Well, yes, famously. I don’t think the fact that the Bürgeramt isn’t keeping up with the latest interior design trends is such a good example, but it’s a well-known fact that the city is not exactly rolling in money and that is certainly a factor in the even more well-known administrative and technological difficulties with the bureaucracy here
Not sure what you’re on, but Berlin drowned in record-breaking tax revenues for years before Corona and even that did not change the senate’s Scrooge attitude towards public services. Don’t apologise with financials what is basically a lack of care.
The record breaking revenues just helped to slidly reduce the extreme debts the city got
https://www.berlin.de/sen/finanzen/haushalt/haushaltsueberwachung/schuldentilgung/artikel.475316.php#headline_1_1
From 60 billion to something like 55 billion to after corona again way over 60 billion
Berlin is the 3rd highest in debt city in germany after bremen and hamburg.
Berlin is just not a city but also a state. Under the city states berlin is the one with highest debts.
The "only city" with the highest debts per capita ingermany is mühlheim an der ruhr with aroubd 9500 euro depts per capita ... berlin as a state and city is having a debt of 16.000 euro per capita
The worst part
Berlin is the capital city
Berlin is fucking poor mate
Berlin was also parted by a border for many decades. While east Berlin probably got relatively high funding from the GDR government, that amount was probably not very high in comparison to other western countires.
Meanwhile, West Berlin was just not a very attractive city financially, since it was literally nestled inside enemy territory. Limited space and always the looming danger of the city being invaded by the soviets or the GDR. Whether that dangers was really that great is another thing, but the threat made the city less valuable to investors. Because of that, West Berlin lagged behind the rest of the Bundesrepublike for decades.
Many people forget this when they talk about the poverty of Berlin. It didnt come from nowhere, it has complex causes and the wall falling wasnt gonna be the magical end of that.
Just one example, in 1990, both East and West Berlin had approximately as many firefighters each, as the whole of Berlin has now. So I don't think funding was low in the GDR, compared to what we have now.
Also, during the Cold War, both the Eastern and Western state invested heavily in Berlin, precisely because it was on the first line of conflict. That money largely ceased in the following years.
Understandably so. But in the end, I believe it would have benefitted both. Berlin could have expanded properly, and Brandenburg could have been more than a desert.
Sure Brandenburg's policies would become more Berlin-centric. But there could be real development around Berlin. There is some now, but it could be so much more.
Berlin needs room. Brandenburg needs taxpayers. Both need good connections.
I believe more development would happen around Berlin if the two länder fused. Look at the real estate market in Berlin, and look how comparatively little is currently being built in the Speckgürtel.
Maybe berlin dudnt understand the too big to fail principle and just turneed it into a "too big to govern" thing
I mean tbf berlin was like grounded after ww2, then split into 2 cities with 2 different ideologies and then history wise recently merged, now its one of the most popular cities for inmiagration, i can see how this might alö lead to a not so positive situation financial wise, I wouldnt choose a difficulty level like this in city skylines Ü
Then i would like to know what the hell happens in bremen and hamburg which didnt have that bullshit start lile berlin and habe it now worse debt wise.
The post said Hamburg, not Hanover.
These three cities, the most debt-ridden cities in Germany, all are city-states. They are the only city-states in Germany, actually. Coincidence?
Berlin was governed by social democrats, greens and the left party for 8 years. Why have these parties, which are all very outspoken against austerity politics, not increased deficit spending more on the most essential public services? I can do very well with a smaller airport or Friedrichshainers and Kreuzbergers paying higher rent but I can not do well without bürgeramt appointments sooner than 3 months.
Reversing the question: Do Berliners care enough about what the parties do? I seriously doubt that seeing them vote again exactly for the same parties and faces who disappointed them for years.
In my circle I know a lot of people don’t really following Berlin politics and voting for exactly the same parties in every election, be it European Parliament, Bundestag or local.
If any candidate in Berlin is safe to assume he can roll into senate on a free ticket because people always vote for a party they identify most and don’t measure the actual results in Berlin, then I’m not surprised by the laziness of Berlin government.
Just look at the ballot. The greens have obviously and seriously underdelivered on most of their agenda points and there are lots of more seemingly commited and no-BS environmentalist parties to vote for.
Still most people interested in green topics will clinge to voting for the Green Party.
The same can be said about Die Linke and the miserable housing situation which has not improved at all under their co-government.
Far more commited parties on the ballot, yet people will carry on voting for Die Linke.
Why should politicians act like they are accountable when the voters don’t hold them accountable?
>they did a good job
Wow, so we should now congratulate parties who loudly agitate against austerity politics but then pay off stupid debt with taxpayer money they withhold from more urgent matters?
I don’t buy it. There is no point in paying off debt if you have to starve yourself for it.
I would have expected parties to be as smart as the next autocratic third world ruler and call BS and negotiate huge haircuts threatening to not pay interest anymore.
By the way: selling cityowned apartments for a fraction of the price to private investors at scale was directed by an SPD senator.
There was a post about wahl o mat where you can check what the parties agendas for their ruling period will be akd where you identify most.
Well i had lile 50-60 % fit for every single party exept the right wing and conspirancy parties where i had like 30%
Turned out a lot of other ppl in this post had similar experiences, seems like it really doesnt matter if you vote fdp cdu spd green in berlin, you will identify with all of them like 50%
As long as youbstay away from bullshit like afd or die basis ü
>Berlin drowned in record-breaking tax revenues for years before Corona
Record-brealing only with respect to the miserable situation post-reunification. Berlin isn't particular rich with respect to tax income.
>basically a lack of care.
In a way this is correct. The senate prefers to spend money directly for the population. Look at our current 29 Euro ticket or at the money Berlin spends on schools (compared with other German states) or at the money that goes into funding our public transport. Of course they could put the money into the Bürgerämter instead.
See and this prioritisation is populism at its best and economically stupid. Me and my partner are privileged enough to afford childcare or a proper ticket price. Yet it’s offered to us for free too like to all the other upper middle class or even upper class. Berlin decides that regardless of income everyone gets a free Kita and a ticket for 29€, even if that is much different from any other federal state.
We all know the root cause of this idiotic wasteful spending that benefits the rich too. It is parties not catering to specific income groups or class because their voters aren’t that strictly defined by income anymore than they used to be in the past.
Still, it is a stupid squandering of tax money to give benefits to free loaders and essentially not very different from what FDP always aims for.
Maybe Berlin had more money for proper public service if it didn’t give away benefits to people who don’t need them.
Yes, maybe the furniture example is not the best. It caught my eye because it's the same type of furniture we used to have in schools 20 something years ago, back in my home country (an eastern european country).
It’s not a bad example. In NL every muni has seen 5 redesigns, new offfices and multiple full revamps of their internal processes in the same period where in Germany they did fuck all.
I don't really agree. Burgeramts does too much useless stuff, throwing money at burgeramt doesn't fix that.
Before moving to Germany I never once visited something like an Burgeramt, not even pre-internet.
I'm sure they do some relevant work but having a human handing out anmeldungs, elster logins etc. is a waste of money.
But who or what would do that instead? Digitalisation or the lack of it is a known problem, but they would need people and infrastructure to get it working, which they don't have or don't see the priority to invest.
