Personal Finance

I'm in no position to buy a house, but I like to browse and dream, and my mindset at this point is basically--give me an honest old house that hasn't been renovated since 1970...at least I can SEE the problem-spots (cracked this or that, stains, etc.) and make a plan on how to tackle them.

Like, my gut feeling when I see that horrible silver-blue color scheme anything flipped/"renovated" in the past few years is to run as fast as I can. You can't plan, you don't know what you'll have to tackle, it's all hidden under fresh paint or flooring. Is there mold? Who knows. Water damage? Who knows. Old pipes/electrical/etc. that need fixing? Who knows, the signs that might have given you a clue were hidden or pulled out. It's all a big mystery.

Hey I like the grey wood floor look lol

I live in a high property tax area and even though prices have gone up, it's nowhere near as crazy as other parts of the country.

this feels like it leads to massive corporations still owning all of them and paying large taxes

Then the taxes aren't high enough. That's an easy fix. It's one of those times the state doesn't want to optimise the rate for total tax earned but to make paying it for any length of time actually prohibitive. Make it so that they can't possibly raise rents high enough to cover those taxes and they'll understand quickly.

The other side of the equation is a bit harder, and that's housing overstock: Companies will be sitting on housing they can't rent out due to lack of demand for housing. One idea would be to allow them to lease homes out to municipalities for literally nothing but tax forgiveness and the municipalities can use that to house the left-over homeless, unemployed, etc. Call it a half write off. Oh those leases need sensible minimum durations, I'd say five years is a good start.

smaller investors that used property for assets

You can easily make smaller investors be hit significant less by it by scaling the tax to the number of vacant housing units. Own a second home you rent out and spend four months finding a renter you like? Fine, pay ten bucks. Do that to 1000 housing units? Pay 10000 bucks for each.

Yes, those kinds of rates are right-out financial violence. That's the point: The state has to step in as the larger bully to keep the small ones in check to avert market failure.

When you rent, you still pay for that $3500 furnace, you just pay for it in monthly installments through your rent instead of all at once.

You can accomplish the same thing with home ownership by using sinking funds. Basically, if you expect that furnace to last 20 years and cost $3500, you'd set aside ~$15/month, assuming your furnace is new. If you expect repairs in that time, set aside enough to cover that cost as well. If you do that for enough of your major repairs (roof, major appliances, driveway, etc), you should always have enough in the fund to meet any house related emergency, assuming your estimates are accurate enough on average. I do this in my budget by using online estimates for expected lifetime and cost to replace, and I do my best to make things last longer than that estimate. I do the same for cars and other large expenses so I'm always prepared.

That's what landlords do, and homeowners can do it too. Budget for repairs just like you'd budget for a vacation.

Your first point is more important though. Selling a house is expensive and time consuming, so it absolutely makes more sense to rent if you expect to need to move with short notice. You'll pay a premium for that convenience, and you'll also not have to worry about repairs. For some people, renting is less expensive on net vs owning even if they don't need to move quickly, e.g. if they know they'll overspend on renovations and repairs. There's absolutely an argument to both, I'm just pointing out that the value in a house isn't in the appreciation imo, it's in potential cost savings by taking ownership of repairs, vacancy, etc.

Municipalities are required to house everyone so the situation doesn't even begin to be comparable to the US. Ballpark a shabby dorm room to yourself as the minimum, bath and kitchen might be shared, washing machine will almost invariably be. In Berlin there's about 27k living in those shelters, about 2k are sleeping rough, and that's as a metropolis smaller cities tend to have zero. None of that includes people crashing on somebody else's couch, but it does include apartment burned down and you don't want to pay for a hotel until you find something new kind of situations.

The official term is "emergency accommodations" and they're supposed to be short-term, hence also the low standards, but we haven't built enough social housing in ages and the stuff that got build constantly stops to be social housing as municipalities cheaped out and simply tacked "X% of units as social housing for 30 years" onto building permits, which leads to municipalities push come to shove having to rent hotel rooms and eat the difference.

The whole situation could be solved within a decade if we re-instituted the social housing programmes of the 50s, and you can't do it as one-off investment as construction companies aren't willing to increase their own capacity for a short-term boom.

Side note: Berlin had a referendum to expropriate all landlords who have more than 3k units, it passed, but wasn't 100% binding and politics is dragging its feet implementing it, including the social democrats. With legalities out of the way though they're now starting one that would be immediately applicable law.

The reasoning of the socdems isn't even completely wrong, "we should build instead of expropriate" but MFers don't seem to understand that people are out for blood. If the people want to expropriate something you can say your bit that you think that there's better solutions but fucking do it. Especially in the east.

And, no, the landlords won't get compensated at market rates. The whole thing is possible because for landlords housing units are means of production and Article 15, Berlin doesn't even have to show it's for the public good. Eminent domain type stuff is Article 14, 15 is way stronger and there because the constitution was deliberately written to be compatible with democratic socialism.