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Hundreds demonstrate against high rents in Zurich
- thriftwy 3y agoHow do you lower rents without add more properties to market or reducing locale desirability?
- banhousing 3y ago[flagged]
- thriftwy 3y agoHow does that fix the supply issue if more people want to live in that place than available units number? I'm not sure why such economic pseudoscience claims are accepted.
- strohwueste 3y agoJust in case you're in a position to change anything about the housing market where you live: Change zoning rules. Incentives for co-living. Reduce flat sizes. Rebuilt office spaces. Or look to Vienna: a big stock of goverment-owned flats with low prices which makes it hard to charge more than those.
- banhousing 3y agoPseudoscience? That's rude. I answered your question in good faith and you take pot shots. Lame dude. To elaborate, if you eliminate investment property, AirBNBers and Blackrock liquidate their house holdings. The houses come from the previously off market investment properties.
- r00fus 3y agoYeah I am partly a YIMBY but if investors can just keep buying up all the new properties and rent them out for ludicrous amounts then rents will never go down. Extra capacity, if not protected from predation, will result in a cycle of high property values and rent.
- selectodude 3y agoDo you think that there are an infinite number of people that want to live in any particular city?
- banhousing 3y agoYou don't rent all the places. You buy all the places and limit the available supply to control the price of rent.
- selectodude 3y agoCornering the market on an entire city seems prohibitively expensive but hey, maybe somebody will roll in with a trillion dollar investment that has massive downside someday.
- r00fus 3y agoHave you read up on how software allows you to virtually do exactly that with other landlords? Discussed here on HN previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38114264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38114264
- krater23 3y agoYes, thats a good solution. Ban investments mean more or less ban renting houses. When no one can rent a house, no one can complain about a too high rent. Interested in the new living models that are coming then.
- Mountain_Skies 3y agoDepends on scale. During much of the pandemic, I rented a house from an elderly lady who owned one other rental property. She only asked for very modest rent increases as rents and property values skyrocketed because I always paid on time and fixed small things myself, which made me a low hassle tenant. Had I been renting from an institutional investor with thousands of properties, I'm betting my rent would have gone up the maximum they thought they could extract.
- ryan93 3y agoThankfully when i lived in lubbock, tx the landlords were much less greedy than my cali landlords
- strohwueste 3y agoGovernment Policy? Maybe a bit crazy for HN...
- glimshe 3y agoWhat kind of policies you believe would affect rents in the short to medium term? Progressive cities have tried all kinds of things, with little in terms of results.
- strohwueste 3y agoShort and medium? That's probably a tough ask besides subsidiaries. But also allow fast redevelopment of office space. In Germany there was and is the "Munich" effect. Zone too many office districts so office space is cheap and companies move there. So also more mixed use zoning for white color work places for short commutes
- Detrytus 3y agoSo what? government just orders lower rents for current renters? That might work short term, but in the longer one it will simply destroy the local property market. No one will be willing to build housing anymore, as it won't be profitable. The city will slowly gentrify and die.
- strohwueste 3y agoAs I posted below and also public transport as mentioned in other comments Change zoning rules. Incentives for co-living. Reduce flat sizes. Rebuilt office spaces. Or look to Vienna: a big stock of goverment-owned flats with low prices which makes it hard to charge more than those.
- mcntsh 3y agoIn Berlin they did this with the "Mietendeckel" and the result was unsurprising (supply shortages, black markets).
- 3y ago
- libertine 3y agoIf you give tax incentives for both people and businesses who start somewhere other than a highly desirable place. To the locals who live there as well of course. I don't think it should be about reducing local desirability, but give the conditions for other places to become more desirable.
- thriftwy 3y agoThere are international migrants as well. How do you make a town in rural Romania or Latvia as desirable and opportunity rich as Zurich? The weather is probably crappier there, for starters.
- somenameforme 3y agoAll you need are business/personal incentives. One extreme example of this is SEZs, Special Economic Zones. You set up a legal structure for region within your territory to be able to offer the sort of benefits one would normally have to seek out tax havens and legal loopholes to achieve. This motivates development and growth in these regions, which drives opportunity and expansion. The Shenzhen SEZ is one extremely successful example. [1] It was established as an SEZ in 1980 when it had fewer than 30k workers. By 2000 it had a labor force over 3 million. The current population (which is predictable difficult to measure given a massive migrant population) may be as high as 14 million. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen_Special_Economic_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen_Special_Economic_Zone
- bugglebeetle 3y agoYou add more properties by forcing sale of those owned for investment purposes to the state and operating them on a cost-recovery basis. Simultaneously, abolish most forms of zoning and have the state engage in home building directly. Landlordism, as Adam Smith himself identified, is a destructive, parasitic drag on economies that should be minimized at all costs. Otherwise, you end up with what we have now, Capital owners chasing after unproductive returns by limiting construction, bribing politicians, and generally making everyone else poorer and more miserable.
- thriftwy 3y agoI doubt that the state will be more efficient in building houses than private enterprises can if allowed to do so. If they are not being built and added on marked, the effective price will only crawl up. In case if Zurich, I imagine that supply is limited due to its geography as well, and of course by wanting to preserve the quality of life.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoIf the Swiss can build train tunnels through mountains on schedule, I’m fairly certain they can build some more apartments in Zurich.
- snovv_crash 3y agoPrivate companies build the train tunnels.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoNot really. Most have been built by subsidiaries of Swiss Federal Railways, which is a state-owned enterprise with extra steps.