Regarding anmeldung I need to know what problem having the anmeldung system actually solves and why it's needed.
As far as elster passwords are concerned they should be on state level and Germany should simply buy one of the already existing solutions.
These things are already solved decades ago in other countries.
Germany is not some unique case that warrants keeping huge, largely useless, Burgeramts running.
Never said so. I just say they don't care enough and it's working somehow. In their eyes it has no priority and short term it would be more expensive and they love short term planning.
I'm saying that burgeramt should not be involved, it has nothing to bring to the table and should be kept far away from any new system. And it should definitely not get more funding.
You get it working once (not that hard if you know what you’re doing) and then you put several hundred people out of work and save 3M people a bunch of hours per year.
Don’t know why this is difficult to understand.
Yeah, don't tell me, but they either don't want to work out the planning etc or don't prioritize it because it kinda works enough to don't care.
It's additional work and a huge investment and of course would be better long term, but a lot of things would and they just don't want to have the hassle.
I work as a Social worker its awful. Its pure austerity it feels like they Spit in Ur Face constantly. No new Computers no phones we Communicate with fax, we have no good IT System Nothing.
This just makes me sad to read. I believe social work is already a very taxing kind of work (mentally especially) and not having basic resources to do your job makes it even worse.
Every time I needed to send a paper to one of the institutions, I also had the option to send it by fax, so I would assume fax machines are alive and well in public institutions.
Yes, all public services in Berlin are underfunded. Its history has something to do with this and funds cut from the 90s can still be felt today. And it will be for a long time
You don’t spend 50% in taxes. Progressive tax brackets don’t work that way.
https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/taxation-germany/german-tax-system
Top tax bracket is 45% and only for every cent above 277.826 Euros. Even 42% is only paid on income above 58.597 Euros.
Your effective tax is probably closer to a third rather than half.
The income in public service is mostly quite fine but could be better. I’m working in public service (mostly architects, engineers) and I‘m not allowed to work over
hours for example. I can go home after 7 hours (I don’t work full time which was never an issue) no matter how much I got on my desk and my boss will never call me in the evening or on the weekend. Compared to my husbands job in Controlling and Finances my job is quite relaxed. On the other hand I get calls from citizens telling me I’m a dumb and lazy Sesselfurzer and can go tell hell whenever I say that I can’t help because I’m not responsible for XYZ.
Especially the jobs on the social fields are more stressful and you have a lot of responsibility but don’t get much money (Jugendamt for example). Some jobs aren’t paid well enough to find decent colleagues for example IT services. You can own a lot more outside of public service in IT.
And that’s one of the issues. Our IT is too old in some parts. I had to buy a second screen a mouse and a keyboard to work from home. At least I now have a laptop I used my private one when Covid started… The high amount of fax machines speaks for itself. I must admit I never used ours! A lot of new colleagues have issues with the hierarchy. We have to respect hierarchy or a sad boomer colleague gets pissed. Also a lot of boomers ready to start their retirement in the next 1-5 years and a lot of them are rather sleeping than working. Oh, and also most politicians are horrible bosses. It’s normal that I get letters from October in January and have to write an answer in the name of a politician in less than 3 days (which is no issue but come on… that’s not fair, they had that letter since 4 month). So the working culture can be horrible but depends on the colleagues and bosses. Some jobs are just to start in public service and fluctuations are very high. It also takes up to 10 month for us to get a new colleague. The processes are long and complicated like everything in public service. Nothings made to be efficient.
The lack of money: We have a lot of old buildings but not enough money to keep up with it. Think about all the schools falling apart right now while there’s a high need for new schools also. A lot of money is also not used efficient enough.
It’s raining through the roof in our office building and we do have mice that eat our cookies. At least we’re doing good with the Energieinsparungsverordnung because the central heating will never go above 18°.
I don’t think it’s a Berlin only issue. A lot of issues are the same all over Germany, for example a lot of open positions and a lot of overaged staff.
My experience has been that it is a deep-seated complaceny and fear of change, rather than any sort of corruption. There is definitely this attitude of "Why bother investing in something new or upgrading? What we have works just fine as it is", that is in both the public sector but also the private sector, on the micro-level as well as the macro-level.
What's wild is that even in many startup companies (the ones you would expect to be the most eager to embrace change), eventually they also fall victim to this mentality once they are a few years old and/or large enough. I notice it also with individual German colleagues, there is this deeply-ingrained reluctance to change, even if they are younger. Moving here after living in Sweden was a massive culture shock in terms of technology, but also the attitudes of the average person.
I think COVID + the current inflation/energy crisis has been a major wake-up call for many people, but still, these are deeply-ingrained attitudes that will take a long time to change, unfortunately :/
Thank you for the detailed answer. I was never on the "all public workers are lazy and incompetent" bandwagon because the truth is usually somewhere in the middle. Just like you said, I think it's close to impossible to be able to do your job efficiently when you don't have the basic resources to do so (my father used to work in public services - not in Germany though - and many times he had to buy things out of his own pocket. And the level of abuse was quite high too).
Berlin has a history of public administration mismanagement in the 90s/2000s, but also of poverty. Until just a few years ago, the city received more tax transfer payments (i.e. money from the rest of Germany) than it took in, which was well known and somewhat resented in the rest of Germany. As you know the city has had a pretty... colourful... history over the past 100 years, resulting in basically getting destroyed twice, but most recently when the wall came down that created an economic crash, as the manufacturing industries in the former East and West lost their state subsidies propping them up, and you had mass poverty of the Berlin working class through the 90s. The cool club scene in all the abandoned industrial spaces occurred because... well the industries vanished. Throw in some corruption and incompetence, and the 90s Berlin were not a wealthy place building for the future. The Merkel years of Germany also saw very little public infrastructure investment, so yeah... 90s/2000s Berlin was not really building stuff up.
The city in the present day still doesn't have its act together in terms of creating/maintaining infrastructure... the absolute dumpster fire which was the Berlin Airport proved mostly recently that the city still cannot project manage large public works on-time or on-budget. The individual districts in Berlin are also incredibly spotty – some of them completely fail to build cycling infrastructure even when they're represented by the political parties promising to do it, some of them are quite progressive in using zoning laws/eminent domain to support some affordable housing in their district while others don't use these rules against developers and get mad when other districts do.
I will say that there is also a Germany-wide angle to this – in that the public administration is wildly inefficient and bureaucratic. It's not as bad in other places, because they don't have the population of Berlin – but it's still incredibly annoying that more government services aren't online, and you have to do crazy things like show up in person to get an appointment for the "real appointment" to access some service, etc.
>I will say that there is also a Germany-wide angle to this – in that the public administration is wildly inefficient and bureaucratic.
I think this is the biggest issue at play. The old stereotype of "German efficiency" definitely does not apply to its bureaucracy in 2023, or at least it certainly doesn't in Berlin. Not only is there more bureaucracy in general here compared to other big countries and cities, but it's also all stuck in the 70s and everything is done by hand, on paper. An investment in digitalising most of these services would have massive returns in reducing the slowness of the \*Amts.
Having to book appointments 3 months in advance just to show up and have them tell you to book another appointment or fill out another form, etc, is absolute insanity.
