I'm a CTO for an SME in Berlin, and I couldn't afford to rent my extremely modest apartment if I had to get a new contract today.

My grandfather had 5 kids and built a house with my grandmother only doing part time cleaning jobs in the 60s. Due to the situation after the war he was not able to find employment in his learned craft, instead he worked most of his life as a "simple" manual laborer.

My father paid out his 4 siblings for the house when he married my mother, they always joke that she met a rich man and married a poor one. That was ~2000. He's a learned instrument mechanic.

If my sister had not voluntarily backed out on inheriting the house I would not be in a position to comfortably pay her out until I'm well into my 40's. I have a bachelors in electronics and am working as a software engineer due to the rather low level coding taught/practiced within said degree.

No disrespect to the jobs of my father and grandfather, they did and do amazing work that is entirely out of my expertise and would take me years to learn let alone master to their degree. But when the family income bracket is moving higher and higher yet the ability to sustain a house is getting slimmer and slimmer something is seriously fucked up with the housing market.

Any family that has not sorted out housing inheritance will be forced to sell because the prices are so insane no one working even an average paying job will be able to reasonable pay out the "value" of the home to their siblings. Which will just force more and more people into renting because you simply don't afford a house in this market or at least not where I live.

Yet there if always mountains of money for ridiculous projects like superexpensive highways in the city or car subsidies. But building new affordable housing is always refused with an absurd excuse like "we don't want to distort free market principles".

This is the best summary I could come up with:

On that day, the single father from Afghanistan, who had been living in Germany for more than 16 years, received notice that his lease near Bonn was being terminated because the owner was apparently planning to use it.

Due to high interest rates and construction costs, the German government is far from achieving its ambitious goal of building 400,000 new homes a year, including 100,000 social housing units.

Peter Kox, managing director of the Deutschen Mieterbund Bonn/Rhein-Sieg/Ahr, told DW: "Almost 50% of people in the large cities of Düsseldorf, Cologne, and Bonn are now eligible for subsidized housing based on their income.

There is a reason why Chancellor Olaf Scholz says that housing is the most important social issue in Germany: It not only affects single-parent families, the unemployed, students, and refugees, but increasingly the middle class as well.

Now, he says, some members who Kox hasn't heard from for years are coming forward looking for a place to live: "For example, because their landlords is trying to get rid of them so that they can rent out the apartment again at a higher price."

At the same time, they warned of a "dangerous scenario in which a crisis in the housing construction sector could trigger a domino effect and cause massive damage to large parts of the economy."

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