And they can't govern alone, so I think it's unlikely that this plan is actually implemented as originally planned. The likely coalition would contain 3 parties.
They do want to pay landlords, though below current (very high) rates.
New large condo buildings have to sell 30% of the units at below market rate. This causes many viable projects to never get built.
So laws like this are sold to renter voters as a way to lower housing costs, but NIMBYs secretly love it. Over time, renters pay more in rent because there is less supply due to builders not building. However, a lucky few renters who were here early will get below market rents.
Perfect examples of voters voting for a short term fix but pay more in long term. And voting for themselves while screwing future renters.
The City of Vienna is the largest landlord in Europe. It is also the only major European capital without a rent cost crisis.
Genuinely interested. Where I live, I have received direct reports that there is almost zero margin between building cost and market price (buying). But buying and then renting still has a good ROI, although a longer term one.
I don’t get it, it goes against the market self regulation, but real estate is very twisted in this respect.
This is not just any law, it's in the German constitution (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_14.html).
sound logic
My province's capital has 43% of unhinabitated houses. They are not even on the market, as we are in a housing crisis. Vast majority of them are property of large housing groups that are backed by black rock and company.
The same firms are manouvering the politicians to get approvals to build modern monstruosities, because there is a housing crisis, but they build only luxury homes thst cost too much and remain unhinabitated.
Yes it is sound logic to force big conglomerates to dissolve by law. Law should aim for the public good.
The large investor landlords purchased the homes and often didn't even do the bare minimum in upkeep. The real estate nevertheless appreciated massively because of Berlin getting more and more popular.
It therefore makes sense to nationalize this housing stock, and I'd see a value comprised of "original purchase price, upkeep and inflation-plus-3%-tied appreciation" as fair value. Maybe even less because they extracted 20 years worth of rent payments from the properties already.
Rent extraction is utterly counterproductive for a society.
Housing should not be a commodity.
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.
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.
Remember the first incentive of any politician is to remain in power not to solve citizens problems. Sometimes there’s overlapping, fortunately.
1. 60% of the Berlin population voted for nationalising (expropriating) apartments from major landlords in a referendum - this is a bipartisan issue
2. This only affects entities with 3000 or more apartments
There's no bi-partisan thing around it: It was the fact that the city has a spcific demographic that voted for it, but the constitutional court revoked it.
Another point: Even during the campaign the group did not explain how it would work given that most of the payments would need to be done at current market rates and the constitutional court will not pass it for obvious reasons.
And on top of that, good luck to make all other states paying it and hoping that the Länderfinanzausgleich will stand.
This sort of nationalisation has never been to trial.
Yesterday on TV, I saw mostly hip young people. Elif Erap, the party’s lead candidate, reminded me of Chrissy Hynde from The Pretenders.
Affordable housing is a very important topic, but this isn't doing anything to fix the current issue.
This party is not far-left, it is just left. But that is not the point. My point is that a headline about anti-left alarmism hit the HN front page. This is unusual; the HN crowd keep their discussions out of daily politics most of the time. So, this has the smell of importance. Alarm! Far-left!
And this is weird because Germany is in real danger of electing a fascist government at the moment. There is not the tiniest chance of socialist projects coming to power, but the far-right is winning—except for Berlin.
And then an OMG-far-left headline pops up here. This headline was made to push anti-left fear, not to inform the readers.
Of all parties in Germany that have a shot at governing, it is the furthest left. Thus, „far-left“ is not wrong in my opinion.
Nowadays votes by many young people that never lived in Berlin pre-1991.
They were junior party in many previous coalitions.
The weird thing this election was: there were like 7 parties with a mayor candidate - and none of them grew up in Berlin.
This is a compilation of an anthologic Reddit post (deleted, but all the links are working):
...
Und wenn dann jemand Nachverdichtung vorschlägt, passiert das hier:
1. Gegen 240 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg [1]
2. Gegen 150 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg (Salzmannstraße) [2]
3. Gegen 105 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg (Joachimsthaler Str.) [3] [4]
Hier hat sich die Linke sogar dazu verleiten gefühlt, den Gegnern einen Preis und 500 € zu geben, damit sie ihren Kampf gegen den sozialen Wohnungsbau fortführen können. Die Linke betont ganz stolz, dass das Geld bereits verwendet wurde „um neue Protest-Banner anzuschaffen und mehr Menschen auf das Thema aufmerksam zu machen“ [5].
