As a result, Berlin is not an airline hub. It's difficult to find direct flights from the U.S. and locals complain about compromised travel across the continent. A new Brandenburg airport has been in the works for decades, and was expected to open five years ago. But construction snafus and major cost overruns have delayed completion now put off until the end of the decade. Locals are skeptical that it will be finished even by then and say when it finally opens its design will not meet the latest airport configurations or offer the most modern amenities.

Without an airport hub, the German capital will struggle to become a true gateway city, business will concentrate in Frankfurt and Munich, and Berlin will rank behind. That can be good for residents—rents are cheap by Euro standards, food and hotels are relative bargains too. The pace of the city is relatively slow—sidewalks never seem too crowded, traffic jams even at rush hours are uncommon. And the mass transit within the city reaches most neighborhoods efficiently and quickly, eliminating the need for cars to get around.

And talking about airports—historic Tempelhof, used by the U.S. to break the Communist blockade in the late 1940s at the start of the Cold War, is now a park. You can stroll on old runways and use the greenspaces for soccer (football) games and picnics, which residents do in droves. That's an inspired option to improve city life, and much better than the alternative of turning the expanse into development tracts. There are plenty of cranes elsewhere in town to provide developers and investors with opportunities.

Over the past two decades, Berlin has become a hot place to visit, re-emerging from Cold War isolation, dealing openly with the horrors of its Nazi past, and rebuilding and re-inventing after the destruction wrought by World War II. Now it is becoming a hot place for investors, looking for value in a world capital that has been somewhat overlooked.

The Wall, what's left of it, has turned into a prime tourist attraction including a mural gallery. Various holocaust related attractions and the museum on the site of the Gestapo headquarters hold special attention. But the city also features great museum art, historic sites, palaces, and parks, including the forest like Tiergarten adjacent to the business-government district.

Business runs off the federal government, expanding tourism, and increasingly some tech and digital start-ups. The food is meat and potatoes—not particularly creative or tasty outside the Turkish outposts—and the weather is typically gray for Northern Europe, especially in fall and winter. It's a good walking town and there are plenty of opportunities to drink beer, of course, and wine—well, German wines, not so much.

But enough with the travelogue. The city has a major problem—substandard airports. Airports where you must walk out onto the tarmac and up portable stairs to get into planes. It's more like arriving in Havana and quite a come down from now typical state-of-the-art airline terminals that you find in Europe from Copenhagen, Oslo, Amsterdam and even Reykjavik to Paris, London, and Frankfurt. At least, mass transit—the S-Bahns and U-Bahns—reaches Schonefeld, one of the two current airport options, but Tegel, the other airport, requires bus and subway combinations to arrive into downtown absent hailing a quick cab ride into the city. It reminds me of LaGuardia or worse. And that's not good.

As a result, Berlin is not an airline hub. It's difficult to find direct flights from the U.S. and locals complain about compromised travel across the continent. A new Brandenburg airport has been in the works for decades, and was expected to open five years ago. But construction snafus and major cost overruns have delayed completion now put off until the end of the decade. Locals are skeptical that it will be finished even by then and say when it finally opens its design will not meet the latest airport configurations or offer the most modern amenities.

Without an airport hub, the German capital will struggle to become a true gateway city, business will concentrate in Frankfurt and Munich, and Berlin will rank behind. That can be good for residents—rents are cheap by Euro standards, food and hotels are relative bargains too. The pace of the city is relatively slow—sidewalks never seem too crowded, traffic jams even at rush hours are uncommon. And the mass transit within the city reaches most neighborhoods efficiently and quickly, eliminating the need for cars to get around.

And talking about airports—historic Tempelhof, used by the U.S. to break the Communist blockade in the late 1940s at the start of the Cold War, is now a park. You can stroll on old runways and use the greenspaces for soccer (football) games and picnics, which residents do in droves. That's an inspired option to improve city life, and much better than the alternative of turning the expanse into development tracts. There are plenty of cranes elsewhere in town to provide developers and investors with opportunities.