Agricultural land here in the Netherlands sells at 6 euro per m2. With a single stroke of a pen that ground can become 300 euro per m2, when the municipality decides you can build a house there.
Same process in Germany. There is more than enough space. Problem is the price of plots is kept artificially high by municipalities, because they rely on the easy money it provides to finance their projects.
> Plot values have doubled BECAUSE OF regulations!
Hard disagree here. Munich, Berlin and Hamburg simply don't have much land in their borders any more. In Munich, we only have two major unpopulated areas left - the SEM Nord (900 ha, 50.000 people) and SEM Nordost (600 ha, 30.000 people) [1], and the currently under construction projects Freiham (25.000 people) and Bayernkaserne (15.000 people).
The opposition to these projects does have valid points, too: a city as large as Munich absolutely needs recreational areas for the populace as well as green areas for micro-climate and recreation, and the amount of both is really really low - the traffic to the existing lakes or the nearby Bavarian Alps is already immense and the areas are all struggling with the regional-tourist population issues like overcrowded trains, trash being left everywhere including in natural reserves or on farm land [2], overcrowded parking lots and vandalism [3], leading to sometimes outright violence against tourists from Munich [4].
"Just build more dense housing" may sound like an easy way out, but (too) dense housing has immense followup costs as well as all these people have to have other options in their lives than slave away as corporate drones and sleep. Otherwise, you end up with Japan-style psychological issues.
Take this area, plenty of plots now housing cows. Distance to city centre (by car!) is 20 minutes.
Same thing to the North West, in between Munich, Grobenzell, Puchheim...
Buddy you are buying into the horsecrap being told by current homeowners. "It's full!"... Nope, not really. Just like in the Netherlands, about 50% of land in Germany is farmland. And even outside of big cities like Amsterdam and Munich there's plenty of space left. But you're not allowed to build there, let alone build high apartment complexes...
> Take this area, plenty of plots now housing cows. Distance to city centre (by car!) is 20 minutes.
That area is precisely the site of the SEM Nordost [0], one of the two major remaining new construction areas. And as you can see on that newspaper map, it's the border of the city - the area to the east is already Aschheim territory. Munich cannot build outside of its borders, no matter how much farmland there is.
> Just like in the Netherlands, about 50% of land in Germany is farmland.
Uh, yeah, we have to grow the food we eat somewhere, Germany has over 80 million people to feed. We already import way too much food from elsewhere, especially the Amazon rainforest where beef for export to Europe is made on burned down rainforest area.
The territory of the city of Munich is already full, and you completely ignored my last point above, that a city also needs green areas for fresh wind to come into the city, recreational areas for the people, and that high-rises and other highly dense developments bring their own problems with them.
On other hand if municipality is struggling to attract people in Finland, they will give those plots of lands for essentially free. Or that is nominal cost of 1€ . Actually transaction happens when construction begins.
Then again those prices are in dying areas with little going on.
Agricultural land here in the Netherlands sells at 6 euro per m2. With a single stroke of a pen that ground can become 300 euro per m2, when the municipality decides you can build a house there.
Same process in Germany. There is more than enough space. Problem is the price of plots is kept artificially high by municipalities, because they rely on the easy money it provides to finance their projects.