According to anti-gentrification activists in Berlin, other strategies for keeping rents low include hanging washing out to dry from apartment windows and having foreign-looking names on doorbells.
Wait yeah, to echo other commenter is this a tongue-in-cheek comment on how that fairly normal stuff is being perceived as “negative” due to racism/classism, OR is this an actual technique being used because it legitimately tends to have such an effect?
Yes. The reason it works is racism and classism; and you can use that fact to affect change in the desired direction.
It’s like when a group of black guys have a traditionally white white guy with them to make the cops not bother them as much.
Serious question as a visitor to Berlin. Are there a large portion of people that do this on purpose for this express purpose? Is this actually a thing? I noticed quite a lot of graffiti.
Neighborhoods should be nice and inexpensive. One out of two isn’t good enough for a goal.
Graffiti can be nice :)
Rather look at graffiti than adverts tbh.
Graffiti is better than a lot of generic build/paint designs. Cookie cutter modern housing is terrible to look at, but you add a little graffiti and you now have an interesting area.
Most Graffiti here is ugly as fuck and just drunk football shit. Or just random names
Same here. We also call the dumb, shitty stuff (like idiots who just graf their nicknames) “pixação” and actual art graffiti
And that itself is beautiful in its own way. Free self expression from unrecognized, unwanted youth; a shout against a society that has thrown them away.
In a previous thread with a similar topic @blibla@blibla@slrpnk.net linked a study that actually was able to support this claim: https://digitalcommons.newhaven.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2018&context=americanbusinessreview
I like art
grafitti raises rents because the owner has to hire someone to clean it off and that comes from my rent. same with not sorting your garbage properly. yes I’m salty about this, how could you tell
the owner has to hire someone to clean it off and that comes from my rent.
Rent has little to do with maintenance. If it did, it would mean that higher rent lead to more maintenance. This is not the case. Landlords are incentivised to maximise margins (rent minus expenses). If they don’t have to pay for maintenance while getting a certain rent level, then they will opt for not maintaining.
Rent level is the maximum level that landlords will set to drain from their tenants. It has little to do with the maintenance or condition of the residence. There are plenty of examples that show poor housing standards being expensive.
The solution: Land Value Tax
it is the case where i live.
Do live in a housing co-op? Because those are the only rentals I know of that base their prices on actual costs rather than greed.
no. i live in an apartment owned by a small-medium housing company. they have some 3000 apartments all over the country. they don’t really care about improving the housing, just keeping it in the same condition. rent is average, but they point to vandalism and neglect as reasons to raise it. the tenants’ union keeps opposing the raises but they keep happening.
gissamittjobb has good info on the situation in general but it doesn’t really apply to me.
I’m going to guess here and the poster can fill in details - I guess that they live in a rental owned by the municipality.
The rents for these are not market-based but instead based on a fairly complex system of pricing based on the standard of the apartment, with rent increases being negotiated by the renters union.
This system has some merits - it has definitely kept rents pretty low for rentals in Sweden generally - but has also been a part of shaping the very dysfunctional housing market we see in Sweden today.
Basically, Sweden had low standards of housing in the mid-1900s, at which point the left-wing governments started a program called Miljonprogrammet, basically a housing program to build a million homes, which should be affordable and of high standard. This program started in 1965, hence my suspicion that the OP lives in this type of apartment.
The program is considered a bit controversial today as the areas built under this program are now basically the high-crime areas in Sweden in many cases. This is not inherent to the program though, but instead a consequence of the fact that this program was so damn successful at fulfilling its job that Sweden had an affordable housing surplus for decades after that program was started. Affordable housing construction basically stopped once the program was over and only co-ops and houses were built after (an overstatement but broadly true). Later, right-wing governments ran programs to sell off this housing stock to private interests which managed them in a slumlord fashion, leading to their current reputation.
Anyway, the current situation of housing in Sweden is that the housing market is bifurcated - you can apply for municipal rentals, which have waiting times upwards of 20 years in attractive cities, or you can get a massive loan and buy either a co-op apartment or a house. There’s generally a shortage due to the lack of building for so many years. If you manage to get a municipal rental, you can expect to pay a rent that is far lower than servicing a loan in a similar area, but the standard of the apartment will usually be lower.
For what it’s worth, I think that reintroducing a program such as Miljonprogrammet again is the only true way to curb the housing market situation in basically every rich country with a housing crisis. The whole concept of gentrification only exists in the context of housing scarcity. It’s pitting workers against workers in a really nasty fashion. A better way forward is to build housing like there’s no tomorrow. Government-owned, high standard, low-cost housing.
not in a miljonprogramsarea and not in a municipal building, but this is all still good info.
Interesting. Private rental, if you don’t mind me asking? They fall under the same rules, for context for the rest of the readers.
yeah, it’s a company that has about 3k units all over the country. they were recently bought by hsb but integration has not started yet.
There are some municipalities where landowners are required to remove graffiti in a timely fashion or be fined by the city. In such places, the landlord would definitely pass those costs to tenants. Not that they would lower rents if the problem went away, of course. One year of a graffiti problem would likely permanently raise rents unless you live somewhere with a glut of available affordable rentals.
Then you probably live in a middle class or rich neighbourhood.
Poorer neighbourhoods usually wouldn’t bother removing unless it was on a window.
i definitely don’t. these apartments have not seen a renovation since the 60s. ventilation barely works, i have seen inside temps as high as 28 degrees, and as low as 17. but the rents pay for all the services. more services, more rent.
