Vienna BUILT the stock, and I am all for Berlin building the stock themselves. That is both constructive and adds more units to the market. But it is also rare, as most others want to take instead of building. Try finding another example like Vienna, you won't. It is all take, take, take, take and preciously little make, make.

Die Linke is a heavily NIMBY party which just wants to change ownership of existing housing stock forcibly. That won't alleviate any pressure in a city that gains almost 20 thousand new inhabitants yearly.

Are you paying attention? The main plan of the Berlin Left is to expropriate existing housing stock. Given that this is Germany and they cannot just take someone's stuff without due compensation, this will put the city on the verge of bankruptcy if not over it, and they will have no money left to build anything even if they wanted to, which they don't, because any development baaaad.

BTW much of the earlier privatization was caused by the previous Berlin town halls spending on unsustainable boondoggles which almost bankrupted the city already. People have short memory. The city sold its remaining housing stock to pay for the spending spree of former mayor Klaus Wowereit.

You're losing track of your own argument. You just decried expropriation because they would chill private development.

I just demonstrated why that is not an issue, since public development produces better results anyways.

The chilling effect on private builders would be a plus with that context, since it would drive down costs for public buildouts.

Your point on expropriation costs is also oversimplifying things. The German constitution says that a price has to be found by weighing interests. Nowhere does it specify markets as the mechanism for doing so, nor the weighting of public interest vs that of the expropriated.