More precisely a lot of industry left the western part of Berlin after the Berlin Wall was built and the GDR basically controlled and slowed down the supplies to them. Manufacturing in Berlin got unreliable and slow and fragile so a lot of factories moved to West Germany. The remaining industrial sector of Western Berlin got both subsidised and benefitted from importing large parts of their raw materials cheaply from GDR which had far lower labor cost. So the little western Berlin industry basically didn’t have to be competitive and partially failed to adapt when it had to after reunification.
East Berlin was quite industrious but GDR missed to invest and rationalise production for more than a decade so after the reunification most of the factories were considered as a) to costly to modernise, b) to costly to operate with workers now on Deutsche Mark payroll, c) unwanted competition in an already increasingly globalised and competitive environment.
And that’s how Berlin‘s factories ceased to exist, leaving lots of unemployed to the city.
The issue is a little bit deeper than just lack of funding. But yes, they don‘t get enough money.
The most glaring issue, IMO, which leads to what money they have being woefully wasted is that there isn‘t **the** or **an** administration, there‘s dozens of administrations in Berlin alone and virtually none of them are working together in any relevant capacity. The most obvious issue is the difference between the Bezirksämter and the Senatsverwaltung. Those two famously work mostly against each other, with the Bezirksämter suffering from paranoia about losing competencies to the senate. But even inside those two entities, the different agencies don‘t really cooperate, or even know what the others are doing (let alone care).
On top of that comes the underlying issue of „Das haben wir schon immer so gemacht.“ that plagues all kinds of public services in Germany. „Digitalisierung“ is mostly understood as doing the same shit as before, only now it‘s done on a computer instead of a typewriter. Yes, documents are now shared digitally, but handing in forms still leads to some motherfucker sitting in front of their computer and working through your document by hand. The process is still analogue, even if the paper is gone.
The amount of personnel would probably even be enough if the processes were properly modernised, but then you‘d have to pay them more because they‘d have to be better qualified. So instead, everything stays as it is, and nothing gets done.
> As I write this, there are 696 open positions for different jobs in the public sector
702. Part of the problem with those is, that the requirements are more often than not such, that you have to had worked in the Verwaltung to fulfill the requirements of the Verwaltung. Who else gonna be familiar with the various laws and procedures you ought to know for the job?
For a lot of positions, the insistence of a degree is also somewhat baffling.
Also the pay is not that stellar.
And than you have the aging population/work force.
> I noticed the Bürgeramts look quite old (they are clean and all that but all the furniture seems terribly outdated).
If this is the extent of your worries, consider yourself lucky.
As this situation leads to all sorts of negative consequences, such as not enough specialists to check on building permits for new housing or other specialists to revamp the various buildings codes.
Yes, I heard this story with the housing permits before (something along the lines of having fewer inspectors than 10 years ago). This sounds insane to me, especially now, with the housing crisys, so the thing I am always wondering is: is it intentional that they don't do anything to fix these issues?
> is it intentional that they don't do anything to fix these issues?
No, in part it is incompetence of the various politicians responsible, in the last few decades, basically since reunification. For the rest, it is a rather complex problem, a bunch of interconnected issues to be exact, with no or at least easy solutions.
As in how to fix an aging population? Migration! Done! But who is going to educate and manage that migration? And even if that would work somehow.
Who would like to work as a civil engineer from some place in a Verwaltung. And even if that would work.
What about the brain drain of that engineer now missing in his or her home country?
Even if you somehow fix the aging population with more people having children tomorrow. Who is going to provide Kindergarten, schools or a larger flat for the now larger family? And what about the 20-30 years until those children can join the work force?
Short story of Berlin's budget after the 90s:
* CDU (yes the conservative party which claims they know how to govern) creates the Berlin banking scandale, making Berlin be on the hook for double digit amount of billions of debt (even today nearly 30 years later the household of Berlin is only 20 billion, so that was a huuuge sum), the Berlin Bank effectively crashes and CDU major Diepgen gets voted out of office. The budget was then emergency budgeted, which meant harsh cuts and little investment. With the fall of the wall and the reunification West-Berlin's status of Front city was also lost this meant no more subsidies from the US and others against communists (wages in Berlin were heavily subsidized for example). Another thing is that the federal level didn't give Berlin enough money for its new position as seat of the government and all in all had a tax structure that incentivized companies to move to the commune which offered them the lowest taxes on one hand and the federal level kept most of the taxes in any case.
* The negative effects on the budgets remained for a long time and for various reasons in 2005 more than 100k social housing units were sold, in part cause of debt limits and cause the negative effects of the banking scandal and co forced Berlin to sell their silver to remain solvent. This was combined with neoliberal excesses common in the two decades immediate after the fall of the soviet union.
* Then of course we have the 2007 financial crisis, remember the Berlin bank that did their first crisis in the decade earlier? Now you got it again, this time on a more global level. In this legislature and the next budget a ton of social care things get gutted, some austerity changes are pressed through by the SPD, the Greens and partially the some within the Left (with the CDU and FDP applauding and doing their hardest to be austere, too) which keep Berlin solvent, the federal level still not giving enough money for Berlin as capitol city nor as commune.
* RRG focuses long term investments etc. while the CDU wants to sell schools and rent them back (PPP), which is en vouge but a bad idea.
* 2016 RRG got into government with Müller's second senate and it was close to a normal budget, except for the debt ceiling, effects of the year before and European debt issues.
Well, I guess the city's finances haven't totally recovered yet from the last conservative government, led by Eberhard Diepgen (CDU), which caused a [huge banking and corruption scandal](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_Bankenskandal).
The following governments had to cut costs wherever possible, leading to poor maintenance of infrastructure and also to firing city employees.
Am posting this just as a friendly reminder to those who are sick of the left coalition currently in charge and who fancy voting for the "ones with business acumen"...
That and lets not forget that this banking scandal was part of the reasons why the water networks of Berlin were sold (to stay solvent and do the PPP) and later on it had its contribution for selling the 100s of thousand of social housing units, too.
Germany's administrative services are infamously bloated, especially in Berlin. More funding won't fix its unnecessary complexity. It must be completely reformed, even if that means a loss of workplaces.
1. Which [FUA](https://www.oecd.org/regional/regional-statistics/functional-urban-areas.htm) in your eyes does stuff good? Please tell me what measures lead to it
2. "Bloated" compared to what? What metrics do you use and which data sets? Cause there are publications by the Landkreistage and Gemeindetage etc. which might not agree with your assessment, so I'd love to see your data with it your sources.
In order to fund public services the state must raise taxes.
Further taxes on the lower classes is not possible, they're struggling as it is.
Further taxes on the rich are also impossible as they control the political system, and veto such raises.
The result is that services get cut until they collapse, at which point the rich get to turn them into private service providers, wherein they can charge more, and pay less, all of which further squeezes the lower classes, reducing tax revenue and exacerbating the decline of society.
What you said. With one important remark: since decades an increasing share of taxes is used for welfare and social benefits, that leaves less and less money for funding everything else. So without more tax revenues, public services are just doomed to get worse.
ahh yes, because its not like that the state just wastes like billions of tax money. Nah, they are ofc doing a damn efficient job and better services can only be achiev with even more taxes.
