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- Hacker News
- 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.
by snickerer - It could be handled differently, more acceptable to right-voters, a lot cheaper to implement (actually brings more money in taxes) and with the same outcomes: tax housing progressively.
It works like this: First house owned by someone - normal tax, second house - 10x tax, 3rd house - 20x tax. Applied to legal persons too, but not to commercial spaces.
A family with two adults could own two houses or apartments (one each) and still pay normal tax. A rich person with 3 houses could keep his most valued property with normal tax, rent two and still be profitable. A real estate company would have no choice but to sell.
by M95D - 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.
by hackandthink - 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.
by fabian2k - 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.
by ant6n - 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
by rkachowski - 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.
- 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.
by soonnow