Since the tenant has a large financial incentive to line up a new tenant to move in the day he moves out, and since the landlord has no similar incentive to hustle, it’s wise for the tenant to find a good replacement tenant who will pass the credit check, sign a lease, pay a deposit, and follow through with the plan to move in.

“For Germany’s major cities, current rules haven’t stopped rent levels reaching ever higher spikes. In Munich, Hamburg, and Berlin, rents have been skyrocketing (by German standards), with landlords both increasing rents on existing contracts by the legal maximum and using breaks between contracts to hike their charges unfettered. Since 2007, Berlin rents have risen by 35 percent, markedly higher than the German national average rise of 15 percent. The result has been A STRING OF EVICTIONS of longstanding residents from their communities, and many people are seeing the range of apartments in their price range shrinking.”

So far, yet so close.

Also, from the article, it seems that the high renters rate is due to a housing stock destroyed during the war and terrible lending conditions after the war that made renting obligatory. (I’m adding: most likely, the banning of ownership in the East German republic until 1989 probably helped boost renter’s habits and increase the ratio of renters there as well). But renter’s share of the population is decreasing very steadily since the 1960s and the trend is obvious: home ownership is on the rise.

The article provides interesting explanation, in a comparison with the UK (emphasis mine):

“Britain also imposed stringent RENT and construction cost CAPS on developers of public housing… housing quality suffered…. Germany also LOOSENED REGULATION OF RENTAL CAPS sooner than many other countries,according to economist Michael Voightländer…By contrast in the UK, harsher regulation on rented housing stretched well into the 1980s, pushing landlords to cut back on maintenance and driving the quality of housing down still further.”

Now, it looks like Germany offers more protection than the UK, but still the rent caps are not that stringent: rent increases are capped at 15% over 3 years. For comparison, in SF the rent increase is capped much lower. Over the last 30 years, the only years where the increase could have been higher than 15% was 1982-1984. It’s usually way below that. Averaging over the last 12 years, it has been capped at 1.28%/year (way below the inflation of 2.21% on average over the same period).

And, regarding your line about people spending too much of their income on housing in the US, the article shows that German people pay A LARGER fraction of their income on housing than the US (I guess homeownership at least cuts the middleman out of the transaction between a person and his living place).