Affordable housing is actually quite scarce inside the city right now, people on average don't really earn that much. The rent controls had no actual effect on price increases. It has been suggested that the rules are simply being ignored and most tenants won't pick a legal fight with their landlords when housing is so scarce:

https://www.welt.de/finanzen/immobilien/article150877146/Die...

There's more than enough housing for higher-income people, so rent control there is moot.

Rent control in berlin goes beyond the mietpreisbrmese - most significant is that you can't increase the rent once you get a tenant beyond the rate of inflation and that you (almost) can't kick out a tenant.

I have friends in London whose rent (in the same apartment) went up 10% every year for years until they had to leave the apartment. This is not happening in Berlin.

You can increase the rent up to 15% (Berlin) within three years, well above the rate of inflation. This forces some people to move out, as well.

Rents in Berlin are a joke compared to London. You can actually get cheap and plentyful housing just outside the city, but then you'll need a car as well.

I didn't know that, every place I lived in here had much slower rent increases (despite the market around the apartment raising more than that - in fact in my current place I'm still paying then same rent 3 years into living here).

Either way 15% in 3 years is still rent control.

Like I said, there's a demand for affordable housing and in Berlin that means very affordable. Lots of students, lots of artistans, and also lots of unemployed people.

> Either way 15% in 3 years is still rent control.

...which affects very few people.

There are some places that suddenly became "hip", where rent increases drove out lots of low-income people, which caused political backlash. These people really just had to move to less popular places.

Well I don't know what your point of comparison is, but my wife and I have been looking at buying or renting a bigger place (new baby) and all the stats I see when looking at places indicate purchase pricing going up at about double the rate of rental prices (often 5-7% YoY rent increase vs 10-15% YoY purchase price increases).

This has been the case for the last couple years at least. What do you attribute the discrepancy in rent increases vs purchase price increases if not for rent controls?

Do you know nobody living cheaply with an old contract that they would never get today, and that their landlord can't increase to market rate? Cause I know loads such people and this would not happen in a place without rent controls.

Real estate prices all over the world have gone up as a consequence of zero-interest monetary policy. Berlin is still on the cheap end, so it's still attractive to buy there even now.

Rents don't go up proportionally, simply because the demand isn't there. During the US housing bubble, rents didn't go up either, while property prices went through the roof.

> Do you know nobody living cheaply with an old contract that they would never get today, and that their landlord can't increase to market rate? Cause I know loads such people and this would not happen in a place without rent controls.

That's because most contracts specify that increasing the rent follows the standard procedure: Over three years, rent can rise by up to 20% (15% in Berlin), if the comparable rents in the area have risen as well (which is influenced by market rate). Ultimately, this limits the pace at which rents rise, but not the extent. In Berlin, only very few areas could sustain such growth, whereas in places like Munich where people earn way more, rents have risen much higher.

This is also not the rent control specific to Berlin (which is what you originally referred to), these are federal regulations.

I refereed to rent controls in the sense that the american OP said are causing price increases in SF (afaik this is simply limiting rent increases for existing contracts, which is the default in Germany).

All of Germany is under rent control in that context, and IMO it works compared to exploding rents in the US and other countries (UK, Israel, most places really aside from some of continental Europe).

    That's because most contracts specify that 
    increasing the rent follows the standard 
    procedure: Over three years, rent can rise 
    by up to 20% (15% in Berlin), if the comparable 
    rents in the area have risen as well (which is
    influenced by market rate). Ultimately, this 
    limits the pace at which rents rise, but not 
    the extent.

This is a form of rent control almost nobody in the rest of the world outside of continental europe enjoys - prices generally rise as quick for current tenants as they do for everyone there: your landlord can tell you tomorrow than the next time your contract is up to renewal (usually yearly), the price will be 2x the current one and if you don't like that you have to leave.

> your landlord can tell you tomorrow than the next time your contract is up to renewal (usually yearly), the price will be 2x the current one and if you don't like that you have to leave.

It all depends on your contract. Some contracts may put limits on rent increases in. Yes, in Germany there effectively is rent control that prevents a doubling of the rent within a year, but generally rents don't double within a year.

If those rent controls were good enough to satisfy the affected people, why are there protests and demands for additional laws for even more rent control in places like Berlin? Why is living in Munich so hard to afford? At what point does rent control start to "work"?

It works, it's just not enough. It's still better than the situation in the US, UK, etc where there's even less (I remind you that the OP's argument was that rent control was a bad thing).

There's too many variables to say that rent control for the entire housing stock is what keeps Berlin's rents down.

For starters, Berlin is known to be one of the cheaper German cities until recently ("poor but sexy"). In addition, the climate, geographies, and economies between LA and Berlin are significantly different.

Compare berlin to any big American city and you would see that the rent-to-purchase-prices ratio is always much lower in berlin.

>>> Rental prices are half of LA's.

Because income is one half of LA.

And yet purchase prices are the same. Rents are controlled and purchase prices are not.