Affordable Rents: A State of Emergency Intensifies by Werner Rugemer

AFFORDABLE RENTS? A STATE OF EMERGENCY INTENSIFIES Rents explode in cities after massive sales of public housing to brutal investors. Affordable housing is in short supply. Something must happen quickly. By Werner Rugemer [This 2018 article published in verdi.de is translated abridged from the German on the Internet. German politicians make pilgrimages to Vienna and are astonished how the city creates affordable accommodations.] In 1987, there were 5.5 million social apartments in the old Germany. Today, there are only 1.5 million in all Germany. Every year, 100,000 of them lose their rent ceiling and hardly any new affordable units are built. The need today is far greater than in 1987 on account of the low-income trend, the low upper-rent limits for Hartz IV recipients, the significantly higher energy costs and rent explosion in the population centers. Since 2014, the number of homeless in Germany has doubled to 860,000. Investors go unpunished when they force modernizations with criminal methods. They also go unpunished for the abuse of raising rental prices on tourists. The Great Coalition admitted its 2015 rent brake did not control the rents. Quite the contrary! Interior minister Horst Seehofer, CSU, with German chancellor Angela Merkel, CDU, is preparing a “Housing Summit” in the chancellor’s office for September 21. The Advisory Board of the German economics ministry published an expert opinion with the misleading title “Social Housing Policy.” Professor Friedrich Breyer from the Thurgauer Economic Institute at the University of Konstanz is in charge. The institute is sponsored by a Swiss bank. A neoliberal confession The 38 professors on this board summarized their neoliberal creed. Social housing accomplished nothing and should be ended. The rent brake changed nothing, cannot be improved and should be rescinded. “Market interventions are counter-productive.” Release or deregulate the market! Then the conventional demand that is even counter to the market: Increase the housing subsidies! The Great Coalition wants to help some higher-paid to apartments of their own. The distribution of modernization costs will be lowered from 11% to 8% per year. Seehofer’s