That is the problem. Berlin and Munich, the cities in Germany with the most insane housing markets, have all space that could be used for housing in the borders already built, under construction or allocated for short-term begin of construction. Even if you'd make policies to "up-zone", it will need decades until housing supply grows because you need to tear down and rebuild all the houses - and that doesn't even include the carbon emissions and resource-waste impact such programs carry. And the suburbs can't really be expanded either, the trains are already filled to the brim with commuters.
We need to get rid of the demand, we need to force companies to not just go to Munich/Berlin/Hamburg/Stuttgart but also the other cities and areas of the country.
> have all space that could be used for housing in the borders already built, under construction or allocated for short-term begin of construction.
Let me introduce you to the original purpose of Berliner Kleingärten.
Plus there are tons of vacant lots, parking lots etc in Berlin.
I’ve lived in Schöneweide for many years and let me tell ya.
Tegel alone could host half a million people and we haven’t even touched the Tempelhofer Feld.
Berlin has no suburbs to speak of. I guess you have never been to any other city in the world if you think that the suburbs are full.
Guess what: you can run more trains, bigger trains, higher frequencies, and you can build new tracks and new tunnels.
Oh, and last: Before you “force companies to move to smaller cities” think about two things:
- Why do many companies prefer to move to big cities?
- Why do many people prefer to live in big cities?
Granted, I've never been to Paris myself, and never in the outskirts of London, but the stories from the Paris banlieues or the 2011 London riots tell enough of a story how fucked life there really is.
> Guess what: you can run more trains, bigger trains, higher frequencies, and you can build new tracks and new tunnels.
I've been born and am still living in Munich. Do tell, where the fuck can you run bigger or more trains here? The stations can't be extended in length, the Stammstrecke is already at a frequency limit that really can't be increased because the people have to get on and off and trains need time to accelerate and decelerate [0], and construction of new tunnels is expensive (as the U5 extension to Pasing is showing) or fraught with massive costs and overruns (see 2. Stammstrecke).
> Why do many companies prefer to move to big cities? Why do many people prefer to live in big cities?
Herd mentality and that there will be more people where they can source staff from.
The thing is, "rural flight" and the corresponding explosion in urban housing prices is a self-accelerating death spiral that cannot be stopped unless political effort is being taken: the less people work in rural areas, the more infrastructure has to close/consolidate to the point it becomes very unattractive, so less children will be there, and so employers will be leaving for urban areas, and so more people will flee, start from begin.
In urban areas, this leads to a lot of issues:
- dense buildings (i.e. skyscrapers) require huge amounts of resources and CO2 emissions to build - they must be made of really solid concrete simply to be able to stand, you can't use wood or other materials for fire safety reasons, fire safety becomes extremely complex and in the event they do burn (like in Grenfell Tower) you're looking at an immense death toll.
- there will have to be an enormous, multi-billion euros/dollars investment into public transit so that it's able to keep up with commuting - and the denser you build housing and employment facilities (offices and production), the denser and more expensive just that basic infrastructure will be. I haven't even included car traffic into planning because that's frankly impossible (and policies like in Singapore and other highly congested areas begin to reflect that reality).
- cities need "green space" like parks, large un-built areas or the Kleingärten you mentioned earlier: people need them for mental health reasons, the city itself needs it to not overheat [1], to draw in fresh air [2], and for stormwater retention [3]. Suuure, you can say fuck all of that, but you'll end up with depressive hellscapes and death tolls as a result. There's a reason why places like South Korea have pretty high suicide rates among developed, wealthy nations [4] - and housing is one of the biggest contributors [5].
- on top of the question of "how to get the people from home to work and back" comes the question "how to provide for these people": anything from water/sewage over electricity and internet to postal/parcel delivery will have to be at insane sizes; for grids this necessitates higher voltages/thicker pipes with corresponding increase in danger from leaks or backhoes
- no matter what you do, housing construction will never be able to catch up with demand, which leads to gentrification as low-income workers are "priced out" and have to endure a massively lower quality of life (long commute times, significantly higher proportion of rent to income, living in housing together with solely other poor people)
- actually owning real estate will become (or, let's be real, is) far out of reach for most people, which means they have to pay rent their entire lives, will never be able to build up wealth, and most importantly never be able to pass wealth down to their children
- both renters and buyers will be complaining about the high prices, with populists blaming immigrants or hillbillies for this issue
On the rural side, the feeling of being "left behind" and the resulting dereliction of everything necessary for life (infrastructure, schools, shopping, healthcare, ...) leads to frustration, that not rarely manifests itself into anti-urban and in the end anti-democratic attitudes.
Particularly the last four points are the ones with the most explosive political/unrest potential... hell just look at the US "flyover states", look at the elections in Hessen and Bavaria. It's no surprise that the far-right has gotten so strong over the last years, as the consequences of rural flight became undeniable.
Rural flight has to be stopped at all cost.
[0] https://www.abendzeitung-muenchen.de/muenchen/muenchen-u-bah...
[1] https://www.transforming-cities.de/baeume-verbessern-stadtkl...
[2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/giesing-neuperlach-lebe...
