In June, the Tenants Association submitted their rent control initiative, with 140,048 signatures calling for lower rents. The Federal Council had to respond. Its response is a scandal, because its proposals achieve precisely the opposite and drive rents even higher. It’s a real outrage to tenants when the Federal Council proposes the following:
💣 The restriction on landlord profits is to be lifted: away from the currently legally mandated cost-based rent, towards market-based rent: free rein for landlords to raise rents.
📈 Rents are to be more closely linked to inflation: If healthcare costs or food prices rise, rents will increase accordingly. Rents would automatically rise without anything changing in your apartment.
Instead of setting limits on exorbitant rents, this will eliminate the last remaining protection against exploitative rents.
Sign the Tenants Association petition to withdraw these proposals, which are detrimental to all tenants: https://www.mietpreisexplosion-stoppen.ch/
Source: www.mieterverband.ch
Rents are already too expensive. Instead of finally taking countermeasures and providing relief for tenants, the Federal Council wants to exacerbate the problem.‼️
byu/Key_Classic_8722 inSwitzerland
Posted by Key_Classic_8722
28 Comments
As usual, expected. Instead of fixing the problem by improving bureaucracy around permits for new construction, free market path is chosen, except it’s still not free market. Supply will still be constrained and will not be able to expand due to existing problems but owners will be able to make more $
Yup, cows need to be milked.
How stupid. With higher inflation the rent should rather decrease. The salaries are only going lesser now a days.
Hi, welcome to Politics, where your opinion doesn’t matter and your money is ours!
The issue is not price, but scarcity.
Capping rent will just make the allocation lottery based instead of being “willingness to pay” based.
Either we increase supply, or we decrease demand
Wait… So if the prices of everything rise then rents will automatically go up as well? Wow, what a great idea! This is exactly what we need, inflation causing inflation.
The main problem is not the rent but the price of an apartment in this country. The rent is directly linked to it. When a 4 rooms apartment is minimum 1.2 million, there is no way you can have cheap rent.
This is such a stupid move by the Bundesrat… they are only ensuring that people vote for this.
Does this come with a concomitant move to make it easier to build new housing?
There’s nothing worse for housing than rent controls. You gotta fix the supply shortage, there’s no convenient way around it.
AI slop
Crazy that tjis counts as a “gegenvorschlag”😂
this seems to be a new trend, if somebody dares to question the federal council they get punished.
The best other example was the apprentices petition for more holidays and the federal council answering that instead they think about reducing the holidays of high schoolers.
The fact is that until we don’t increase the stock of rental units, rents will have a tendency to increase. Controls on rents or reduction of rental yields will only make it worse by disincentivise developers to build more.
I am not calling for full de-regulation, but to regulate even more is masochistic and will give the opposite of what you’re seeking
[Rent control doesn’t work](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1051137724000020).
It only reduces the price of housing for those that are rent-controlled. It actually has the opposite effect for average prices: because of rent-controls, housing construction slows down, which leads to a decrease in supply. While demand increases due to said rent-controls, this leads to exploding prices and exarcerbates the housing shortage.
There is tons of research that shows new developments actually [reduce](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354327303_Do_new_housing_units_in_your_backyard_raise_your_rents) rents.
If we want our policy to be evidence-based shouldn’t we focus on relaxing zoning, increasing density, and building more housing (state or private-owned, doesn’t matter both have positive effects).
Price control never ever ever work.
The restriction is a good thing, renting out should be only modestly profitable as it is a nonproductive asset. But to fix the housing crisis there is really only one and very simple solution.
Speed up the permits, lower the ability of people to resist and complain about new builds. Allow for buildings as high as the demand in the given location allows. I think I wrote this before but ppl/km2 in swiss cities is very low there shouldnt be any single houses in the central Kreises of the city of zurich. A simple way to get rid of them would be to allow for 8 story buildings everywhere and then just putting the land value tax based on the hypothetical rent of this building to be paid by the owners of the low density housing.
Now while this sounds very unfair to the owners of this house at first the reality is by changing what is allowed to be built the value of their land should increase significantly. But having the taxes be so high, maybe even with an additional low density housing tax that is applied, they will be forced to sell or build higher themselves. And then they may live on the top floor in their luxury 2 story apartment or buy a fancy house in th country side, but living in the city in a single family house is simply not something they should be allowed to do.
Now I dot want to plaster zurich with ugly high rises or soviet blocks like they did in the 60s designers
/planners that make sure buildings look city appropriate should still be very involved.
Rent control is great for people who already rent. But it is destroying the mobility in the housing market and diminishes available housing, making open market rents for new tenants even more unaffordable. There are several studies linking rent control to housing shortages. So I’m all for open markets in housing
Unfortunately, the FC is not wrong. The problem is between short term and long term effects. I‘m pretty sure that long term the FC‘s proposal would lower rent because the prospect of higher rent income would increase the number of houses/apartments built.
But it would take years, maybe even a decade, to show an effect.
In the mean time, renters would suffer more than is acceptable.
First, this Bundesrat absolutely sucks, to nobody’s surprise. Rent and insurance are probably the two biggest weights on people’s wallets, so they had an opportunity to directly help people. They chose not to. Second, the initiative was very clear in targeting abusive rents. They estimated the abusive amount that people pay across the country around billions of francs. BILLIONS! Third and last point, supply and demand do drive prices upward but we cannot let this stupid assumption accept abusive rents. There has to be accountability for greedy landlords and right now there is veeeery little of it.
Housing is crazy expensive in Switzerland. The main factor is that building new housing is highly restricted on all levels including very restricted buildable land because of various laws. We haven’t built that much housing at the same time as our population doubled. Yes LAT I’m talking about you !
I love free market pricing and supply and demand on things that people’s existence depends upon. /s
Or, I don’t know, stop that stupid shit of having big boxes of offices that people go to work with, to only a bare minimum.
Maybe if people don’t need to go to the office every day (COVID clearly taught us nothing). Maybe they won’t need to commute or live near or at city centres.
Further, making cities full of high rise buildings is at best a visual dystopia of grey and black and at worse asking for more crime and lower quality of life overall – those high rises will accommodate more cars underneath so more traffic.
Half of the country is scattered with small communities that lack basic infrastructure but could be improved by more families coming in, in more homey environments, people could work remote and maybe meet once or twice a month with colleagues.
Or… choose to fight an impossible fight in places that have little room to spare.
Roughly 70% of the 246 Swiss parliamentarians own their own home. Questions?
But is rent really a problem? The place I am living still lists all other open apartments at the same price as they did when we moved in over 10 years ago. Other apartments in the same area are all in a similar range. If everyone wants to have an apartment in a major city prices will have no limit and I dont see why anything should have to be done about it.
Rent control is a dumb, not working misguided policy that failed over and over again.
What is needed, is to create incentives to build more. No rent control will change the fact that there are more people looking for living space than there is available living space.
What needs to change:
– ease building regulations, expand zoning, restrict NIMBY’ism
Switzerland is a free market and a democracy. If you don’t like this, take the initiative and get a voting in place. Nothing is stopping you.
Why the sign page is only German and french? We are missing one language