Again: „das Thema“ ist die Verhinderung des kommunalen Wohnungsbaus.
5. Gegen 50 landeseigene Wohnungen in Lichtenberg (Atzpodinenstraße) [6]
6. Gegen 150 landeseigene Wohnungen in Schöneberg [8]: Dort haben sie Einwendungen gegen den Bebauungsplan formuliert, also aktiv rechtliche Schritte gegen den Wohnungsbau eingeleitet, und ganz offen ihre Position kundgegeben:
„Das Vorhaben [150 landeseigene Wohnungen!] ist für die Anwohner*innen ausschließlich mit Nachteilen behaftet, einen gesellschaftlichen Mehrwert gibt es nicht.“
8. Gegen ~60 landeseigene Wohnungen in Treptow [10]:
„Die Nachverdichtungen bestehender Wohnquartiere sollen möglichst vermieden werden und gegebenenfalls behutsam unter Erhalt von möglichst viel Grün und unter Berücksichtigung der ursprünglichen Siedlungskonzepte erfolgen.“
10. Allgemein gegen Wohnungsbau in Treptow [12]
11. Allgemein gegen Wohnungsbau in Pankow [13]
12. Allgemein gegen Neubauziele in ganz Berlin [14]
Alles Beispiele von Die Linke, weil das die Partei ist, die eigentlich am härtesten für den sozialen Wohnungsbau kämpfen müsste.
Auch Neubau im Außenbereich wird nicht gerne gesehen: 5.000 Wohnungen auf der Elisabeth-Aue sollten verhindert werden [15].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20211015205615/https://www.tages...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210202231844/https://www.links...
[3] https://www.facebook.com/linke.lichtenberg/photos/a.16689808...
[4] https://www.archivebuttons.com/articles?article=https://www....
[6] https://web.archive.org/web/20220926185744/https://www.berli...
[7] https://web.archive.org/web/20220926184054/https://www.nachh...
[8] https://web.archive.org/web/20220119200234/https://www.links...
[9] https://web.archive.org/web/20220927182345/https://mobile.tw...
[10] https://web.archive.org/web/20220928214930/https://www.dieli...
[11] https://web.archive.org/web/20220307125359/https://leute.tag...
[12] https://www.dielinke-treptow-koepenick.de/politik/aktuelles/...
[13] https://web.archive.org/web/20210910093835/https://www.die-l...
[14] https://www.rbb24.de/politik/beitrag/2022/05/berlin-bauen-ge...
[15] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/baustopp-fur-den-klimasch...
Far left would be inciting people to outright hang landlords. Much like far right is labeling anarchists as terrorists in the US.
I am not German, but from what I can tell it's basically no arms for the defense of Ukraine, and no NATO rebuilding.
Is that correct? Just like AfD, extremely convenient for one particular country.
Three years ago, a pro-imperial Russian told me that we will see regime change in the West, before in Moscow. Looking around the EU at the moment, it turns out that he was correct. What an absolute tragedy.
I mean, how does a local-only party plan to "nationalize housing?"
If this has zero bearing on future national policies, I would love to be talked down.
> Levittowns are six large suburban housing developments, three of which are actually named "Levittown." They were created in the United States (including one in Puerto Rico) by William J. Levitt and his company Levitt & Sons. Built after World War II for returning white veterans and their new families, the communities offered attractive alternatives to cramped central city locations and apartments. The Veterans Administration and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) guaranteed builders that qualified veterans could buy housing for a fraction of rental costs. Under Levitt & Sons, Levittown housing would maintain racial covenants that excluded non-White would-be buyers.
Italics added. Seems the government was somewhat involved in the US too. Of course, now the reason "the free market is terrible at pumping out houses" is government regulation too....
