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**SEPTEMBER 28, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

Tenants of the World, Unite!

As a story

in today's

**Wall Street Journal**makes clear, the housing affordability crisis has
gone global. It's not just San Francisco where housing, both owned and
rental, has soared out of reach; it's also Seoul and Dublin and
Berlin. "In Canada, New Zealand and Norway," the

**Journal**reports, "the home price-to-income ratio ... is at its
highest level ever."

The

**Journal**article doesn't provide a deep dive into the causes behind
this go-sleep-in-a-manger pandemic, but it certainly looks like yet
another manifestation of Piketty's r>g-that is, the rate of return
on investment, in this case in housing, is greater than the growth, in
this case, not of nations' incomes, but rather the income of those
nations' median residents. Though the

**Journal**doesn't reference it, the purchase of many thousands of
for-sale and rental properties by major corporations and investors is
now a global phenomenon. These corporations and investors have enough
market share to send housing costs skyward, and enough cash cushion to
hang on to a property until the bids for it clear a high bar. Such has
been the case in Berlin, a city disproportionately of renters, where
private equity and hedge funds have purchased roughly 200,000 housing
units since 1990.

In Sunday's German elections, Berliners pushed back at these
latter-day Nosferatus who've threatened their previously affordable
burg. In an advisory referendum, they voted

by a 56 percent to 39 percent margin to instruct the city government to
purchase the housing owned by private real estate companies and
investors that own more than 3,000 units. If the government takes this
recommendation, it would transfer roughly 15 percent of Berlin's
housing (about 240,000 units) from private to public ownership. Of
course, purchasing on that scale doesn't come cheap; a purchase
earlier this month of 15,000 apartments from two corporations will cost
the city $2.9 billion.

It's by no means clear that Berlin's city government will take the
advice that this advisory referendum offered, though it may well
continue its more incremental buyouts, such as the one it made earlier
this month-in response, surely, to its sense that the referendum would
pass. It

**is**clear, alas, that no American city government would venture such a
move, but tenant and home-buyer advocates here in the U.S. should
nonetheless feel emboldened by their Berlin comrades to push for rent
control (with no vacancy decontrol) and new public housing, as the cost
of housing continues to soar while incomes lag far behind.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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The Right-Wing Attack on Racial Justice Talk

How critical race theory has become a handy target for an old-fashioned
assault on civil rights. BY RANDALL KENNEDY

Pelosi Tries to Bulldoze Progressives on the Infrastructure Bill

But she claims it must pass to avoid an expiration of highway funding.
That's just not true. BY DAVID DAYEN

How the Democrats Can Pass the Entire Reconciliation Bill

It just requires enacting it for four years. BY HAROLD MEYERSON

The Limited Social Democratic Victory in Germany

The most likely coalition government includes the libertarian FDP party.
The result: a modestly better version of Merkel. BY ROBERT KUTTNER

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