\n\n“Tenants in newly seized units obviously benefit from the lower rents that would come from government ownership. Everyone else would be worse off, as they’d be forced to compete for a smaller share of private units.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is in effect what happened with Berlin’s brief experiment with a law that froze rents at apartments built before 2014. Rents did indeed stop rising in regulated units, benefiting the tenants who lived in them. But prices shot up dramatically for unregulated units. (In April 2021 Germany’s constitutional court struck down<\/a> Berlin’s rent control.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The number of regulated units on the rental market also collapsed, while new listings for unregulated units weren’t enough to pick up the slack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The rent control represented “a windfall to one group of tenants: those, whether rich or poor, who are already ensconced in regulated apartments,” wrote<\/a> Bloomberg <\/em>columnist Andreas Kluth in March. “Simultaneously, they hurt all other groups\u2014especially young people and those coming from other cities\u2014by all but shutting them out of the market.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is robust evidence<\/a> that new housing, even expensive new housing,<\/a> makes cities more affordable for everyone. Berlin’s leaders should consider ways to boost housing production so the city can continue to grow and thrive, instead of just redistributing existing units to benefit a minority of incumbent renters.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n