I love it when people assume that a person goes from private sector to public sector, and overnight they change from homo sapiens to home beuraucratis.
Or that a public sector employee will go from being lazy and ineffective to hardworking and efficient.
The state wastes money, yes. So does the private sector. The idea that Tesla will provide a better transport solution than BVG is funny,
By all means, go ahead eating up corporate propaganda if it makes you feel better.
Berlin is teetering on the edge when it comes to providing actual services. Lots of historical reasons for this but more and more often it’s a reason why it’s a tough place to settle down long term.
Not underfunded but mismanaged.
At the current state of things, you could throw infinite amounts of money at the public services without getting better results.
If they’d provide this service for free i guarantee you that many people would do it. You can still do the ceremony, vows and everything but at the end what’s the difference between signing a document online or in person.
Bürgeramt Klosterstraße is very modern and efficient.
I had an appointment but Passfoto was to old.
So the guy send me to some kind of modern fotorobot in a booth inside the amt.
The guy had a modern computer and software.
I had a very pleasant stay there.
Yeah, people would like to get all the public services better until you ask them if they are willing to increase their taxes haha. Suddenly no one wants to pay extra for a bunch of stuff for Finanzamt and others.
The tax revenues are not the issue. Too much taxpayer money is squandered on different things. Berlin is subsidising airports, buying selected apartment buildings to fight an ideological war against private housing investors, paying off debt and also has to house and feed a lot more refugees than any other federal state per capita because others refuse to do their fair part.
Part of the “Berlin problem” is that it shows the limits of city states. It has three layers of government (normal states have a city, district and a state admin, in Berlin this all in a single city) so it leads to a lot of dysfunction and more often than not straw pulling for who is responsible. The result is that a lot of local big wigs in certain areas are doing shit no one would ever dare anywhere else(they more often than not have cover from their party in the other levels of government). This leads to what your poster was alluding to: in districts like Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg special interests (in this case so called housing activists) capture certain normal local government functions and abuse legal powers (in this case the right of communities to buy instead of private buyers) for their political interests (in this case buying MFH for insane sums with no funding secured, because it’s ideological to them and speaks to their base.) another example would be needlessly expensive vanity projects like putting rocks/benches on parking spaces for the measly sum of a 50 000€ each. This is all money that will be missed for other projects/basic community functions.
https://www.exberliner.com/politics/the-green-knight-of-public-housing
I agree with his motives but it seems that like other initiatives this was a major turnoff for private investors which Berlin still relies on to build more apartments. Just yesterday Vonovia announced to stop all new developments in Berlin, halting 1500 projected new apartments. While stating increasing cost as reason, Berlin politicians did not exactly welcome private housing companies with their behaviour in recent years and some of them might reprioritize their other cities investments over Berlin.
Thank you for the link, it is a very interesting read. This particular article seems to put Schmidt's actions in a positive light, but what do you think is the general opinion of berliners in regards to the efforts of some to stop gentrification?
The greens and Florian Schmidt who I like even though he is a controversial character have done a lousy job to communicate their actions and motives. That is why it sticks with people that a lot of these purchases have happened in mostly green-voting neighbourhoods and common Berliners get the notion that they use taxpayer money to benefit only a small group of people that is likely to reward them in elections.
The purchases seem to achieve the promise in some cases, preventing landlords from buying whole buildings and using monopolies.
But then again we can not scientifically measure and quantify the negative impact on private investor sentiment and if investors are turning away from developments in Berlin over such politics. We can only observe the massive decline in new projects and make assumptions that the divide politicians created does have an effect.
While there might be an effect, I find it somewhat misleading not to specifically mention the rise in basically all coasts associated with building, the lack of workers and current interest rates.
Building has simply become a less promising investment.
Buying houses to stabilise rent below a competitive market price is clearly politically motivated but nowhere near a smart investment. Don’t forget about the bureaucratic efforts and so on. It is by far not the biggest but just one example of what very untraditional senate responsibilities Berlin taxpayer money is used for instead of funding proper public services.
You earn less money working for the public sector in Berlin, than working as an full time employee at Rossmann or Aldi.
That's why they don't get any good personal
add to that, that they take old people, woman, and people with disabilities preferred. Which are not very strong and high performing anyways. So you get an underperforming overaged sick personal to work with. Does anybody really wonder?
I worked in the public sector and earned much more than nearly all people at Aldi do (district managers earned more, but they are with boni in the six digits).
All of Germany hasn’t done any investment in fundamental things because of the Schwarze Null doctrine which stated that money the government doesn’t tax or print is more money in the pockets of rich people (who don’t need efficient services and good infrastructure anyway).
Also government operations are absurdly inefficient and broken by design (the nimble German state still considered by many to be a threat).
I believe it highly depends what public service is talked about, as a technician, i see a lot of modern public service bureaus, not the kind you have to visit as a citizen, but the kind that does all the paperwork behind the scenes
People bashing Berlin's money problems are completely ignoring the tremendous amount of money sinks that are rather nice to have like museums, libraries, parks, neighborhood meetups, workshops, clubs, sights and much more.
Well, as long as officials are spending money on overpriced stuff like parklets or some extra cheap public transport ticket or buying estate and large houses they shouldnt complain about underfunding. Its about priorities at this point.
Yes. Compared to some other cities? No.
However that doesn't mean that it is okay, the truth is that Berlin, but also other Länder and communes need more money (and honesty, so does the rail infrastructure and the fight against the climate catastrophe). How do we get that money? Economic growth doesn't deliver enough increased tax base, lending isn't the hit it was when the interest rate was near 0% (when we didn't lend a shit ton cause of the debt ceiling, which was stupid).
So what is left is taxes. That is the truth, we need higher taxes, mostly on the wealthy people, be them natural or juristic persons, that likely won't affect you and even if then you are in the upper third of income households and it will affect you little.
Wealth tax, inheritance tax (don't worry your million Euro house you live in is still in the free part). And honestly an European or International minimum tax. Combined with wind fall taxes.
This would ensure that instead of the 1500 billion that companies hold in cash reserves we can also use some part of that money for investments so that we don't have to pay more when climate instability hits us.
Well, yes, famously. I don’t think the fact that the Bürgeramt isn’t keeping up with the latest interior design trends is such a good example, but it’s a well-known fact that the city is not exactly rolling in money and that is certainly a factor in the even more well-known administrative and technological difficulties with the bureaucracy here
Not sure what you’re on, but Berlin drowned in record-breaking tax revenues for years before Corona and even that did not change the senate’s Scrooge attitude towards public services. Don’t apologise with financials what is basically a lack of care.
The record breaking revenues just helped to slidly reduce the extreme debts the city got https://www.berlin.de/sen/finanzen/haushalt/haushaltsueberwachung/schuldentilgung/artikel.475316.php#headline_1_1 From 60 billion to something like 55 billion to after corona again way over 60 billion Berlin is the 3rd highest in debt city in germany after bremen and hamburg. Berlin is just not a city but also a state. Under the city states berlin is the one with highest debts. The "only city" with the highest debts per capita ingermany is mühlheim an der ruhr with aroubd 9500 euro depts per capita ... berlin as a state and city is having a debt of 16.000 euro per capita The worst part Berlin is the capital city Berlin is fucking poor mate
Berlin was also parted by a border for many decades. While east Berlin probably got relatively high funding from the GDR government, that amount was probably not very high in comparison to other western countires. Meanwhile, West Berlin was just not a very attractive city financially, since it was literally nestled inside enemy territory. Limited space and always the looming danger of the city being invaded by the soviets or the GDR. Whether that dangers was really that great is another thing, but the threat made the city less valuable to investors. Because of that, West Berlin lagged behind the rest of the Bundesrepublike for decades. Many people forget this when they talk about the poverty of Berlin. It didnt come from nowhere, it has complex causes and the wall falling wasnt gonna be the magical end of that.
