Let our flats be!

Poor pensioners who worried about their higher and higher rents can now breath a sigh of relief. The government took a neutral stance on the parliament-proposed plan to slow down rent deregulation, which in practice means that MPs will pass it. But ministers do not deserve much applause for their social feeling. In fact, their sluggishness means failure. A failure for people who wanted to move for work, a failure for house owners, but also for the tenants themselves who will have to deal with the problem again sometime in the future. And we'll probably witness an epilogue at the court in Strasbourg. House owners suing the Czech Republic now have another argument why to demand dozens of billions in compensation for lost profits.

One day it might perhaps be a good question on entrance exams at universities of economics: In which sphere did the market still not work 20 years after the Velvet Revolution? The correct answer is - in the rented housing sector. The Czech housing open-air museum is inhabited by two types of beings. Th group of old residents who for some reason got the flats in the past and now pay low rents. The second group, let's call them the non-locals, do not have that piece of paper and paying rents therefore costs them much more. The gap between the two groups has been narrowing in recent years as rents have grown gradually, but the are locals still much better off than the non-locals. We don't know exactly…