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.

▲

tirant an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Unfortunately solving the housing crisis will remove any incentive to vote for the Left or the Socialist Party.

Remember the first incentive of any politician is to remain in power not to solve citizens problems. Sometimes there’s overlapping, fortunately.

▲

karmakurtisaani an hour ago | parent [-]

I don't believe this is basically ever the case. The reality is more like that simple promises often collide with messy reality, and the compromise solution ends up solving a fraction of the original promise.

▲

tirant an hour ago | parent [-]

Do you know which big city recently solved the rental price problem? Buenos Aires, by just removing most of the rental housing regulations.

It can be solved, you just need to do it without ideology. Die Linke is not that type of party, quite the opposite.

	▲	karmakurtisaani 36 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		But now you're talking about a different thing. First, you said they don't even want to solve it so they'll have voters in the future. Now, you say they want to solve it, but the wrong way. So which one is it?

▲

atoav 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Has to do mostly with the historic environment of the country. Berlin was a split city, so after the 90s it abstained mostly from what it perceived as dangerous political experiments. Also die Linke was basically seen as a continuation party of the GDRs SED, and as such didn't have the greatest of reputations in that city (shooting/jailing people that want to move out will do that miraculously).

Die Linke today is a completely different generation of people and drawing any direct line to the SED is mostly wishful thinking by polemic conservatives.