Olympische Sommerspiele und Stadtentwicklung: Der Fluch des Goldes?

 Dr. Nicolai Wendland

Die Olympischen Sommerspiele sind das größte Sportereignis der Welt. Etwa 4,7 Milliarden Zuschauer sahen zuletzt die Spiele in Bejing 2008. Die Zuschauerzahlen für die Spiele 2012 in London werden in Kürze erwartet. Die Diskussionen um eine eventuelle zukünftige Bewerbung entflammen auch in Berlin erneut und entfachen Mal für Mal die Gemüter der konträr gelagerten Interessengruppen. Befürworter proklamieren neben positiven Entwicklungen des lokalen Arbeitsmarktes und der überregionalen Wirtschaft im Allgemeinen auch regelmäßig Effekte für den Tourismus sowie einen beachtlichen, weltweiten Imagegewinn, der weitere Investitionen nach sich ziehen soll. Zudem werden potentielle Infrastruktur- und weitere städtische Gestaltungsmaßnahmen positiv hervorgehoben.

Kritische Stimmen stützen sich hingegen vor allem auf die immensen Kosten und versuchen damit, einer möglichen Bewerbung entgegenzuwirken. Die entsprechende Summe für die Austragung in Athen 2004 wird z.B. auf über 8 Milliarden Euro geschätzt und soll die Schwächung der griechischen Wirtschaft erheblich vorangetrieben haben. Montreal, als Gastgeber der Spiele 1976, benötigte etwa 3 Jahrzehnte, um die entstandenen Schulden zu tilgen. Tat-sächlich konnten bisherige Forschungsarbeiten in ihrer Tendenz nur sehr schwache bis gar keine Effekte auf Arbeitsmärkte, Tourismus und die wirt-schaftliche Entwicklung nachweisen, die die entsprechenden Kosten recht-fertigen würden. Eine vollständige Erfassung des gesamten Arsenals an Einflüssen blieb jedoch aus Gründen der Messbarkeit – bis jetzt – aus. 

In einer aktuellen Studie habe ich in Zusammenarbeit mit Volker Nitsch zum ersten Mal einen aggregierten Gesamteffekt aller Olympischen Sommerspiele seit 1896 auf die Gastgeberstädte untersucht. Die Analyse relativer Wachs-tumsraten der Bevölkerung gibt dabei an, ob eine Stadt im Vergleich zu anderen Städten nach Ausrichtung der Spiele schneller oder langsamer wächst. In der Stadtökonomie wurde in den letzten Jahrzehnten nachgewiesen, dass Städte, die ihren Einwohnern einen erhöhten wahrgenommenen Nutzen bieten (wie etwa durch bessere Infrastruktur, mehr Arbeitsplätze oder auch ein Gefühl des Lokalpatriotismus), eine erhöhte Nachfrage nach Wohnraum schaffen. Diese lässt sich u.a. über das Wachstum einer Stadt messen. Wenn also das Ausrichten der Spiele in seiner Gesamtheit einen positiven Effekt auf die Gastgeberstadt ausübt, dann sollte sich dies über die relativen Wachstumsraten der Städte im Zeitablauf zeigen. Interessanterweise erkennt man jedoch eine andere Tendenz: Tatsächlich wachsen Gastgeberstädte nach den Spielen deutlich langsamer. Das deutet stark darauf hin, dass olympische Spiele eher negative Gesamteffekte auf die Stadtentwicklung haben.

Nun bleibt anzumerken, dass dies nicht bedeutet, dass eine Stadt unter keinen Umständen eine Bewerbung einreichen sollte. Die Ausrichtung der Spiele vermag es, bereits durchgeführte Maßnahmen der Stadtentwicklung wirkungsvoll zu vermarkten, wie es im Falle von Barcelona (1992) geschah. Außerdem lassen sich einzelne innerstädtische Aufwertungseffekte nicht leugnen.  Jedoch sollten sich Befürworter der Sache darüber im Klaren sein, dass die gesammelten Forschungsergebnisse darauf hinweisen, dass die enormen Kosten möglicherweise nicht durch nachfolgende positive Entwicklungsimpulse aufgefangen werden können.

Rents are going up – what can we do?

Gabriel Ahlfeldt

The Berlin Senate Department just released a new Mietspiegel. The Tagesspiegel reported and Christiane Scholz and Sevrin Waights commented in this blog. Rents go up – that's bad for the poor – and we need someone to blame.

So we have – or are running into – an affordability problem. While it is easy to complain about a housing affordability problem, it is more complicated to do something about it. So, realistically, what can we do to shift rents? Where do market rents come from? Obviously, rents, as any price, are an outcome of demand and supply. Hence, to lower rents, we can
a) reduce demand
b) increase supply
c) regulate the market.

What about a)? Can you prevent people from “demanding” housing space in a neighborhood? I think yes, you probably can – cut down school expenditure, stop cleaning roads and let public spaces rotten away. If that does not help, stop police and fire services. You see where this is leading...