The average rent in Berlin (and other German cities) is not very high but that's because a lot of flats still run on a very old contract. If you're moving to Berlin, finding an apartment is incredibly difficult, even if you're willing to spend a lot of money. My grandmother lives by herself in a 90sqm flat in a really nice area and pays 400 Euros a month. In the last 10 years she tried to find a smaller flat (30-40 sqm) for herself but the cheapest she could find was 750. So she stays where she is and just doesn't use 2 of the rooms she has except for storage. In the meantime, a friend of mine moved to Berlin and couldn't find a decent 60sqm flat for less than 1400 Euros. The only way to get those affordable rents is either knowing someone who is moving out or getting super lucky by finding and getting it through a public ad.
Massenbesichtigung (mass viewings) are not uncommon. The agent will publish a public timeslot and literally hundreds of people lined around the block will show up to view a single flat.
> »Durch Enteignung entsteht keine einzige neue Wohnung.«
> Das stimmt, aber darum geht es auch nicht.
The nationalization is not about supply, but to stop the price hikes. They also want to invest in new affordable homes at the same time.
Or so they claim.
They will have to wail until after WW3 because Russia is openly threatening action, European governments are trying to prepare their citizens, German populists want to return to 'normal relations' with Russia, which means 'use our money to invade and kill everyone to the East of us, just not us'.
Germany and Europe is in for a very rough ride.
Were it not for the war situation, then we could say this is 'healthy political turmoil' - but this is at a time when outside parties will take advantage of European disunity.
That doesn't seem too unusual, considering the organization probably asks for as much as possible, even if it knows some asks might be unreasonable.
The guy is notoriously known for paying below minimum wage and setting the worst working conditions possible to maximize profits.
They made a law that forced companies in the meat processing industry to have certain standards if they reach a certain number of employees.
So he opened 250 companies on a weekend and split up the workforce to stay below the limits.
Then they just changed the law to declare multiple entities with below the limit they set under same ownership to become a "super entity" with even stricter regulations.
The government has the monopoly on violence of any form. That does not just include that they can send the police after you to hit you with batons, they can also make sure you’re drowning in administrative work and taxing the shit out of you, and the guy threatened to leave the country and just open meat processing in Poland and Bulgaria as well.
In the end, all his threats to leave the country and just do the whole processing in Poland and Bulgaria were empty. They simply told him someone else will just take over, because the profit was still great after the new regulations, and they were going to ban him from doing business on the German market by simply banning his product for food safety reasons.
This is the same thing with a different product. Investors threaten to no longer invest and build housing, but they will just fall in line and shut up in the end, because capitalism dictates that if you no longer want to make good profits because they took away your ability to make ridiculous profits, someone else will just do your business under the new conditions and gladly take the good money over no money at all.
Areas that are attractive to live always have low vacancy rates, because there's a reason that people want to live there.
The assumption that 'as many people ought to be able to live in a neighbourhood as should want to live there' - implied by the 'vacancy rate' issue just means 'every attractive area turns into Hong Kong'.
While there can be very good reason for more building as well - socialized housing is almost never the answer to that. It has a role in some situations, but generally not on the aggregate like that.
Usually this will have to do with permits, regulation - and frankly workers. Nobody wants to do the kind of labour necessary to build homes, and it's extremely hard to find workers to do that kind of work, which to anyone paying the least bit of attention should be a pretty big paradox.
'City overflowing with people who want homes to live don't want to make homes in which to live'
Probably there's a lot of bureaucracy to clean out and that's a good place to start.
It says the compensation is determined as a balance of public good and the interests of those affected, so to me it does read like the compensation can be lower than market value so it'd all come down the courts to determine how much below the market value the state can get away with.
Confiscation with (some) remuneration is still confiscation. Is your comment satirical?
It can be solved, you just need to do it without ideology. Die Linke is not that type of party, quite the opposite.
In my old neighborhood, if a developer wanted to build a high rise with 300 apartments, they’d make a proposal for 350 apartments, have a few public meetings, let people yell at them for a couple hours, and make a “concession” of reducing the project to 300 apartments. Then everyone goes home happy. Everyone knew that was the game, except perhaps a few obtuse NIMBYs that thought they were accomplishing something.
