Germany is a land of tenants.

The home ownership rate is stagnating, although home ownership has become considerably more attractive over the past decade.

Real estate prices have risen sharply.

On the other hand, however, the interest rate trend has overcompensated for the price trend in many places, as stated in a new analysis by the Institut der Deutschen Wirtschaft (IW).

Instead of buying, Germans prefer to whine.

Instead of becoming small capitalists themselves, they want to expropriate the big capitalists.

Rainer Hank

Freelance writer in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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Almost half of Germans own a house or a condominium. The other half lives to rent. In Berlin it is particularly blatant: over eighty percent of the people there are tenants. Nowhere in Europe are there so few homeowners as in Germany. "Real estate wealth is the key to an equal distribution of wealth in Germany," I read in a new study by the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW). No wonder that Germans are less wealthy than Spaniards or Italians.

All of this is strange.

In surveys, many young Germans say they would like to have their own apartment.

It is unclear why they do not implement the request: Complicated approval procedures are mentioned, high costs for brokers and notaries as well as an unfair real estate transfer tax.

Financing a house is a risk - if you can find one at all given the reluctance to build.

The state, which declares itself responsible for everything and everyone in this country, does not really feel responsible for access to affordable residential property.

People prefer to talk about social housing, a concept out of the social democratic moth box.

As a rule, the wrong people live there, for far too long and for too much at low prices.

Berlin can learn something from Singapore

I propose to look to Asia. I was in Singapore last week. The country is opening up after being almost hermetically sealed off from the outside world for eighteen months to deter the coronavirus - which then didn't quite work out. Singapore has the highest rate of ownership in the world. It's over eighty percent. That is the opposite relation compared to Berlin. In Singapore, a successful experiment can be studied to find out how tenants or homeless people become owners - and that under difficult conditions. The city-state is now home to 5.7 million people in an area that is barely twice the size of Bremen (around 600,000 in Bremen). In the 1960s, when the new state was formed, there were only 1.6 million people.Since then, the country has attracted people from all over the world like a magnet. This led to an extreme housing shortage.

The government parried the crisis with three ingenious measures. First, land was gained from the sea. The area of ​​the state increased from 580 square kilometers in 1965 to 728 square kilometers in 2020.