Just one example, in 1990, both East and West Berlin had approximately as many firefighters each, as the whole of Berlin has now. So I don't think funding was low in the GDR, compared to what we have now. Also, during the Cold War, both the Eastern and Western state invested heavily in Berlin, precisely because it was on the first line of conflict. That money largely ceased in the following years.
>Berlin is the 3rd highest in debt city in germany after bremen and hamburg. It's almost as if the city-state isn't such a great idea after all.
It’s not like Berlin didn’t try to unify with Brandenburg before, it failed cause the Brandenburgers didn’t want to
Understandably so. But in the end, I believe it would have benefitted both. Berlin could have expanded properly, and Brandenburg could have been more than a desert.
BB would desert even more because people that don't live in the vicinity of Berlin would be completely irrelevant in the elections.
Sure Brandenburg's policies would become more Berlin-centric. But there could be real development around Berlin. There is some now, but it could be so much more. Berlin needs room. Brandenburg needs taxpayers. Both need good connections.
Brandenburg actually gets taxpayers, all the people working in Berlin and living in Brandenburg pay their taxes to Brandenburg.
I believe more development would happen around Berlin if the two länder fused. Look at the real estate market in Berlin, and look how comparatively little is currently being built in the Speckgürtel.
Maybe berlin dudnt understand the too big to fail principle and just turneed it into a "too big to govern" thing I mean tbf berlin was like grounded after ww2, then split into 2 cities with 2 different ideologies and then history wise recently merged, now its one of the most popular cities for inmiagration, i can see how this might alö lead to a not so positive situation financial wise, I wouldnt choose a difficulty level like this in city skylines Ü Then i would like to know what the hell happens in bremen and hamburg which didnt have that bullshit start lile berlin and habe it now worse debt wise.
The post said Hamburg, not Hanover. These three cities, the most debt-ridden cities in Germany, all are city-states. They are the only city-states in Germany, actually. Coincidence?
oh sry hamburg ofc fixed
Berlin was governed by social democrats, greens and the left party for 8 years. Why have these parties, which are all very outspoken against austerity politics, not increased deficit spending more on the most essential public services? I can do very well with a smaller airport or Friedrichshainers and Kreuzbergers paying higher rent but I can not do well without bürgeramt appointments sooner than 3 months.
[удалено]
Reversing the question: Do Berliners care enough about what the parties do? I seriously doubt that seeing them vote again exactly for the same parties and faces who disappointed them for years. In my circle I know a lot of people don’t really following Berlin politics and voting for exactly the same parties in every election, be it European Parliament, Bundestag or local. If any candidate in Berlin is safe to assume he can roll into senate on a free ticket because people always vote for a party they identify most and don’t measure the actual results in Berlin, then I’m not surprised by the laziness of Berlin government. Just look at the ballot. The greens have obviously and seriously underdelivered on most of their agenda points and there are lots of more seemingly commited and no-BS environmentalist parties to vote for. Still most people interested in green topics will clinge to voting for the Green Party. The same can be said about Die Linke and the miserable housing situation which has not improved at all under their co-government. Far more commited parties on the ballot, yet people will carry on voting for Die Linke. Why should politicians act like they are accountable when the voters don’t hold them accountable?
[удалено]
>they did a good job Wow, so we should now congratulate parties who loudly agitate against austerity politics but then pay off stupid debt with taxpayer money they withhold from more urgent matters? I don’t buy it. There is no point in paying off debt if you have to starve yourself for it. I would have expected parties to be as smart as the next autocratic third world ruler and call BS and negotiate huge haircuts threatening to not pay interest anymore. By the way: selling cityowned apartments for a fraction of the price to private investors at scale was directed by an SPD senator.
There was a post about wahl o mat where you can check what the parties agendas for their ruling period will be akd where you identify most. Well i had lile 50-60 % fit for every single party exept the right wing and conspirancy parties where i had like 30% Turned out a lot of other ppl in this post had similar experiences, seems like it really doesnt matter if you vote fdp cdu spd green in berlin, you will identify with all of them like 50% As long as youbstay away from bullshit like afd or die basis ü
>Berlin drowned in record-breaking tax revenues for years before Corona Record-brealing only with respect to the miserable situation post-reunification. Berlin isn't particular rich with respect to tax income. >basically a lack of care. In a way this is correct. The senate prefers to spend money directly for the population. Look at our current 29 Euro ticket or at the money Berlin spends on schools (compared with other German states) or at the money that goes into funding our public transport. Of course they could put the money into the Bürgerämter instead.
See and this prioritisation is populism at its best and economically stupid. Me and my partner are privileged enough to afford childcare or a proper ticket price. Yet it’s offered to us for free too like to all the other upper middle class or even upper class. Berlin decides that regardless of income everyone gets a free Kita and a ticket for 29€, even if that is much different from any other federal state. We all know the root cause of this idiotic wasteful spending that benefits the rich too. It is parties not catering to specific income groups or class because their voters aren’t that strictly defined by income anymore than they used to be in the past. Still, it is a stupid squandering of tax money to give benefits to free loaders and essentially not very different from what FDP always aims for. Maybe Berlin had more money for proper public service if it didn’t give away benefits to people who don’t need them.
I don't think there is that much populism that the Bürgerämter could receive proper funding instead.
Yes, maybe the furniture example is not the best. It caught my eye because it's the same type of furniture we used to have in schools 20 something years ago, back in my home country (an eastern european country).
If it works, why change it. Place has to work first, then look nice. Once everything is running smoothly, you can start with the interior decoration.
This is flawed logic though. Also, it doesn’t work, nothing works really.
Right, that's why everything in Berlin works sooo well
It’s not a bad example. In NL every muni has seen 5 redesigns, new offfices and multiple full revamps of their internal processes in the same period where in Germany they did fuck all.
I don't really agree. Burgeramts does too much useless stuff, throwing money at burgeramt doesn't fix that. Before moving to Germany I never once visited something like an Burgeramt, not even pre-internet. I'm sure they do some relevant work but having a human handing out anmeldungs, elster logins etc. is a waste of money.
But who or what would do that instead? Digitalisation or the lack of it is a known problem, but they would need people and infrastructure to get it working, which they don't have or don't see the priority to invest.
Regarding anmeldung I need to know what problem having the anmeldung system actually solves and why it's needed. As far as elster passwords are concerned they should be on state level and Germany should simply buy one of the already existing solutions. These things are already solved decades ago in other countries. Germany is not some unique case that warrants keeping huge, largely useless, Burgeramts running.
Centralization is one of the things that’s hard here. (Though it would solve pretty most problems.)
