It must be possible to sell and buy in 2-3 weeks maximum. The large landlords should be re-privatized: first, state takes over, then rentals are converted to subsidized lease deals with tenants with transferrable rights, in which tenants will effectively own their homes, while continuing to pay the current, never increasing amounts.
4. Progressive tax on property ownership kicking in from 0% on 3-5 apartments to significant percentage of rent value on 50+ apartments. The for-profit landlord business model must become unattractive, while not putting too much pressure on small landlords which are more market-friendly.
This kind of reform is neither left, nor right. It’s anti-capitalist, because it prevents concentration of capital and negative redistribution, but it is also pro-market, because it hands over the ownership to millions of people which can then freely sell and buy for their own use.