German housing crisis: 'Like winning the lottery!'
German housing crisis: 'Like winning the lottery!'
Housing is the social issue of the 21st century, German politicians and experts say time and again. And yet there's no improvement in sight, especially in cities, where affordable housing is in short supply.
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The issue is near global no matter the wealth of a country. Why? We have allowed homes to be investment vehicles like stocks. This is what you get and given that those who own the homes do not want to see their value go down, you better believe they have infiltrated the government to ensure it. It is working. Maybe a little too well as things are getting desperate and surely cannot be sustainable.
Yes, but that's not the only factor.
We also have a larger population. And we have smaller household sizes, which means that the number of households has grown even quicker than the population. And higher rates of urbanisation, which means those households all want to live in a few overcrowded urban areas.
And we have more households owning multiple homes, either as investment, for recreational usage or to rent it out.
Solving these issues will not be simple, but it has to be done.
Well there are waysmto solve them but they would really hurt the feefees of some big lobbies.
1: limit in some way shape or form the ownership ofmproperty across the board. Average joe won't complain if he can only own two residential properties total because he'll be plenty happy with one. Current
parasitesinvestors don't like this because it will limit their profit margins2: provide high capacity transit to and from satelite towns, extending the 'reachable' distance (how far you can get within 15, 30, 60 minutes) by expanding primarily rail but also the auxiliary services would drastically increase the catchment area of large cities. Cars are really a doomed mode of transport for cities and should ideally be left at the entrance to any major metro region. Important part here: web transit instead of hub and spoke since the latter will make prices in the hub skyrocket even harder. The automotive industry will do their best to prevent this idea because none of them want to risk entering the rail market.
3: this last part really is the hardest because unlike the previousmtwo it cannot be easily solved by regulation/focused tax spending. The previous two points would only create conditions in which housing prices remain lowish if and only if the added space and forced distributed ownership of homes coincided with increased construction efforts.
Part of this means less luxury lofts but herein lies the problem: building has a high base cost (mainly the land itself but also things like plumbing and wiring) with any luxury installations on top of it drastically increasing the profit margins. I cannot think of any way to fix this that won't come back to monkey paw everyone down the line right now. Probably the best way I can think of is heavily reduced taxes for anyone working with first time (total lifetime) home owners coupled with a 5 year sale restriction on the property afterwards. That would give construction companies an incentive to work with collectives of regular people at lower rates rather than the same housing megacorp over and over again.
4: (Alternative) just slap an expotential tax on residential buildings past the first one and see how the market works itself out, not like it can get much worse lol
After reading (3), I was going to suggest (4), but you did it yourself.
We should drastically raise property taxes and make them deductible from income taxes for owner-occupied housing up to a certain amount.
That would really put middle class home owners and starters in a competitive position compared to those who consume a lot of housing.
And this, in turn, will incentivize property developers to target the middle class
Housing in the "east" is cheap. However jobs are rare. People living in Dresden usually travel to Thüringen for working.
Really? I always heard about lots of jobs in Dresden, but maybe that's just my bubble of people.
Maybe there are but I believe I read sth. about 40% of Sachsen (Sachsen-Anhalt) are travelling to Thüringen for work.
But Dresden is not in Sachsen Anhalt.
I know. I meant both states.