What about b) Build more housing units, or grant permissions to (re)develop. With more housing provided, prices come down (unless demand is completely elastic). However, in most downtown areas you won’t fix an affordability problem by filling some empty plots. You will need to increase densities. But what do you think about residential high rise buildings around Kollwitzplatz in Prenzlauer Berg? Alternatively, should we get rid of open spaces? Who needs a “Volkspark” that most people don’t use for most of the year because it is too cold anyway? You see, that’s not that easy either.

To see the problem – I just gave a presentation at the University of Aberdeen showing (among other things) how historic (heritage listed) buildings in Berlin exhibit positive external benefits because of an increase in demand by people who like them. At the same time, they constrain supply (less floor space per land area). That means we could solve our affordability problem by replacing them with modern, functional, and dense housing units. You don’t like that vision?

So c) – regulate.
I understand the main problem is that the poor can’t afford to live in their preferred central “Kiez”, but we want to keep the social mix alive. So, again, what can we do?
Well, we can quite easily protect renters from increasing rents in the short run by rent regulation. Effectively, that’s what we are doing already. While, realistically, it takes some time before owners can pass on an increase in market rents to their tenants, you can, of course, always do more. However, this does not seem like a particularly targeted policy as all tenants benefit irrespectively from their economic background. And what happens if the gap between market and regulated rent is large enough? Landlords will offer their tenants a premium to vacate their flats – and guess who will take the offer – the rich or the poor?
So why not eliminate the market rent entirely and fix rents for vacant flats as well? The problem is, do you really think a landlord, even with the same rent, would not give preference to some tenants over others based on their social background? And don’t you think people would find a way to establish secondary markets?
Of course, you could push the system a step further and allocate tenants to regulated flats centrally, but maybe we don’t want to say “good-by” to property rights, not?

So maybe the other way round... If the poor can’t afford their preferred neighborhood, why don’t we give them more money so they can? The problem is (apart from the question where the money should come from) – what do you think this will do to demand (see a)? Yes, demand will go up – and – what does this do to rents? Right, you push the problem from the poorest to the somewhat less poor.
Another option, can’t we build affordable housing to get a social mix? We take money from private developers or force them to build affordable housing for the poor – just like in the UK! Great idea, but private developers don’t like the idea very much and prefer using their money for something else instead (by the way – private renters usually don’t like the idea either). Looking at housing affordability in the UK I don’t need to tell you that the system does not work very well.

So what can we do? I’m open to suggestions, but – I’m afraid – apart from preventing sever misallocations (e.g. holiday apartments that are empty for most of the year) – probably not too much.
If you look into research by my colleagues at the Spatial Economics Research Center you find that social inclusion, if at all, happens at a very early stage, i.e. primary (and perhaps secondary) education. Whatever we can do to improve chances of people to escape a “social trap” in first instance will be well spent money. We need to acknowledge that our society produces severe inequalities, but also that it’s hard to fix them with the housing market…


Gabriel Ahlfeldt is
-Lecturer in Urban Economics and Land Development at the London School of Economics
-Director of URBANCONTEXT Institute for Urban and Regional Research
-Affiliate of the Spatial Economics Research Center
-Director of the Urban Economics Group at the Center for Metropolitan Studies

Berlin Mietspiegel

Christiane Scholz and Sevrin Waights

The Tagesspiegel reported on the recently released “Mietspiegel 2011” for Berlin. It states an average rent of 5.21 €/s.qm. and a growth of almost 8 % since 2009. The senator for urban development, Ingeborg Junge-Reyer, trys to conciliate this finding by indicating that since 2000 the growth is only about 2.5 % per year on average. Apart from the ridiculous excuse that Munich, Stuttgart and Hamburg still have much higher rents this statistic doesn´t take one important finding from urban economics research into account – or maybe is hiding it. 

The Mietspiegel indicates local comparative rents for flats with similar characteristics. It´s developed from different housing characteristics such as size, amenities, building age and ‘neighbourhood quality’. This seems sophisticated and transparent at the first glance because everybody can find his/her ‘neighbourhood quality’ by looking up his/her own street in a table. This allows for comparisons of individual rents with the average for their level of neighbourhood quality. But within any level, if you look closely, you will find that very different rents are payed for comparable flats.

The problem is that there are only three level of neighbourhood quality and that these only take into account a limited number of characteristics. The Mietspiegel report does little to acknowledge important general findings from URBANCONTEXT research: The nearer a residence is located to the Central Business District (CBD) the higher are land values and accordingly rents. This is because of the scarcity of space. The same applies for the proximity to a transport station (because travel time to the CBD and other employment centres is shorter).

Hence one important pattern is concealed: downtown becomes increasingly expensive and above some social groups. It becomes some kind of exclusive residence for highly paid employees and the well off. And the innercity ring probably more and more – as Andrej Holm writes in his blog – is free of people who receive benefits. But who cares? Berlin still has around 100.000 tenantless flats! These exist mainly in the outskirts, where people who receive Hartz IV have perfect opportunity structures to improve their situation (countryside, more tenantless flats, no jobs, more beneficiaries, few neighbourhood resources). There they can live among themselves (model: banlieus in Paris) and the problem is solved. Two birds killed with one stone. Congratulations, senator!