Rental price brake will not work without punishment for landlords

An 80-square-meter apartment on the northern edge of Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin: rented cold for 1350 euros. The tenant seemed too much. After more than a year of trouble, the district court in Mitte corrected the rent on the permitted ten percent above the rent index: 597.78 euros. So the landlord had requested 125 percent too much. Shortly afterwards, she sent the tenant a termination for personal needs – the procedure is still running.

The normal madness on the housing market. After all, the rental price brake has reached in this case. That happens far too rarely. Because many tenants do not know their rights or are afraid to assert them – because they do not want to burden their relationship with the landlord.

Landlords, on the other hand, can simply charge higher rents without having to be afraid. Because those who ignore the rental price brake does not make themselves punishable. Every little offense costs a fine in road traffic. But if you button a tenant, see above, 750 euros too much a month gets away from it.

Then there are the loopholes. The rental price brake has a lot of it, the largest: it does not apply to furnished rental. So there are now an ugly sofa and a rickety bed in many apartments that have to be rented. According to the tenant association, every third apartment is now offered as furnished in the five largest cities.

The rental price brake has been in effect since 2015, since then the offer rents in the 14 largest independent cities have risen by half. Not a good record. Nevertheless, the black and red coalition only extended the rental price brake with its votes in the Bundestag until 2029 without removing its defects. A difficult failure, unfortunately one with system.

Overall, the Union and SPD has been missing the lack of living space for many years. Above all, the lack of cheap living space. Since 2005, either the SPD or CSU has been running the Ministry of Construction – and in all the years it has not been possible to properly get the new building. The result: the housing market is totally out of balance because 550,000 apartments are missing.

Many people are displaced from the centers of cities. The number of households, which now pay 40 percent of their income for rent, has tripled to 14 percent since 1990. These households are considered overloaded. But it gets really bad if these people still have similarly high rents to shoulder, but less income.

The federal government must already spend six billion euros on housing benefit to support low -wage earners in their rent. Tendency rising. Money that would be better invested in housing construction, but is now missing, because otherwise many city dwellers could slip into social assistance.

In many places, the rental market is so tense, inventory rents and rent rents gap so far that people who would actually rather live in a smaller apartment, for example because the children are out of the house, do not move: after the change, a smaller apartment would often cost more than the old. Which makes the overall location more and more difficult.

In the long term, the rental price brake only cures the symptoms. It is crucial that more apartments are being built and the right ones: also with cross -sections for families, barrier low for older people – and affordable. Instead, luxury apartments are more likely to occur.

Even worse: With the Ukrainklieg, the construction prices went up strongly, at the same time the interest rose, so that less and less was recently built. The number of building applications has decreased by more than 40 percent, the construction industry is now in a recession. And it will take a few years to recover from it. Until the industry can build as many apartments as desired now.

So if the new Minister of Construction Verena Hubertz (SPD) calls for the “Bauurbo”, that’s a good thing, but it is at least three years late. The constructionurbo should accelerate the planning, which makes sense. But it is also about new ideas on how to build cheaper and yet climate -friendly and worth living. And it is high time to finally tackle the biggest cost driver: rising soil prices. The coalition has not agreed.

After all, the expenses for social housing should also increase, from currently 3.5 billion to 5.5 billion euros by 2028. That would be almost as much as is currently being paid for housing benefit.

One thing is clear: we can’t get rid of the housing problem that quickly. And it doesn’t just lead to social hardships. It also endangers our economic recovery, as has now been determined by the ARGE thinking factory, which has summarized the situation on the housing market once a year. Because how do you want to lure skilled workers into the country if they don’t even find an apartment here?