- rando_dfad 3y ago> I doubt that the state will be more efficient in building houses than private enterprises can if allowed to do so Depends. If the profit is in more expensive housing, than private enterprise will bias towards that and ergo be less efficient at building lower-margin "affordable" housing. Ideally, in a perfect frictionless economy populated by spherical cows, yes, private enterprise will more efficiently allocate across the entire spectrum of market needs -- so in principle, I'm agreeing with you. But spherical cows make lousy roommates.
- gumballindie 3y agoYou reduce demand by letting people live and work where rent is affordable.
- lnsru 3y agoHelping to rent a room in apartment of a friend in Germany. Normally a room costs from 600€ in Munich. And it’s cheap. Decade ago same room was going for 300€. Small apartment goes for 1000+€. And for both room for 600€ or 1000€ apartment you get at least 50 applicants. That sounds crazy to me. I would go and protest too, luckily I moved away.
- air7 3y agoIf there are at least 50 applicants, arguably, perhaps the price is too low...
- katbyte 3y agoOr there is not enough housing driving prices up (which then makes everything more expensive)
- Throe8494905 3y agoQuite opposite! We need to bring more migrants, so there are 500 applicants. That will bring price down for sure!
- Helmut10001 3y agoRental prices in Germany are heavily controlled.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoThere's your problem. You can't regulate your way out of supply shortage by capping prices below their market value. Venezuela tired that, ask them how it's going. You either build more housing to math the demand, or you restrict the demand from the number of people coming to move in.
- Helmut10001 3y agoI said this without judgement as an answer to this comment: > If there are at least 50 applicants, arguably, perhaps the price is too low... Yes, prices are too low. Yes, you cannot increase prices. Status quo. Generally I agree to your point - if demand is high, prices will be high. People should move somewhere else.
- DrNosferatu 3y agoThe state provides Public Transport (trams, buses, etc.), it should also provide Public Housing - after all, it’s a Human Right. Furthermore, if Human Rights do not appeal to your Political Economic leanings, nevertheless I’m sure you can agree the state should provide a firefighting and police service. Police officers and firefighters need to live close to where they work. And, should be able to afford public transport, therefore: Public Housing.
- DrNosferatu 3y agoThe market fails to move people efficiently around a big urban clustering. Hence: Public Transport. As it is apparent worldwide - at least in the West - the market is also failing to house people efficiently and effectively. Hence: Public Housing. Should not cost more than one third of the resident’s liquid income. Start with university residences - build (or convert to) new in mass.
- cscurmudgeon 3y agoThis is rich. The market is not failing, the govt is failing by adding onerous regulation and giving into NIMBYism. And the solution is more govt intervention?
- Kamq 3y ago> Police officers and firefighters need to live close to where they work. And, should be able to afford public transport, therefore: Public Housing. This does not follow. You could make it an argument that essential services should be paid enough to live close to work, which would satisfy the criteria that you've laid out. The most you can conclude from what you've laid out is that something is wrong with the current system. Which, I think very few people would disagree with.
- katbyte 3y agoOk, be prepared to pay a ton more taxes to afford that, all to the benefit of landlords - now what about all the people needed to maintenance, groceries, schools, etc? Expensive housing is a problem for everyone even the people who own their home
- threeseed 3y agoCan we not post this sort of content on HN ? It isn't relevant. It offers no unique insight into what is happening. It's just a report on a protest.
- psychlops 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
- TooSmugToFail 3y agoActually, I like random things like this posted from time to time. Not because of the content itself, but because of the comments where I can often read relevant and thoughtful insight.
- rajnathani 3y agoSometimes understanding / contemplating the root cause of such hard socioeconomic issues can really help broaden one’s worldview.
- H8crilA 3y agoJust so you know weekend protests in Zurich are extremely common, people living in the city center sometimes don't even bother to look at them passing by their apartments. They are well secured and well scheduled, sometimes back-to-back with other protests, as one would expect from the Swiss. We also have zoning here, which as far as apartment price goes mostly interferes by limiting the maximum height of a building to just a few floors. ~All buildings have the same height. There's also price control which definitely does something to the market - I know this because the amount of applications per apartment lease contract is through the roof, and it's sometimes very hard to get an apartment even if you qualify (income) and apply to tens of them. But I don't know where would the prices be if price controls were lifted. (and yes, the rent here is too damn high)
- alephnerd 3y ago> They are well secured and well scheduled, sometimes back-to-back with other protests Whoa. That's pretty cool. It's similar in the UK I believe. Also vaguely reminds me of Speaker's Sqaure in Hyde Park. > We also have zoning here Why hasn't Zurich (or more like it's Canton's govt) expanded suburbs into the farmland surrounding it? For the size of city, it is quite small. And the southern portion towards Egg seems pretty flat and easy to build. Even with suburbs that have a fraction of the density that Zurich has, it would probably alleviate population pressures. I'm assuming local politics? Actually, how is local politics (sub-canton level) organized in CH?
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoYou actually can live in the suburbs, like Renens in my case when I was living in Lausanne. But your commute sucks so no one wants to, even with decent public transit people still want nice lives. But the suburbs are definitely an option (I don’t know specifically about Zurich). But another problem: the suburbs are actually nice and in demand also. So how far do you want to live from your job? Freiburg (works for Bern and Lausanne!)? It’s like, ok I’m going to commute a lot and finding a place to rent is still hard. And Switzerland is not not dense.
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