I just bought a house in Germany. It will remain unused for around 6 months due to renovation. It is naive to believe that any empty house is empty due to speculation.

My grandmother died some years ago, my family wanted to sell the house as they didn’t need it. It took 3 years to sell it because it’s in a location with no demand plus 6-12 months to arrange the inheritance legal details. You would say, the price was too high then! It was sold for €30K, a garden farmhouse with 6 bedrooms, garden and garage.

It’s inevitable that some houses are out of the market for some time due to many different reasons.

Berlin already has fines against letting an apartment sit empty without reason, if they're empty, they're empty for a reason or eating the fine is cheaper than the cost of renting it out.

It is not buildings, but apartments. And you completely la-la-ed your way around what I wrote and considered them ALL as long-term speculatively withheld apartments, while only about a THIRD of them are. Which means that only about two years' growth could be accomodated like this. Then, what? Given that the city has spent all its money on buying out old stock?

Zero unoccupied housing is unachievable anywhere but in a dilapidated slum, because apartments must get remodeled from time to time. If you remodel an apartment every 15 years and it takes three months (a rather optimistic timeline), you already have 1,6 per cent of the housing stock out of the market inevitably, because 3 months is 1/60th of 15 years. If anything, only 2 per cent of the Berlin apartments being out of the market indicates that they already don't get enough maintenance!

Then you have pauses between tenants. If an average tenant stays for 8 years and it takes about a month to fix the most basic things once he moves out, and find new people, then you have 1 per cent of the housing stock momentarily unoccupied just due to this. Again, Berlin having only 2 per cent of the stock out of the market indicates that the changing of tenants is already overoptimized, with not enough time to vet new ones and fix smaller things: one moves in on the heels of another.

Then you have a certain small percentage of apartments being part of litigations, either commercial or inheritance-related. Inevitable. Companies split, people die, and not everyone has their papers in Ordnung.

You seem to be claiming that all those mechanisms can be compressed to zero, and that all the apartments that are unoccupied due to them can be put on the market by fiat. How? Will you ban apartment remodeling? That's the way to produce - fully occupied - ghettoes.

We’ve established how many empty houses there are and how much further demand there will be, and guesstimated that with the current empty apartments, we can cover almost 6 years of the cities growth. That is, if you do absolutely nothing but to force people to rent their homes. Now in reality, we’ll do more than that. Both the government and public sector are and will continue to build houses. But those are just projections. The existing houses, well, exist. So let’s make sure we use them. Whenever this argument comes up people get extremely defensive for no good reason whatever. It will make a significant impact to the housing market if we force stalled housing to become available. Sure, we can and must do more than just that, but why not start with the cheapest and easiest thing we can today? Because it’s someone’s private property and we can’t even demand they rent it out in a housing crisis???? Come on now. Stop the madness.