I'm more into the gentle way to prevent the collaps: spread condoms all over the world!
China may overdone it with their 1-child-policy, however, some kind of "2-child-policy" for some countries may not be the worst idea imho. It's just not fair for the newborns to birth children right into war, poverty, suffering etc. This is actualy very cruel.
Rent regulation is the best way to render apartments empty instead of being available for rent. This has been tried in many places and had disastrous results every single time.
No rent regulation has the result here, that many of those are empty for years until someone is able to pay the ridiculous amount of money, which usually are rich immigrants from southern Germany, England or elsewhere, while the natives are on the streets or many of those crammed into appartments that were intended for a single person or two.
The problem in most developed countries is not the lack of rent control, it's the barrier to build new apartments in existing cities. The constraint on the construction of new buildings is locking the market and ensuring prices stay high - rent control would not solve the problem at all, and it would destroy the incentive of owning a property in the first place, and therefore further depress the rate of construction of new buildings.
New buildings make no sense at all when there actually are lots of empty flats in different sizes but the owners refuse to offer a rent that the natives are able to pay.
The study presents just one of a lot of possible ways to measure richness. Whether this is actually a useful one isn't clear. Living in Germany right now generally isn't that difficult. But obviously in some parts it's more difficult than others.
See "location" under my avatar.@klumpen: ludwigshafen am rhein?
move over the bridge to mannheim and leave your troubles behind
Sorry, but what's the incentive for home-owners to do that? They are happy not to get any rent ?
If the tenants they have are enough for them there is no point in dropping the price to bring in more people and have to deal with maintenance, repair, and whatever else that more people would bring. The house next to me has been empty since before I moved in, and I have been here for years. The owners stop by once or twice a year to check on things and mow the grass. They had the roof redone recently, but have no interest in renting or selling the house. My landlord has stated that if he had known the land across the street was going to be used for apartments when it was for sale he would have purchased it and not built anything just to keep the apartments away.
Take your off topic discussions elsewhere.