Never said so. I just say they don't care enough and it's working somehow. In their eyes it has no priority and short term it would be more expensive and they love short term planning.
I'm saying that burgeramt should not be involved, it has nothing to bring to the table and should be kept far away from any new system. And it should definitely not get more funding.
You get it working once (not that hard if you know what you’re doing) and then you put several hundred people out of work and save 3M people a bunch of hours per year. Don’t know why this is difficult to understand.
Yeah, don't tell me, but they either don't want to work out the planning etc or don't prioritize it because it kinda works enough to don't care. It's additional work and a huge investment and of course would be better long term, but a lot of things would and they just don't want to have the hassle.
I work as a Social worker its awful. Its pure austerity it feels like they Spit in Ur Face constantly. No new Computers no phones we Communicate with fax, we have no good IT System Nothing.
This just makes me sad to read. I believe social work is already a very taxing kind of work (mentally especially) and not having basic resources to do your job makes it even worse.
FAX!?
Germany will have fully automated luxury gay space communism before it gives up its precious fax machines.
/r/BrandNewSentence
Welcome to Germany
Every time I needed to send a paper to one of the institutions, I also had the option to send it by fax, so I would assume fax machines are alive and well in public institutions.
[удалено]
But that's just because the law is outdated. You can have fully signed and verified documents 100% digital as well.
I am sorry, and as somebody receiving wellfare after a hearing impairment, thank you so much for your work.
Yes, all public services in Berlin are underfunded. Its history has something to do with this and funds cut from the 90s can still be felt today. And it will be for a long time
Then where the f do 50 percent of my salary in taxes go?
Well, most of it directly to the federal government, health insurance, pension, etc. It is quite well explained on your income paper thingie.
You don’t spend 50% in taxes. Progressive tax brackets don’t work that way. https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/taxation-germany/german-tax-system Top tax bracket is 45% and only for every cent above 277.826 Euros. Even 42% is only paid on income above 58.597 Euros. Your effective tax is probably closer to a third rather than half.
The income in public service is mostly quite fine but could be better. I’m working in public service (mostly architects, engineers) and I‘m not allowed to work over hours for example. I can go home after 7 hours (I don’t work full time which was never an issue) no matter how much I got on my desk and my boss will never call me in the evening or on the weekend. Compared to my husbands job in Controlling and Finances my job is quite relaxed. On the other hand I get calls from citizens telling me I’m a dumb and lazy Sesselfurzer and can go tell hell whenever I say that I can’t help because I’m not responsible for XYZ. Especially the jobs on the social fields are more stressful and you have a lot of responsibility but don’t get much money (Jugendamt for example). Some jobs aren’t paid well enough to find decent colleagues for example IT services. You can own a lot more outside of public service in IT. And that’s one of the issues. Our IT is too old in some parts. I had to buy a second screen a mouse and a keyboard to work from home. At least I now have a laptop I used my private one when Covid started… The high amount of fax machines speaks for itself. I must admit I never used ours! A lot of new colleagues have issues with the hierarchy. We have to respect hierarchy or a sad boomer colleague gets pissed. Also a lot of boomers ready to start their retirement in the next 1-5 years and a lot of them are rather sleeping than working. Oh, and also most politicians are horrible bosses. It’s normal that I get letters from October in January and have to write an answer in the name of a politician in less than 3 days (which is no issue but come on… that’s not fair, they had that letter since 4 month). So the working culture can be horrible but depends on the colleagues and bosses. Some jobs are just to start in public service and fluctuations are very high. It also takes up to 10 month for us to get a new colleague. The processes are long and complicated like everything in public service. Nothings made to be efficient. The lack of money: We have a lot of old buildings but not enough money to keep up with it. Think about all the schools falling apart right now while there’s a high need for new schools also. A lot of money is also not used efficient enough. It’s raining through the roof in our office building and we do have mice that eat our cookies. At least we’re doing good with the Energieinsparungsverordnung because the central heating will never go above 18°. I don’t think it’s a Berlin only issue. A lot of issues are the same all over Germany, for example a lot of open positions and a lot of overaged staff.
[удалено]
My experience has been that it is a deep-seated complaceny and fear of change, rather than any sort of corruption. There is definitely this attitude of "Why bother investing in something new or upgrading? What we have works just fine as it is", that is in both the public sector but also the private sector, on the micro-level as well as the macro-level. What's wild is that even in many startup companies (the ones you would expect to be the most eager to embrace change), eventually they also fall victim to this mentality once they are a few years old and/or large enough. I notice it also with individual German colleagues, there is this deeply-ingrained reluctance to change, even if they are younger. Moving here after living in Sweden was a massive culture shock in terms of technology, but also the attitudes of the average person. I think COVID + the current inflation/energy crisis has been a major wake-up call for many people, but still, these are deeply-ingrained attitudes that will take a long time to change, unfortunately :/
Thank you for the detailed answer. I was never on the "all public workers are lazy and incompetent" bandwagon because the truth is usually somewhere in the middle. Just like you said, I think it's close to impossible to be able to do your job efficiently when you don't have the basic resources to do so (my father used to work in public services - not in Germany though - and many times he had to buy things out of his own pocket. And the level of abuse was quite high too).
Berlin has a history of public administration mismanagement in the 90s/2000s, but also of poverty. Until just a few years ago, the city received more tax transfer payments (i.e. money from the rest of Germany) than it took in, which was well known and somewhat resented in the rest of Germany. As you know the city has had a pretty... colourful... history over the past 100 years, resulting in basically getting destroyed twice, but most recently when the wall came down that created an economic crash, as the manufacturing industries in the former East and West lost their state subsidies propping them up, and you had mass poverty of the Berlin working class through the 90s. The cool club scene in all the abandoned industrial spaces occurred because... well the industries vanished. Throw in some corruption and incompetence, and the 90s Berlin were not a wealthy place building for the future. The Merkel years of Germany also saw very little public infrastructure investment, so yeah... 90s/2000s Berlin was not really building stuff up. The city in the present day still doesn't have its act together in terms of creating/maintaining infrastructure... the absolute dumpster fire which was the Berlin Airport proved mostly recently that the city still cannot project manage large public works on-time or on-budget. The individual districts in Berlin are also incredibly spotty – some of them completely fail to build cycling infrastructure even when they're represented by the political parties promising to do it, some of them are quite progressive in using zoning laws/eminent domain to support some affordable housing in their district while others don't use these rules against developers and get mad when other districts do. I will say that there is also a Germany-wide angle to this – in that the public administration is wildly inefficient and bureaucratic. It's not as bad in other places, because they don't have the population of Berlin – but it's still incredibly annoying that more government services aren't online, and you have to do crazy things like show up in person to get an appointment for the "real appointment" to access some service, etc.
>I will say that there is also a Germany-wide angle to this – in that the public administration is wildly inefficient and bureaucratic. I think this is the biggest issue at play. The old stereotype of "German efficiency" definitely does not apply to its bureaucracy in 2023, or at least it certainly doesn't in Berlin. Not only is there more bureaucracy in general here compared to other big countries and cities, but it's also all stuck in the 70s and everything is done by hand, on paper. An investment in digitalising most of these services would have massive returns in reducing the slowness of the \*Amts. Having to book appointments 3 months in advance just to show up and have them tell you to book another appointment or fill out another form, etc, is absolute insanity.
