The German Constitutional Court bats Berlin on the roof for rents
The Constitutional Court overturned the Berlin law on the roof on rents in Berlin. All the effects, including political ones, given that in the capital you vote for the government of the Land on the same day you vote for the policies
Populism doesn't work, even when it's on the left. The German Constitutional Court overturned the rent roof law that the red-red-green city government of Berlin introduced two years ago. He declared it invalid, because it is incompatible with the fundamental law. In essence, the Berlin administration has invaded a field that is not its own, which belongs to the German federal government: "States are allowed to legislate only as long as and to the extent that the federal government has not made final use of its legislative competence" , the constitutional judges declared. And since the federal government as legislator has already regulated the rental price law in the German Civil Code (BGB), there is no room for state legislative power. Berlin, as a city-state, is one of the sixteen Länder that make up the Federal Republic of Germany.
For the city administration it is a serious defeat, five months after its renewal: they will vote on September 26, the same day in which all Germans will go to the polls to re-elect the new Bundestag, and with it kick off at the level national in the post- Merkel era. For the city of Berlin, instead, it will be a question of deciding the post-Müller, the political future of the capital after seven years of leadership of the Social Democrat Michael Müller (who does not stand for a new candidate), who in turn succeeded in 2014 another Social Democrat of even longer standing , that Klaus Wowereit who for 13 years marked city life by coining the famous motto “poor but sexy” and ingloriously ending his political career in the black hole of the new Berlin airport.
Twenty years of social democratic government which will now be placed before the judgment of the citizens. What for Wowereit was the almost infinite scandal of the Berlin-Brandenburg airport, for Müller could be the law on the roof of rents, the Mietdeckel. Invented to deal with a real problem, the capital's expensive rents, which literally exploded from the beginning of the 2000s to the present day in a manner not parallel to the growth of Berliners' income, proved to be cumbersome and tangled well before the guillotine of the Constitutional Court.
Technically it provided for the remodeling with lowering of particularly high rents and then their freezing for the first two years, then limits for subsequent increases, until 2025. But its formulation (for example the reference to the year of construction of the property) he had created the paradox of favoring apartments in prestigious nineteenth-twentieth-century buildings in residential areas, rather than social housing in the large barracks of the eastern districts. He had then created a sort of stall in the city renting market, already suffering from the shortage of housing, especially at a good price. And finally, if it had facilitated the situation of tenants, it had affected that of many savers and small apartment owners who had invested their money in the rental business in recent years, also to escape the trap of zero interest rates on bank deposits. . A problem swept under the rug by the rhetoric of the fight against large real estate speculation groups.
However, the law had entered into force last year, involving 1.5 million contracts, and rents had been frozen and / or lowered. Now the cancellation risks turning into a boomerang for the mayor and for his majority, also because the landlords (individual owners or large real estate groups) are preparing to ask tenants for the arrears, and not everyone has been able or wanted to put in place. part of the excess amount waiting for the Court to decide on the appeals presented by the opposition citizen parties (CDU and Fdp), which instead supported the setting of a wide-ranging building policy, which also increased the availability of affordable housing with incentives .
However, the issue remains extremely delicate, and does not only concern Berlin, but all of Germany. Even in the months dominated by the pandemic, housing and rental prices continued to rise, disproving all forecasts of the end of the "speculative bubble" that industry experts occasionally propose. Other cities had hinted that they wanted to take the Berlin route: Frankfurt and Potsdam, for example.
The sentence of the Constitutional Court puts an end to a badly born law (someone will now also ask for an account of the quality of the advice sought for its approach) and the risk of an uneven proliferation of local laws, but does not solve a problem that has become above all social. The ball returns to politics. The Berlin administration, which in the short term will also have to find a solution for arrears that risk putting many tenants out of action, and the federal government which has the responsibility to tackle a sensitive issue for the quality of life of many citizens.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/la-corte-costituzionale-tedesca-bastona-berlino-sul-tetto-agli-affitti/ on Thu, 15 Apr 2021 14:21:58 +0000.