In the mile or two south of Roosevelt Rd, there are 5000-10000 permitted apartments/condos, just waiting for some developer to get a loan and pull permits to start construction. No public meetings needed. They could start building next week.
It costs a lot of money to build a new apartment building because land where you are allowed to build is regulated by the State. Also the State requires many regulations that increase unnecessarily the costs, and most of all in the name of the ideology.
For example, housing standards of Japan and the US, which are way cheaper and still serve two of the richest countries in the world, would never be allowed in Germany. That makes housing unaffordable and drives people into poverty.
I live in Japan, so I know it first-hand.
Housing standards in Japan are awful. The average Japanese city is chaotic and ugly with zero urban planning, and the average Japanese house is built with the cheapest possible materials and has zero insulation. I remember reading that the average Japanese house uses 7 times more energy than the average German house! You do NOT want to build houses like Japan.
I’d almost believe the burden one, but you just piled and made the whole thing sound very emotional and not very objective.
If you have any kind of stats supporting this, I genuinely would be interested.
1) > They're pretty much the only capital city in the developed world that's a burden and not a benefit to the country as a whole.
https://www.iwkoeln.de/presse/iw-nachrichten/matthias-dierme...
2) > Then they do things like free daycare paid for by other states in the country while those states can't offer it.
Look up "Länderfinanzausgleich" and then look up daycare programs and compare them. None of the net payers get even remotely the same even though they're the ones actually paying for it.
Both statements are objectively true.
It is more of demonstration how strong other cities in Germany are and how Berlin almost stopped existing (economically speaking) for 70 years than of being a burden in my view, but this is a detail you can throw in any conversation with berlin people to drive them nuts =)
2/ true example, yes. Then check what Germany pays to get power from the north down to Bavaria. And who pays for this? Unfair all around. I’m of course holding every single Bavarian personally responsible for this.
I dislike how you generalise from economical examples to the character of berlin inhabitants. It’s obviously wrong but also just not nice.
Fighting against these companies will only drive prices higher. It is stupid.
I've never met anyone who prefers Vonovia etc. to housing cooperatives, or failing those small private landlords.
I shouldn't have to subsidize my neighbor's rental just because they chose to live in my city.
you could of course pay them more, and everything would become more expensive. might work. but i bet you don't want that either.
As a society, we decide what we value, and then we pay for it. If you don't like what the group decides, it's your choice to move elsewhere.
Wouldn't the landlords would just take a loss and sell the property to avoid penalties?
> 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.
It would make more sense just enforce maintenance standards and improve renters rights. You can't really legislate supply & demand.
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.
.. Cities also rely quite a bit on property and real estate transfer taxes. By reducing property values, cities destroy their own tax base while needing lots of additional money to renovate state-acquired, vacant properties.
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.
Because it was forbidden by law. You were forced to be put in an institution or directly went to prison. Check Section 249 of the DDR Criminal Code.
And by the way, the DDR suffered from chronic housing shortage. People were cramped in barracks with not bathroom and no heating. Technically housed but in actually povert level of housing. It was an absolute disaster.
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".
Source?
Deutschlandatlas says that Berlin has whole 2 percent of empty apartments for all reasons, which is less then half of German average [0]
Some of those apartments are being remodeled, some are just in the period where the previous tenant moved out and the next moved in.
There are 16 thousand long-term empty apartments, which looks like a huge number, but it is only 0.8 percent of the total. [1]
Even if those 16 thousand apartments could be all put to market (some have legal barriers, like being part of a complicated litigation), that easing would not last even for a single mayor's tenure. Last year alone, Berlin grew up by 17 thousand people. [2] It was not an extraordinary year.
ALL that money that the Linke wants to sink into old housing should be spent to build new one, just to accomodate the arrivals.
[0] https://www.deutschlandatlas.bund.de/DE/Karten/Wie-wir-wohne...
[1] https://www.berlin.de/sen/wohnen/rechtliches/zweckentfremdun...
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.
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.
Most urgent intervention required in the UK, IMO. We're choking to death on the cost of housing.
Every country in the Western world is. And it seriously hits our economies as well - when companies have to pay wages to match what landlords are asking of their employees, places like China with a massive oversupply of housing are far, far more competitive.
