Which is precisely what I said:

> sold at firesale prices after the CDU Diepgen government thoroughly wrecked the state finances with a banking scandal at the end of the 90s.

Wowereit didn't have much of an alternative, the cash coffers were drained.

Still the same companies Deutsche Wohnen and Vonovia but I agree with the second part.

Their yearly profits are capped because of the Mietpreisbremse (rent control) law since all the old buildings that they bought would fall under it, so it would've been better to put the money towards either building new state-owned housing or helping the tenants enforce their rights.

The laws are there to protect tenants against neglect from the landlord but enforcement takes multiple months which is not a reasonable timeline if you have a problem in your apartment and the consequences for landlord are mostly just reducing the rent for that time by a certain percentage which doesn't make a difference if the rents are already cheap because of the Mietpreisbremse, so it would also be good to introduce fines but not sure if Germany's legal framework allows for that.

> Currently Berlin is under high demand, and that’s why drives prices up

Yeah, I know the written logic of all this, but as things stand right now we didn't have homelessness East of the Wall back in the day, while the West had. That should have been reason enough to throw all this capitalist and pervert logic under the bus, but I understand how come the highly paid programmers in here are happy with the current economic system, homelessness be damned. Which is to say, you're telling me nothing new.

Correction: It's a reflection of demand from people who already live in Berlin. That's who were allowed to vote in the referendum.

They don't care about the elasticity of the market, or the demand from people who would want to live in Berlin in the future.

They already have an apartment, and at pretty low prices because nearly everything built before 2014 is subject to rent control,

I'd guess most people just voted for it because in their eyes "government promised to take apartment from my landlord and lower my rent even more".

Yes, the grandparent scored an own goal with their aside

>> The "free market" (which has been demonstrated to not be free at all)

The Berlin rental market suffers under strong government intervention, and would benefit from being much freer.

I do not think that housing should be broadly available for trade in global markets, in the typical definition of a commodity.

That enables mass buyouts of housing from corporation which leads to rent extraction and a myriad of woes.

The only reason I enjoy cheap food is the industrialisation of agriculture and the subsequent increase in yields.

P.s. the EU already decides how much, how many, what and when will be planted, through subsidising. And it's going quite well.

Who builds all those bridges, roads, power plants, and other public works projects? Maybe them?

Also government formed co-ops. Find people who want a flat and agree on rent before you build it. As the loan is paid off rent becomes substantially cheaper. The second best time to plant a tree is today.

It also doesn't need to be the entire housing stock, just enough to help keep rent low (see Vienna).

Governments directly, cooperatives or non-profit organizations. The Churches used to be pretty active in that space as well to invest tithes, with rents paying for common-welfare projects.