You are comparing a small theoretical start-up town in the middle of nowhere and with a non-existing economy and job-market - to an already established city that is the business center and capital of a country (a country that itself is the business center of the EU).

That seems like an exception being used to disprove someone else's rule.

Unless they already have the money to exist and live there, no one is going to move to a place they can't afford.

So the question is again - why would they move there, except this time you are asking only people that are not part of the typical job market / economy (because the number of available gainful jobs there is too low; and at the same time no one is looking to start businesses there).

It seems like these types of places are for only the upper class, especially considering that low scale gives high prices.

Or goes the other way, and makes lots and lots of suicide inducing standard units, small in size, with uniform paint jobs, and all placed together. A place where the government pays your rent.

Well, perhaps. But it's probably pretty hard to make a lot of money as a landlord in Berlin if that is the case. Which is ultimately what this company would need to do to be successful.

Quite the contrary, due to the high demand, rents are on a steady rise. [1] The government is issuing caps now on how much higher the rent can be with new contracts (there are already caps for how much rent can be increased with an existing contract, but when old tenants move out, they could ask for any price on the new contract, especially when renovating the place - which led to shady methods to get long-term tenants out)

[1] http://www.wohnungsboerse.net/mietspiegel-Berlin/2825

Look, you can't have both an overabundance of housing supply and an overabundance of housing demand. I don't really know or care which is really the case in Berlin, and of course demand could be low but rising, but if housing is oversupplied, then landlords won't make much money. If housing is undersupplied, then Berlin wasn't a good example of what you thought it was.

There is no oversupply of housing, there are just not so many jobs.

So your claim here is that there is enough demand for housing in Berlin to produce tidy profits for landlords and a steady influx of new people for whom there are not enough jobs and so those people are unemployed?

That is:

1. Obviously not true. 2. Obviously not a good or sustainable thing if true.

Or 3. Your argument is wrong because markets aren't efficient and jobs + housing aren't as tightly linked as you'd have us believe?

This has nothing to do with any strong form of the efficient markets hypothesis.

If there aren't jobs for the people in Berlin, then obviously they can't pay these great housing prices that the OP claims they can. I guess barring a case where Berlin is a vacation spot for the idle rich, but I don't think that anyone is arguing that.

If there are plenty of jobs, but housing is super-abundant, then I suppose you could make some weird case for there being a non-efficient market that's propping up housing prices despite there being no reason for that. And then landlords are, heh, making a rent, not the normal one but the economic concept, and sure, Berlin is super-overpriced for what it should be. But that's obviously nonsense too, everyone knows that Berlin is affordable.

I don't care if markets are for some reason inefficient the other direction and landlords are making less than what they ought to be -- the entire point of this ridiculous digression was the OP's claim that Campus could design an attractive model city which people would flock to despite there not being any jobs, and the point is that Campus is a landlord. They will not grow and become a giant disruptive force in the world if they are not making lots of money. If they build cities in which landlords for whatever reason make less money than they "ought to," then they will not grow and will not make many cities.

EDIT: I think this was all lost in the weeds, so let me play out the whole thing. I am not denying that Berlin is a vibrant, great, wonderful city that is also affordable and is attracting people for any reason you care to name. All I'm saying is that there are two possibilities:

1. Jobs are scarce in Berlin -> people do not have a lot of money in Berlin -> landlords do not make a lot of money in Berlin -> Campus could not make a neo-Berlin and then roll the incredible profits into making neo-neo-Berlin, because Campus is a landlord.

2. Jobs are not scarce in Berlin -> Berlin is not the counter-example that the OP thought it was.

For whatever it's worth, I think that the actual situation with Berlin is that it's still affordable but getting less so, and the OP confused the graph with the graph of the first differential.

EDIT2: In the case of Berlin, you could I suppose make the case that landlords are renting properties for low absolute rents but high profit margins, and that thus a sufficiently large landlord could use high volume to produce large absolute profits. But I don't think that could be the case for a new city. Building a city is a capital-intensive process -- even if the land is inherently cheap, building the structures and the infrastructure is just expensive, full stop.

What (may have) happened in Berlin is that somebody did the expensive city-building and then took a bath on it. Present landlords who are (hypothetically) making a good profit bought the distressed assets cheaply and now are making that profit off low absolute rents because essentially they've profited from the previous landlord's failure. Again, this is not a potential route to high absolute profits for Campus' potential future cities, as Campus will be the first landlord. They will need relatively high absolute rents in order to have substantially high absolute profits.

I think I made too many assumption, so the point I wanted to make got lost.

Basically, Campus wants to build what normally is the end result of gentrification, I'm not critical of that at all, I just wanted to point out that there has to be more to a city than the availability of jobs - there have been previous modelled cities specifically for that purpose (e.g. Eisenhüttenstadt) which turned out rather boring.

As for Berlin, it's isolated position during the cold war/much abandoned property after reunification led to rents being quite low, which attracted creative types - who probably couldn't afford to live at Campus. The vast availability unclaimed spaces after the wall came down enabled them to try all different kind of things, there was a niche for everyone. To pull that of you need a certain density - Leipzig just barely does that, but many other East German cities are rotting away and experiencing an exodus because there is not the critical mass of people. But I also think the Hobrecht-Plan plays into it by providing dense and flexible city spaces - areas where those structures are preserved are the most popular today.

To get back to the original point, the target audience of Campus will rather move to a place they find desirable and find/create jobs there than to move to a place that has no other appeal than a job.

Berlin is still perceived to be desirable enough and affordable enough that young people move there without a job, often from another country. (Both of those assumptions are often made based on a magazine article or blog post, btw.)

This definitely warps the jobs-to-housing relationship, and is hard to account for in any predictions because it's not strictly logical.