Far-left party wins Berlin election, pledging to nationalise housing

expedition32

After WW2 all European countries had massive housing shortages. It was not capitalism that solved it but heavy government involvement. In a span a few decades millions of people were re-housed. The free market is remarkably terrible at pumping out houses fast.

soonnow

To add a b it of context. They do not want to confiscate housing. They do want to pay landlords, though below current (very high) rates. Also this would only apply to private real-estate companies not individual owners. And they can't govern alone, so I think it's unlikely that this plan is actually implemented as originally planned. The likely coalition would contain 3 parties.

ant6n

This sounds super alarmist. Bit it’s not: the party only got 25%, so they will have to make a coalition with other parties to govern. They were junior party in many previous coalitions. The weird thing this election was: there were like 7 parties with a mayor candidate - and none of them grew up in Berlin.

rkachowski

Before knee jerk reacting to this 1. 60% of the Berlin population voted for nationalising (expropriating) apartments from major landlords in a referendum - this is a bipartisan issue 2. This only affects entities with 3000 or more apartments

throwawaydeutsc

I used to live in South America (mid-tier city), living here in Berlin my will never understand how such intelligent people in general (no irony or sarcasm) never thought in a collective sense that if you have a market with a rigid supply in terms of availability (not occupied homes with no incentives for renting), it never made a serious planning for building. I was travelling to some big cities (between 70% of size of Berlin to 4x its size) and you can find a plethora of options since something modest that can fit in a minimal income (salario minimo) to nice appartments. Here we had in the last 7 years 55K units made, but in my home city alone we had more than 470K in a single city; if you're willing to be 1 hour away by car you can find apartments that the normal berliner never would have access in his/her entire life. Not to dunk on berliners, but once you're in the environment where people do real housing at scale you will see a small magic in terms of prices for the legacy supply dropping.

hackandthink

Decades ago, when I was still living in Berlin, the predecessor party of Die Linke (the PDS) was made up of creepy former GDR officials. Yesterday on TV, I saw mostly hip young people. Elif Erap, the party’s lead candidate, reminded me of Chrissy Hynde from The Pretenders.

fabian2k

If they try to avoid paying the full price, this will simply be stopped by the courts. If they do this the proper, legal way it will be far too expensive and not do anything useful. Affordable housing is a very important topic, but this isn't doing anything to fix the current issue.

snickerer

This headline is alarmist ('far-left' sounds dangerous for some people). And 'nationalise housing' is just wrong. This party is not far-left, it is just left. But that is not the point. My point is that a headline about anti-left alarmism hit the HN front page. This is unusual; the HN crowd keep their discussions out of daily politics most of the time. So, this has the smell of importance. Alarm! Far-left! And this is weird because Germany is in real danger of electing a fascist government at the moment. There is not the tiniest chance of socialist projects coming to power, but the far-right is winning—except for Berlin. And then an OMG-far-left headline pops up here. This headline was made to push anti-left fear, not to inform the readers.

mordae

That's liberal left, not far left. Routers is just doing its usual capitalist propaganda here. Far left would be inciting people to outright hang landlords. Much like far right is labeling anarchists as terrorists in the US.

throwawaydeutsc

For general context (this topic will be very charged, but anyways) in several times the party that won yesterday voted against urban density for new units. This is a compilation of an anthologic Reddit post (deleted, but all the links are working): ... Und wenn dann jemand Nachverdichtung vorschlägt, passiert das hier: 1. Gegen 240 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg [1] 2. Gegen 150 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg (Salzmannstraße) [2] 3. Gegen 105 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg (Joachimsthaler Str.) [3] [4] Hier hat sich die Linke sogar dazu verleiten gefühlt, den Gegnern einen Preis und 500 € zu geben, damit sie ihren Kampf gegen den sozialen Wohnungsbau fortführen können. Die Linke betont ganz stolz, dass das Geld bereits verwendet wurde „um neue Protest-Banner anzuschaffen und mehr Menschen auf das Thema aufmerksam zu machen“ [5]. Again: „das Thema“ ist die Verhinderung des kommunalen Wohnungsbaus. 4. Gegen 84 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg (Gotlindestraße) [6], dabei wird das erzkonservative Weltbild der Bürgerinitiative unterstützt: „So, wie das Viertel einmal geplant wurde, soll es bestehen bleiben.“ Siehe die Selbstbeschreibung der BI [7]. 5. Gegen 50 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg (Atzpodinenstraße) [6] 6. Gegen 150 landeseigene Wohnungen in Schöneberg [8]: Dort haben sie Einwendungen gegen den Bebauungsplan formuliert, also aktiv rechtliche Schritte gegen den Wohnungsbau eingeleitet, und ganz offen ihre Position kundgegeben: „Das Vorhaben [150 landeseigene Wohnungen!] ist für die Anwohner*innen ausschließlich mit Nachteilen behaftet, einen gesellschaftlichen Mehrwert gibt es nicht.“ 7. Gegen 95 landeseigene Wohnungen in Treptow [9] 8. Gegen ~60 landeseigene Wohnungen in Treptow [10]: „Die Nachverdichtungen bestehender Wohnquartiere sollen möglichst vermieden werden und gegebenenfalls behutsam unter Erhalt von möglichst viel Grün und unter Berücksichtigung der ursprünglichen Siedlungskonzepte erfolgen.“ 9. Gegen 30 landeseigene Wohnungen in Friedrichshain [11] 10. Allgemein gegen Wohnungsbau in Treptow [12] 11. Allgemein gegen Wohnungsbau in Pankow [13] 12. Allgemein gegen Neubauziele in ganz Berlin [14] Alles Beispiele von Die Linke, weil das die Partei ist, die eigentlich am härtesten für den sozialen Wohnungsbau kämpfen müsste. Auch Neubau im Außenbereich wird nicht gerne gesehen: 5.000 Wohnungen auf der Elisabeth-Aue sollten verhindert werden [15]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20211015205615/https://www.tages... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210202231844/https://www.links... [3] https://www.facebook.com/linke.lichtenberg/photos/a.16689808... [4] https://www.archivebuttons.com/articles?article=https://www.... [5] https://archive.is/a8QVo [6] https://web.archive.org/web/20220926185744/https://www.berli... [7] https://web.archive.org/web/20220926184054/https://www.nachh... [8] https://web.archive.org/web/20220119200234/https://www.links... [9] https://web.archive.org/web/20220927182345/https://mobile.tw... [10] https://web.archive.org/web/20220928214930/https://www.dieli... [11] https://web.archive.org/web/20220307125359/https://leute.tag... [12] https://www.dielinke-treptow-koepenick.de/politik/aktuelles/... [13] https://web.archive.org/web/20210910093835/https://www.die-l... [14] https://www.rbb24.de/politik/beitrag/2022/05/berlin-bauen-ge... [15] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/baustopp-fur-den-klimasch...

drcongo

Finally some good news.

consumer451

What is their position on Russia's war in Ukraine, and NATO in general? I am not German, but from what I can tell it's basically no arms for the defense of Ukraine, and no NATO rebuilding. Is that correct? Just like AfD, extremely convenient for one particular country. Three years ago, a pro-imperial Russian told me that we will see regime change in the West, before in Moscow. Looking around the EU at the moment, it turns out that he was correct. What an absolute tragedy.

kazinator

Maybe they should start with something easy, like building a simple wall.

hackeraccount

I's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for 'em.

lr1970

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