The affordable housing from ~50 years ago was single family housing and is crazy expensive today.
We should be building lots of high density luxury condos today. Those are the affordable apartments of the future.
>>If you let the "market" decide on its own it will always decide on the most profitable items, even if that's not what is needed.
How do you define "not needed"? Businesses will build what they can sell - the very definition of needed. The problem is that it's difficult to build. A lot of cheaper housing projects don't get build because some restrictions (like height, number of apartments, parking places) that are not necessary.
If this is what people want, then it seems like the right solution. Short term the only change will be increased taxes and maybe a few lucky renters getting apartments with the number slowly increasing over years and years.
Which is pretty much the situation in Vienna (rents are low in Vienna, but for the 20% that get city-owned apartments the rents are very low. Quality is ... let's call it "very old", and there's no choice (can't move up if you have a kid, say). Then housing associations pay like 30% more but less than private. Private rents are about double city-owned apartments as they're called. Only way to become a city renter is to earn less than 58000 in a given year, then wait 5+ years).
Seems like a very good law, don't you think? And this reminded me of how come one of my favorite childhood books from when I was 3 or 4 here in Romania was about DDR constructors building apartment flats, loved that book and loved the spirit behind it.
> People were cramped in barracks with not bathroom and no heating
There were? Back in the '70s and '80s? You sure? I don't remember it that way here in Romania back in the '80s, and I know that the DDR had a much better economic condition than us, Socialist Republic of Romania.
Housing right now is the opposite of a commodity: it's a boutique investment for individuals whose price is propped up by regulations that artificially limit supply.
>> 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.
- Tax empty flats to death
- Disallow corporate ownership of residential property
That enables mass buyouts of housing from corporation which leads to rent extraction and a myriad of woes.
It's not corporate lawyers who show up to protest new housing, it's retiree homeowners.
Housing in many countries is not part of a free market but part of a monopoly where the government decides how much, how many, the what and the when the houses can be built. If it was a real free market, the issue would have been long solved.
P.s. the EU already decides how much, how many, what and when will be planted, through subsidising. And it's going quite well.
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).
Personally, I believe Berlin has more issues with a lack of affordable housing than with a lack of luxury condos.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009411902...
https://archive.is/2026.02.23-212725/https://www.theatlantic...
IMO, in Berlin the most lacking thing is the supply in affordable housing, so it makes sense to optimize for that directly instead of a side effect of some other optimization.
Why not build something like Alt-Erlaa? [0] [1]
Cities can just build stuff. And if private developers are not as incentivized to invest, that makes it cheaper for the city to do so itself. As somebody from Vienna, it's crazy to me this is even up for debate.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alterlaa [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxuACFQBwxs
The government may (let us forget, for the sake of the argument, that all major parties in Germany are NIMBY in practice), but for what money? The forced buyout was not free, the German constitution won't allow for that. They may even be sentenced to pay the full market price. That alone will make Berlin bankrupt.
The City of Vienna was a place of misery and slums before their socialist party built out enormous amounts of high-quality housing stock, financed by high taxes on luxury goods.
It to this day tops global quality of live rankings as a result.
We have the empirical data. No need to speculate.
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.
I am not sure how it is in Berlin. I haven't visited in a while. I think it's too general an assessment though. In many cities the limit is not land but permits - both being permitted to build at all and then build high enough.
>>Cities can just build stuff. And if private developers are not as incentivized to invest, that makes it cheaper for the city to do so itself. As somebody from Vienna, it's crazy to me this is even up for debate.
I hear a lot of good things about housing in Vienna. Are those city build apartments readily available for anyone? The problem with public housing when I am from is that it turns the city population into lucky few who get access and the rest who not only have to subsidize it but then need to buy on private market themselves.
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.
Hence I don't believe that the Linke will even try. They will form a coalition government and agree behind closed doors that they will let this one simply slip; sorry, the Greens got cold feet.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc...
> an income maximum for applicants of €57,600
and can't be bought, only rented
as for the "only rented" part, again, at this level of low rent it does not matter. you're better off renting. And Europeans have actual pension systems, we are nowhere near as reliant on real estate always appreciating in value.