alt Hacker NewsBefore moving to Europe, I always had this conception of Germany as being very good at organizing things, especially anything involving engineering. It doesn't take long to set this picture straight.
> From 2015 to 2024, Austin added 120,000 units to its housing stock—an increase of 30%
Compare that to the following [1]:
> The [...] government [...] intended to build 400,000 new homes annually, including at least 100,000 social housing units. This target was significantly missed from 2021 to 2024. In each year from 2021 to 2023, fewer than 300,000 new homes were built.
So, the city of Austin alone build on average 12,000 new housings each year, while all across Germany, they failed to build 300,000 new units. That's roughly a 1:25 ratio.
So, how much bigger is Germany than Austin, Texas? More than 80 times bigger.
Is that just because big projects don't scale linearly? I would think that that's definitely one factor. Also, I'm not convinced that economy of scale laws apply here, given that this is not one company building 300,000 houses.
But it does show a number of problems inherent in Germany's current situation: (a) shortage of skilled laborers; (b) high cost of labor; and (c) exorbitantly much red tape. These three points alone are among the most frequently cited factors that companies feel inhibit business, and it holds across disciplines.
[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/08/20/vmjm-a20.html
Replies
>But it does show a number of problems inherent in Germany's current situation: (a) shortage of skilled laborers; (b) high cost of labor; and (c) exorbitantly much red tape. These three points alone are among the most frequently cited factors that companies feel inhibit business, and it holds across disciplines.
There are 9 billion people in the world, roughly half of them are perfectly capable of doing manual labor.
There is plenty of skilled labor, and the cost is frankly not that high, you just need to let them work.
Can we be serious here? There is one and only one cause of "high housing prices" and that is a political choice to make housing expensive.
Don't tell people what they can or can't do with their property.
Don't prevent people from being brought in to build stuff.
Do these 2 things and housing will be built if the price is truly high. Anything else is bullshit.
While it’s a different country my experience in Ireland and the Netherlands has been that there’s this bizarre contempt for builders. Like “I build homes and sell them to people for money” basically makes you satan incarnate. So housebuilding is bogged down in x% social, y% “affordable” (because apparently the goal of making all housing affordable by actually building enough is unthinkable) and very little gets built .
In Amsterdam the Green Party is celebrating making homes more affordable to buy…. By kicking out the people who were renting them. And they continue to say only 20% of developments can be market rate, aka for everyone. When you’re new to the city because you just got a job at booking.com or whatever you only can hope to get a flat in that 20% - the rest isn’t for the likes of you!
https://youtu.be/t05cFv02pzY