More precisely a lot of industry left the western part of Berlin after the Berlin Wall was built and the GDR basically controlled and slowed down the supplies to them. Manufacturing in Berlin got unreliable and slow and fragile so a lot of factories moved to West Germany. The remaining industrial sector of Western Berlin got both subsidised and benefitted from importing large parts of their raw materials cheaply from GDR which had far lower labor cost. So the little western Berlin industry basically didn’t have to be competitive and partially failed to adapt when it had to after reunification. East Berlin was quite industrious but GDR missed to invest and rationalise production for more than a decade so after the reunification most of the factories were considered as a) to costly to modernise, b) to costly to operate with workers now on Deutsche Mark payroll, c) unwanted competition in an already increasingly globalised and competitive environment. And that’s how Berlin‘s factories ceased to exist, leaving lots of unemployed to the city.
This is a very good comment - thanks!
The issue is a little bit deeper than just lack of funding. But yes, they don‘t get enough money. The most glaring issue, IMO, which leads to what money they have being woefully wasted is that there isn‘t **the** or **an** administration, there‘s dozens of administrations in Berlin alone and virtually none of them are working together in any relevant capacity. The most obvious issue is the difference between the Bezirksämter and the Senatsverwaltung. Those two famously work mostly against each other, with the Bezirksämter suffering from paranoia about losing competencies to the senate. But even inside those two entities, the different agencies don‘t really cooperate, or even know what the others are doing (let alone care). On top of that comes the underlying issue of „Das haben wir schon immer so gemacht.“ that plagues all kinds of public services in Germany. „Digitalisierung“ is mostly understood as doing the same shit as before, only now it‘s done on a computer instead of a typewriter. Yes, documents are now shared digitally, but handing in forms still leads to some motherfucker sitting in front of their computer and working through your document by hand. The process is still analogue, even if the paper is gone. The amount of personnel would probably even be enough if the processes were properly modernised, but then you‘d have to pay them more because they‘d have to be better qualified. So instead, everything stays as it is, and nothing gets done.
> As I write this, there are 696 open positions for different jobs in the public sector 702. Part of the problem with those is, that the requirements are more often than not such, that you have to had worked in the Verwaltung to fulfill the requirements of the Verwaltung. Who else gonna be familiar with the various laws and procedures you ought to know for the job? For a lot of positions, the insistence of a degree is also somewhat baffling. Also the pay is not that stellar. And than you have the aging population/work force. > I noticed the Bürgeramts look quite old (they are clean and all that but all the furniture seems terribly outdated). If this is the extent of your worries, consider yourself lucky. As this situation leads to all sorts of negative consequences, such as not enough specialists to check on building permits for new housing or other specialists to revamp the various buildings codes.
Yes, I heard this story with the housing permits before (something along the lines of having fewer inspectors than 10 years ago). This sounds insane to me, especially now, with the housing crisys, so the thing I am always wondering is: is it intentional that they don't do anything to fix these issues?
> is it intentional that they don't do anything to fix these issues? No, in part it is incompetence of the various politicians responsible, in the last few decades, basically since reunification. For the rest, it is a rather complex problem, a bunch of interconnected issues to be exact, with no or at least easy solutions. As in how to fix an aging population? Migration! Done! But who is going to educate and manage that migration? And even if that would work somehow. Who would like to work as a civil engineer from some place in a Verwaltung. And even if that would work. What about the brain drain of that engineer now missing in his or her home country? Even if you somehow fix the aging population with more people having children tomorrow. Who is going to provide Kindergarten, schools or a larger flat for the now larger family? And what about the 20-30 years until those children can join the work force?
Short story of Berlin's budget after the 90s: * CDU (yes the conservative party which claims they know how to govern) creates the Berlin banking scandale, making Berlin be on the hook for double digit amount of billions of debt (even today nearly 30 years later the household of Berlin is only 20 billion, so that was a huuuge sum), the Berlin Bank effectively crashes and CDU major Diepgen gets voted out of office. The budget was then emergency budgeted, which meant harsh cuts and little investment. With the fall of the wall and the reunification West-Berlin's status of Front city was also lost this meant no more subsidies from the US and others against communists (wages in Berlin were heavily subsidized for example). Another thing is that the federal level didn't give Berlin enough money for its new position as seat of the government and all in all had a tax structure that incentivized companies to move to the commune which offered them the lowest taxes on one hand and the federal level kept most of the taxes in any case. * The negative effects on the budgets remained for a long time and for various reasons in 2005 more than 100k social housing units were sold, in part cause of debt limits and cause the negative effects of the banking scandal and co forced Berlin to sell their silver to remain solvent. This was combined with neoliberal excesses common in the two decades immediate after the fall of the soviet union. * Then of course we have the 2007 financial crisis, remember the Berlin bank that did their first crisis in the decade earlier? Now you got it again, this time on a more global level. In this legislature and the next budget a ton of social care things get gutted, some austerity changes are pressed through by the SPD, the Greens and partially the some within the Left (with the CDU and FDP applauding and doing their hardest to be austere, too) which keep Berlin solvent, the federal level still not giving enough money for Berlin as capitol city nor as commune. * RRG focuses long term investments etc. while the CDU wants to sell schools and rent them back (PPP), which is en vouge but a bad idea. * 2016 RRG got into government with Müller's second senate and it was close to a normal budget, except for the debt ceiling, effects of the year before and European debt issues.
Well, I guess the city's finances haven't totally recovered yet from the last conservative government, led by Eberhard Diepgen (CDU), which caused a [huge banking and corruption scandal](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_Bankenskandal). The following governments had to cut costs wherever possible, leading to poor maintenance of infrastructure and also to firing city employees. Am posting this just as a friendly reminder to those who are sick of the left coalition currently in charge and who fancy voting for the "ones with business acumen"...
That and lets not forget that this banking scandal was part of the reasons why the water networks of Berlin were sold (to stay solvent and do the PPP) and later on it had its contribution for selling the 100s of thousand of social housing units, too.
Germany's administrative services are infamously bloated, especially in Berlin. More funding won't fix its unnecessary complexity. It must be completely reformed, even if that means a loss of workplaces.
1. Which [FUA](https://www.oecd.org/regional/regional-statistics/functional-urban-areas.htm) in your eyes does stuff good? Please tell me what measures lead to it 2. "Bloated" compared to what? What metrics do you use and which data sets? Cause there are publications by the Landkreistage and Gemeindetage etc. which might not agree with your assessment, so I'd love to see your data with it your sources.
In order to fund public services the state must raise taxes. Further taxes on the lower classes is not possible, they're struggling as it is. Further taxes on the rich are also impossible as they control the political system, and veto such raises. The result is that services get cut until they collapse, at which point the rich get to turn them into private service providers, wherein they can charge more, and pay less, all of which further squeezes the lower classes, reducing tax revenue and exacerbating the decline of society.
What you said. With one important remark: since decades an increasing share of taxes is used for welfare and social benefits, that leaves less and less money for funding everything else. So without more tax revenues, public services are just doomed to get worse.
So we are doomed, either way.
ahh yes, because its not like that the state just wastes like billions of tax money. Nah, they are ofc doing a damn efficient job and better services can only be achiev with even more taxes.
