Posted on 04/04/2019 12:48:09 AM PDT by blueplum
Support is growing for a referendum on whether to ban large landlords from the German capital and turn their property into social housing stock
...The Social Democratic party (SPD), senior partner in Berlin’s current governing coalition and the main driver behind the privatisation of the capital’s housing stock in the late 90s and early 00s, has distanced itself from the campaign, although it has proposed freezing rents in the city for five years. The SPD’s youth branch, by contrast, has trumped the campaign’s demands and proposed expropriating any landlord with over 20 apartments...
...Taheri, now the campaign’s spokesperson, argues that court cases between Deutsche Wohnen, which owns over 100,000 apartments in the German capital, and tenants like Von Boroviczeny prove the company is currently abusing its economic power in the city, thus providing sufficient reason for triggering the previously overlooked legal paragraph.
His campaign’s specific proposal: landlords who own more than 3,000 apartments should be dispossessed and their property passed into the hands of a new public body responsible for social housing. By the campaigners’ calculation, such a move could free up around 200,000 apartments.
Deutsche Wohnen thinks the idea is legally unenforceable and would amount to “saying goodbye to the market economy”. But three legal surveys commissioned by the Berlin senate support the basic tenet of the campaigners’ approach, one even suggesting that “socialising large companies may be easier to justify than small companies”.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Berliners have gone stark - raving - mad.
Socialism cannot exist without freedom. If you rule through totalitarian methods you end up neither with social justice nor freedom.
This is why a particular idea of socialism completely disappeared. To revive it would be a tragic mistake.
Human nature being what it is, some people are habituated to accept the loss of freedom to build a more just society.
That never happens and for that reason alone, I’m not a socialist. If equality is the main goal, then I prefer freedom.
I agree with socialists we must every provide everyone equal opportunity and ameliorate great extremes of wealth and poverty.
Where I part company with them is over the notion we can make everyone equal. It’s patently absurd. We can give every one equal opportunity.
But the notion we can order society according to some ideal plan will always remain a fiction.
“By the campaigners’ calculation, such a move could free up around 200,000 apartments.“
These imbeciles are as retarded about supply and demand as liberals over here. There’s still only the same finite number of apartments available. Stupid little creatures.
Uh, yeah. Public housing. That’s the ticket. It always works so well.
“Deutsche Wohnen thinks the idea is legally unenforceable and would amount to “saying goodbye to the market economy”
... which is the intention of the left.
If you love being on a waiting list, its fine. Few people have delayed gratification and the reality is inevitable disappointment.
Maybe it’s some fantasy to be discussed, but the minute you do some property-grab...by German law, you have to compensate for the loss with a fair amount in return. You go and price a 2-bedroom condo in Berlin (within the city limits), in decent shape, and you are talking about 300,000 Euro ($400k) minimum. The city government might be able to come up with money to take a hundred-to-two hundred properties a year. But then you do the math on the ‘grab’ cost, and the rent that you can recover on the property....it’s a massive loss for the city. Money just down the drain.
Toss in the fact that each ‘grab’ will trigger a fair price fight in court and judges will drag this into a one to two year fight.
You’d destroy the incentive to build any condo properties, and suddenly stall construction while everyone is rethinking how safe their investment is. All you do is exchange one problem for another.
It is actually worse than what you are describing.
Investors always weigh alternative uses for their funds, so the folks who would have built or upgraded condos or apartments will look at the added risk in the city and build or upgrade elsewhere (even if just a mile outside of the city limits).
Socialists are trying to herd cats.
In other words, "nationalization" is really a scheme to transfer quasi-ownership, in the form of a perpetual entitlement, to current renters. Future apartment seekers will be out of luck. For them, nationalization will produce severe and chronic scarcity.
The clarifying remedy would be this. Provide that all newly nationalized apartment units would be available on an equal opportunity basis to anyone seeking housing. Current tenants would lose any priority; they would go into the common applicant pool and would only be able to stay if they won a winning ticket in the lottery to award new leases. Otherwise, they would have to move to whatever might be available. Support for nationalization would evaporate overnight.
Socialists are trying to herd cats.
Fascists will let you think you own it but they control it. Hitler was a fascist.
As far as I can tell, this is the only difference?
Socialism cannot exist without freedom and money from a capitalist society
There are at least a dozen reasons for the housing/affordable costs crisis in Germany today. Few of the journalists ever sit down and lay out the complex nature of this issue.
You can take a city like Frankfurt....there’s probably at least 300 different open properties in the city which are being held in a speculation situation. Some have been held for over twenty years, waiting on the real estate prices to reach epic proportions. So even if you found some group willing to go and build affordable housing...they’d have to deal with the property issue (enormous cost just to buy the ground itself).
Part of the problem as well is that well-to-do Germans have reached a point they can list out all the negative features of living in a metropolitan city, and then go 20 to 30 km outside of that city...creating a ‘flight’ scenario, and drawing big money to build entire suburbs which have a rapid-rail link back to where they work (in the metropolitan city). Significant growth is going on, but it’s way beyond the city limits.
Then you can add in the migration feature of the past six years, where the new immigrants all want to live in the city-region, where the jobs are located. Once you ask for affordable housing, it simply doesn’t exist because of the competition now for one, two and three-bedroom apartments.
The last issue, which one never expected to occur, all of this recent diesel car crisis business, and the potential threat to make entry into some of the bigger cities, is a mess. Some companies are now reviewing the idea of taking their operation out of the city limits, and putting it beyond banned streets/entry points.
Hey, I have an idea of how to ameliorate the housing crunch in German cities. Stop taking in 2 million “refugees from shithole countries and throwing people out of their homes to give them to freeloaders. Just spitballin’ here.
"....The higher the number of apartments affected by the proposed cull, the higher the cost for the senate – which in turn is eventually likely to be passed down to Berlin’s citizens in taxes. According to the senate’s own estimate, expropriating around 240,000 apartments would require compensation payments of between €28.8bn (£25bn) and €36.6bn. The official Expropriate DW & Co campaign questions the authorities’ calculation, offering up a cost proposal of €18.1bn instead.
Increasingly relishing their taste for controversy, some Berlin tenants are happy ignore the warnings. Instead, they propose even more radical solutions. In a recent talk show on German television, one veteran housing activist suggested the senate should offer no more than €1 in compensation payments.
“€1 per flat?” the moderator asked. “No! €1 per company,”, the activist responded.
Yeah. Who won the cold war?
The activist and the expropriation-enthusiasts chatter like 11-yar old kids. German law dictates that while you (as a city or state government) can expropriate property/housing, you have to put fair-compensation into the game. Since cities cannot raise sales taxes on their own (the national VAT prevents that), and there’s a limit on property taxes....all of this is wasted hot-air. If some city signs off to buy 100 condos (2 bedroom units), and the average price is 300,000 Euro per unit....then they (the city) need 30-million Euro.
This talk of the 240,000 apartments that they would grab, and their ball-park figure of 28-billion Euro is a joke. They don’t have the money, and no bank is going to sign up to loan them the money unless there is a strong possibility of the money being paid back. Do the math on cheap apartment rental prices (like the activists talk about). The math doesn’t work.
There is a housing crisis and a affordability crisis...almost every German will agree on that. But this expropriation talk is mostly a joke. It’ll never be accepted by vast majority of voters.
The national socialist democrat party of germany
What could possibly go wrong?
Those pushing such policies NEVER live in squalor working digging a ditch or spending time in the factory line.
They always have the estate with fine dining, world travel big footprint, etc etc.
All animals are equal. Some are more equal than others.
It is about CONTROL. and keeping some down in the mud.
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