[3] https://www.ardalpha.de/wissen/umwelt/klima/schwammstadt-kli...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
[5] https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/11/05/south-korea-suicide-rat...
Per capita, big cities are much more energy efficient and resource-saving than small cities.
And as I come from a family of midwestern farmers, I'd say that your revolution fantasy is just that. They tend to embrace high technology pretty damned willingly. This is what is leading to the country side emptying out. We don't need 50% of the population to farm any longer. In another 40 years we may not need 60% of the population to sit around in offices typing out code. These are things both the rural and urban populations in nations need to work on finding solutions to rather than fighting each other.
Tokyo is a city that is both
* bigger than Munich and
* more affordable for low-income residents than Munich.
Oh, it is entirely possible to build a city larger than Munich, Berlin, Paris and whatnot. I never denied that.
The problem is all the side issues that come with density, most importantly suicide and other mental health and general wellbeing issue rates.
> Tokyo is a city that is both bigger than Munich and more affordable for low-income residents than Munich.
Tokyo has one of the most expensive rental markets in the world [1]. No idea about low income residents, having never been there, but I'd guess a massive amount of government subsidies.
Additionally, due to earthquake resilience Japanese buildings are usually torn down after 20-30 years [2]. That makes it "easier" to upzone - here in Europe this sort of policy would be completely unacceptable because we value the architectural history of our community and because of the effort and resource usage involved.
[1] https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/new-york-city-tokyo-l...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...
Density in itself doesn't drive suicide rates. There's a lot of factors that go into this, and it's reductive to blame this simply on density.
> Tokyo has one of the most expensive rental markets in the world [1]
You're linking to an article about luxury rentals and using that to say Tokyo has one of the most expensive rental markets, but that's misleading at best. Yes, you can pay a lot of money for the high end apartments here, but you can also find super cheap apartments in central tokyo, near the yamanote (central) line.
> No idea about low income residents, having never been there, but I'd guess a massive amount of government subsidies.
There's government housing, which is super popular, but it's not considerably cheaper than market-rate housing. The biggest difference is the lack of fees and deposits. Government housing is a drop in the bucket of overall housing though. Low-income people live in cheap apartments, or shared houses.
> Additionally, due to earthquake resilience Japanese buildings are usually torn down after 20-30 years [2].
Though houses were historically torn down after 20-30 years, that's becoming less frequent as construction quality has increased, and as the current earthquake standards are quite high. This is also not true for highrises and lowrise multi-housing complexes.
Zoning does play a large part in this, as Tokyo's zoning laws are considerably less strict, and don't allow NIMBYs to stop construction.
Just neglecting everything you said after this point because this is insanely ignorant of TCO.
The miles and miles of roads suburbs require not only require massive amounts of concrete to pour, the suburbs require continual sacrifice to the fuel gods to function from each and every one that lives there.
There's also some BS in here about suicide rates, which in the US have a reverse correlation to what you posted.
At the same time, Berlin’s Degrowth mentality has prevented sufficient investment into construction
If suddenly a city were somehow flooded with supply of homes, wouldn't more people decide it now makes sense to move to the city, and prices would rise back up?
Increased vehicle traffic is a bad thing. You want to induce demand for other types of transportation.
There is a finite amount of people willing to move to X city / a finite number of jobs for them to support themselves.
But I have to admit that adding another lane does allow more people to use the road. Even if everybody ends up stuck in traffic again, overall more people are able to get to work or wherever they want to go.
That being said, I still think that with correctly priced externalities, and when offered the choice, that most people would prefer to bike or take the train.
If your roads are jammed, some people who want to take trips on them will take other means or abandon the trip. If additional lanes are built, trip capacity increases, and more trips are taken. Sometimes the amount of supressed trips is such that traffic jams continue to the same extent as before... but that's unusual --- when Caltrans widened the 405 in west LA, morning and evening jam duration was significantly reduced; but population growth continued and trip demand growth continued, and the jam duration grew.
It's the same with housing. A lot of people would love to live in (city you like), but can't because it's too expensive or too hard to find a place. It would take a lot of construction to change that, but incremental construction is still brings supply closer to demand; even if the difference is hard to spot.
There's certainly places that have sufficient roads that there's rarely a traffic jam, and that have sufficient housing such that it's affordable enough for all who want to live there... those places tend not to have a lot of traffic density and not a lot of people density either.
The most effective way to make housing affordable is to make the city undesirable to live in, but that's not typically a popular method. It also tends to make traffic better, too.
If you flood the zone with supply, the power of landlords will diminish.
In the 90s, if you came to Berlin and wanted to rent and apartment, the landlord would hand you 3 keys with three addresses, and tell you to "have a look at them and choose one". The rent was minimal and the landlords had no power.
Your proposed solution of making renting an apartment illegal will create A LOT of friction when people want to move. It will make it impossible for people with bad credit to live in the city. It will expose a lot of people to a lot of interested rate risk. Not everybody wants to be a real estate investor.
It will also not solve the main suffering here, which is that a lot of people want to move into the city, but they cannot, because there isn't enough space.