[Killes]

Always in Berlin the knee jerk response to what is going on "We have to keep the rents down!" in response to housing crisis....never "We have to raise pays!" Pay situation for many jobs in Berlin and to some extent most of Germany is just abysmal, even in tech in many cases.

If people here put half the energy in fighting for fairer remuneration for their work rather than whining about the raising rent and property prices that come with being a desirable city and country...

[Xylakant]

Hey, I'm all for "raise the pay for everyone". I just don't see that happening and I do see the issues arising from "raise the rents and keep the pay low" all around me. I'm even a part of the issue, since I'm on the "hey, I can afford the rent for that nice, freshly renovated flat." side of the equation. Good friends are on the other side. I could go and close my eyes and willfully ignore that, but I'm afraid that won't make the issue go away.

[close04]

Sure, raise the rent -> raise the pay. What happens to the people who don't work in the dynamic IT sector? Everybody gets a raise? Doesn't this just bring everybody to the starting block only with a little more inflation? Otherwise you create an imbalance where you have affluent neighborhoods and slums, something that you definitely want to avoid.

The solution is to build more housing to alleviate the pressure. This way you can keep the rents low without pumping up just a few salaries.

And in a city like Berlin the situation is vastly different from SF. Public transport and biking work like a charm so housing doesn't have to be smack next to the headquarters.

Companies want to reap the benefits of coming to a city with a qualified workforce but the disbenefits get to be "enjoyed" by everyone else around there. Tragedy of the commons. They should be supporting the housing market if they want a good reception.

Full disclosure: I'm saying this as one of the people who enjoys such benefits while some people around me bite the bullet.

[rlanday]

You can't fit more people into the same amount of housing by raising everyone's pay. Either someone needs to start living with more roommates, or someone needs to get priced out and decide to leave.

[Xylakant]

If pay was more equal, at least opportunities to stay in your local area would be more equal. I don’t think it’s the price as an absolute that makes people angry, it’s the feeling of being unable to compete for a beloved space.

[TulliusCicero]

Things might be slightly better then, but if there's still X number of housing units, you're still only going to have Y number of people living there.

Giving people a more even chance at winning musical chairs is nice, but how about just making more chairs?

[Xylakant]

This is partially at least an emotional problem which you cannot only tackle with logic. The other problem that you’ll currently see is that even if you can convince people that tearing down their house and building a new one in the same spot, they’ll often still want to be able to afford one of the new flats - and that’s currently not a given. So people understandably prefer to stick what they have.

So a fundamental ability to compete is IMHO a basic requirement for building more chairs.

[mazesc]

Sorry, but this argument is terrible. Look at the bay area and see how all the wages have risen. Nobody has to be homeless there because they can't afford housing anymore right?

[TulliusCicero]

> Always in Berlin the knee jerk response to what is going on "We have to keep the rents down!" in response to housing crisis....never "We have to raise pays!"

If salaries go up without housing being addressed directly, you get what's happened in SF: everyone middle-class and down being pushed out by high rent prices, because they're all competing for the same limited amount of space.

[ebikelaw]

Part of the German economic success story has been keeping housing cheap, so they can keep pay down, so they can export. As soon as housing prices rise, pay rises, and the story falls apart.

[usrusr]

...and the secret sauce of keeping rents down have been conscious efforts at keeping second and third tier cities and towns attractive for business, which distributed demand and thus kept it somewhat in check in the naturally attractive metropolitan areas. E.g. most of those small, highly specialized industry (car and other) suppliers that are the backbone of the German industry are based in cities you never heard of, that's not a coincidence but the result of careful balancing.

In recent years (decades, actually), we seem to have dropped the ball in the counter-centralisation game, maybe as a consequence of reunification.

[chimeracoder]

> Part of the German economic success story has been keeping housing cheap, so they can keep pay down, so they can export. As soon as housing prices rise, pay rises, and the story falls apart.

The only reason they're able to do this is because of years of fairly extreme mercantilistic policies combined with struggling economies in other parts of the EU (Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and to an extent Ireland).

It works out for Germany in the short- and medium-run, but it's bad for the EU as a whole.

It's also bad for Germany in the long run, because even if extreme mercantilism were sustainable in a free market in the long run (spoiler: it's not), excess surplus means, by definition, that the government is underinvesting in public infrastructure. It takes a while for the effects of that to become evident, but Germany is starting to see hints of it already, and if these policies continue, it'll become much more pronounced.

[Killes]

Not so sure about that. Germany doesn't compete on firesale prices for its export products. Germany is amongst the top 5 richest countries whatever that means.

I simply see many good and skilled workers paid way too little. How am I earning as much as a med tech with 12 years experience after being in IT proper for 2 years ? The answer lays, admitted within my limited view, in the skilled labor force simply accepting middling pays. Which is maybe harder to pull off in the IT branch it attracting more workers not ready to simply accept lower pays for their work.

In the end I have colleagues with way more experience than me earning less than me simply because they asked for less...Somehow its more a kind of established cultural thing and companies / management taking good advantage of it. Lets not pretend C levels are badly paid in Germany XD.