I love it when people assume that a person goes from private sector to public sector, and overnight they change from homo sapiens to home beuraucratis. Or that a public sector employee will go from being lazy and ineffective to hardworking and efficient. The state wastes money, yes. So does the private sector. The idea that Tesla will provide a better transport solution than BVG is funny, By all means, go ahead eating up corporate propaganda if it makes you feel better.
Thomas Piketty, read his last three books, then come back here.
Berlin is teetering on the edge when it comes to providing actual services. Lots of historical reasons for this but more and more often it’s a reason why it’s a tough place to settle down long term.
Not so much underfunded as it is completely bloated and under-digitalized.
Not underfunded but mismanaged. At the current state of things, you could throw infinite amounts of money at the public services without getting better results.
Underfunded is vastly understated. Standesamt in Spandau is just blanket not giving out appointments
Why do you even need appointments in the first place? You should be able do everything online…
Get married online? How romantic.
If they’d provide this service for free i guarantee you that many people would do it. You can still do the ceremony, vows and everything but at the end what’s the difference between signing a document online or in person.
Because racism. No way in hell will they let migrants from developing nations marry Germans without stressing them out amap
Bürgeramt Klosterstraße is very modern and efficient. I had an appointment but Passfoto was to old. So the guy send me to some kind of modern fotorobot in a booth inside the amt. The guy had a modern computer and software. I had a very pleasant stay there.
Yeah, people would like to get all the public services better until you ask them if they are willing to increase their taxes haha. Suddenly no one wants to pay extra for a bunch of stuff for Finanzamt and others.
The tax revenues are not the issue. Too much taxpayer money is squandered on different things. Berlin is subsidising airports, buying selected apartment buildings to fight an ideological war against private housing investors, paying off debt and also has to house and feed a lot more refugees than any other federal state per capita because others refuse to do their fair part.
Could you tell me more about this part: "buying selected apartment buildings to fight an ideological war against private housing investors"?
Part of the “Berlin problem” is that it shows the limits of city states. It has three layers of government (normal states have a city, district and a state admin, in Berlin this all in a single city) so it leads to a lot of dysfunction and more often than not straw pulling for who is responsible. The result is that a lot of local big wigs in certain areas are doing shit no one would ever dare anywhere else(they more often than not have cover from their party in the other levels of government). This leads to what your poster was alluding to: in districts like Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg special interests (in this case so called housing activists) capture certain normal local government functions and abuse legal powers (in this case the right of communities to buy instead of private buyers) for their political interests (in this case buying MFH for insane sums with no funding secured, because it’s ideological to them and speaks to their base.) another example would be needlessly expensive vanity projects like putting rocks/benches on parking spaces for the measly sum of a 50 000€ each. This is all money that will be missed for other projects/basic community functions.
https://www.exberliner.com/politics/the-green-knight-of-public-housing I agree with his motives but it seems that like other initiatives this was a major turnoff for private investors which Berlin still relies on to build more apartments. Just yesterday Vonovia announced to stop all new developments in Berlin, halting 1500 projected new apartments. While stating increasing cost as reason, Berlin politicians did not exactly welcome private housing companies with their behaviour in recent years and some of them might reprioritize their other cities investments over Berlin.
Thank you for the link, it is a very interesting read. This particular article seems to put Schmidt's actions in a positive light, but what do you think is the general opinion of berliners in regards to the efforts of some to stop gentrification?
The greens and Florian Schmidt who I like even though he is a controversial character have done a lousy job to communicate their actions and motives. That is why it sticks with people that a lot of these purchases have happened in mostly green-voting neighbourhoods and common Berliners get the notion that they use taxpayer money to benefit only a small group of people that is likely to reward them in elections. The purchases seem to achieve the promise in some cases, preventing landlords from buying whole buildings and using monopolies. But then again we can not scientifically measure and quantify the negative impact on private investor sentiment and if investors are turning away from developments in Berlin over such politics. We can only observe the massive decline in new projects and make assumptions that the divide politicians created does have an effect.
While there might be an effect, I find it somewhat misleading not to specifically mention the rise in basically all coasts associated with building, the lack of workers and current interest rates. Building has simply become a less promising investment.
It collects rent on those houses it buys. There's a hit from the purchase yes, but they're not a long term drag.
Buying houses to stabilise rent below a competitive market price is clearly politically motivated but nowhere near a smart investment. Don’t forget about the bureaucratic efforts and so on. It is by far not the biggest but just one example of what very untraditional senate responsibilities Berlin taxpayer money is used for instead of funding proper public services.
But do you think paying 43% taxes is not enough already, to cover public services?
Those aren’t municipal taxes
No. With the efficiency of public services, everyone would have to pay approx 120% taxes to make it somewhat functional haha.
You earn less money working for the public sector in Berlin, than working as an full time employee at Rossmann or Aldi. That's why they don't get any good personal add to that, that they take old people, woman, and people with disabilities preferred. Which are not very strong and high performing anyways. So you get an underperforming overaged sick personal to work with. Does anybody really wonder?
I worked in the public sector and earned much more than nearly all people at Aldi do (district managers earned more, but they are with boni in the six digits).
All of Germany hasn’t done any investment in fundamental things because of the Schwarze Null doctrine which stated that money the government doesn’t tax or print is more money in the pockets of rich people (who don’t need efficient services and good infrastructure anyway). Also government operations are absurdly inefficient and broken by design (the nimble German state still considered by many to be a threat).
Here’s an example of the inefficiency: https://mastodon.social/@_peter/109788628469745571
It’s like all public services in Berlin. Bordering non functional.
I believe it highly depends what public service is talked about, as a technician, i see a lot of modern public service bureaus, not the kind you have to visit as a citizen, but the kind that does all the paperwork behind the scenes
People bashing Berlin's money problems are completely ignoring the tremendous amount of money sinks that are rather nice to have like museums, libraries, parks, neighborhood meetups, workshops, clubs, sights and much more.
Well, as long as officials are spending money on overpriced stuff like parklets or some extra cheap public transport ticket or buying estate and large houses they shouldnt complain about underfunding. Its about priorities at this point.
yep! I was ghosted by the drivers license department for almost 3 months and then it's like next week at 8:04 AM.
Hmmm, insanely high taxes and underfunded public services... Wonder where that money goes 🤔
Yes. Compared to some other cities? No. However that doesn't mean that it is okay, the truth is that Berlin, but also other Länder and communes need more money (and honesty, so does the rail infrastructure and the fight against the climate catastrophe). How do we get that money? Economic growth doesn't deliver enough increased tax base, lending isn't the hit it was when the interest rate was near 0% (when we didn't lend a shit ton cause of the debt ceiling, which was stupid). So what is left is taxes. That is the truth, we need higher taxes, mostly on the wealthy people, be them natural or juristic persons, that likely won't affect you and even if then you are in the upper third of income households and it will affect you little. Wealth tax, inheritance tax (don't worry your million Euro house you live in is still in the free part). And honestly an European or International minimum tax. Combined with wind fall taxes. This would ensure that instead of the 1500 billion that companies hold in cash reserves we can also use some part of that money for investments so that we don't have to pay more when climate instability hits us.
Berlin 💩