Berlin already has fines against letting an apartment sit empty without reason, if they're empty, they're empty for a reason or eating the fine is cheaper than the cost of renting it out.

Correction: It's a reflection of demand from people who already live in Berlin. That's who were allowed to vote in the referendum.

They don't care about the elasticity of the market, or the demand from people who would want to live in Berlin in the future.

They already have an apartment, and at pretty low prices because nearly everything built before 2014 is subject to rent control,

I'd guess most people just voted for it because in their eyes "government promised to take apartment from my landlord and lower my rent even more".

Still the same companies Deutsche Wohnen and Vonovia but I agree with the second part.

Their yearly profits are capped because of the Mietpreisbremse (rent control) law since all the old buildings that they bought would fall under it, so it would've been better to put the money towards either building new state-owned housing or helping the tenants enforce their rights.

The laws are there to protect tenants against neglect from the landlord but enforcement takes multiple months which is not a reasonable timeline if you have a problem in your apartment and the consequences for landlord are mostly just reducing the rent for that time by a certain percentage which doesn't make a difference if the rents are already cheap because of the Mietpreisbremse, so it would also be good to introduce fines but not sure if Germany's legal framework allows for that.

I can't find the original document anymore but when I read it there were a lot of inconsistencies in the comparisons,

this reddit thread has excerpts from the report and some comments explaining why the comparison was fraught

https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/1v1qiz0/waymo_has...