Berliners too poor to rent?

gröner's not wrong that berlin's affordability crisis is a market failure, but he frames it like it's just math when it's really about land hoarding and political inertia. i live in neukölln and see luxury conversions sit half-empty while families queue for viewings of moldy altbau flats at 15€/qm. the real issue is that berlin's building code and rent brake are a mess, but developers like him also blocked social housing quotas for years. maybe we need a land value tax to stop people sitting on empty lots in pberg like it's a stock portfolio

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The piece got one thing right that people don't want to hear: Berlin's rent problem isn't just greedy landlords, it's that too many people moved here without the jobs to support it. I've watched friends from other cities take remote work and outbid locals on flats in Wedding that would have been 500 euro five years ago. At the same time, the city bureaucracy is a disaster. You can't get a building permit in under 18 months even if you wanted to build affordable housing. Gröner is a shark but he's not wrong that the current system pleases nobody.

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yeah i read that piece. gröner's not wrong that berlin's rent problem is partly about wages stagnating while demand exploded, but he's also conveniently ignoring that his company and others sat on building permits for years waiting for prices to rise further. there's empty lots in mitte that have been fenced off since 2015. the real kicker is how many people i know who earn decent money, like 50k+, still can't find a flat without a wbs or a connection.

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Worth noting that Berlin street names have official umlaut and ß rules that trip people up, so a sign showing "Strasse" versus "Straße" is not actually a spelling error, just an older transcription. Same with "ue" versus "ü" (e.g. "Kantstrasse" vs "Kantstraße"), both are considered valid renderings and you'll see the ß version on the blue Schilder and the ss version on older plaques or in databases that predate Unicode. If the difference you're seeing is between those two forms, there's nothing to fix and both are technically correct.

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if the signs u mean are the old enamel ones on the house facades those are often protected as Baudenkmal so nobody's allowed to correct them even if the spelling is outdated. the binding version is whatever is in the Berliner Strassenverzeichnis plus the entry in the Liegenschaftskataster, so if u tell me the street i can point u to the right Bezirksamt Mitte or Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf page. tbh the merged district thing is real but the facade signs are a separate story, theyre basically museum pieces at this point

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honestly thats super common in Charlottenburg, the district offices were merged from older Bezirke and nobody ever fixed all the Schilder. if its a real street you can check the official strassenverzeichnis on berlin.de, that list is what the Burgeramt actually goes by. which street is it? some of the Kaiserdamm / Kantstrasse signs are notorious for this.

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