Der Schweizer Mieterverband hat eine Volksinitiative gegen zu hohe Mieten lanciert. Die Initiative will das Prinzip der Kostenmiete verankern und marktwirtschaftliche Elemente aus dem Mietrecht verbannen. Zudem sieht sie eine automatische Mietpreiskontrolle vor.
Vermieter dürften künftig die Miete nicht mehr mit Hinweis auf Orts- oder Quartiersüblichkeiten erhöhen, sagte Verbandspräsident Michael Töngi gegenüber der Schweizer Nachrichtenagentur Keystone-SDA. Er bestätigte Informationen der NZZ am Sonntag.
Der Mieterverein hat den Initiativtext angenommen. Er wurde dem Bundeskanzleramt zur Vorprüfung vorgelegt.
Die Initiative sieht zudem eine automatische und regelmäßige Mietpreiskontrolle vor. Wird die Initiative umgesetzt, müsste der Gesetzgeber klären, durch wen, wann und wie genau. Mieter seien bei Streitigkeiten oft auf sich allein gestellt, so der Mieterbund. Viele seien nicht in der Lage, das Verfahren durchzuziehen oder wollten keinen Streit riskieren, da sie vom Vermieter abhängig seien.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-politics/initiative-launched-against-excessively-high-swiss-rents/83830274?utm_source=multiple&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=news_en&utm_content=o&utm_term=wpblock_highlighted-compact-news-carousel
Von BezugssystemCH1903
29 Kommentare
The execution appears to be the problem.
Why should new rental houses be built if the owners are not allowed to make a lot of money with it? Why should the owners renovate old apartments if they can’t demand more rent afterwards?
Edit: 2 more points:
A lot of our pension funds are holding the houses, for the sake of our pensions they need to make money.
The prices are high because the demand is high. How do they want to control the demand? Do we have even more demand for apartments?
Completly braindead. It would literally make the problem worse.
The problems stuff like this can potentially create: housing companies stop building houses, as it becomes unprofitable. This definitely needs to be considered. Less houses built would be a terrible consequence.
I think the renter protection and rent control is already pretty strong in CH.
We need more housing, not more rent control.
The state needs to build more subsidized housing. More permits. Force to build houses with more appartments in it (build higher etc.).
they should correct the root of the problem instead of putting on a bandage. The growth of population and the lack of housing need serious solution.
Rent control is a failure pretty much every time it is applied.
Sure, it helps in the short-term, but it completely wrecks new development projects and stifles supply. It also leads to old appartments never being renovated, and just left in a poor state.
The only real solution is to make it easier and cheaper to build more units, and have some percentage of those units being subsidized to provide housing for those on the bottom wrungs of the earning ladder.
One of the best examples of this being done successfully is Vienna, where there is a large pool of high quality subsidized units, keeping overall renting prices relatively low for an otherwise expensive area in an expensive country.
It’s like all previous initiatives of that kind (with one recently succeeding, sadly).
* *“X is too expensive, X has to be cheaper“.*
* *“If the initiative is implemented, the legislator would have to clarify how exactly“.*
And just like previous ones, the claim is that it will be paid by „them“. „Government“, „rich people“, „corporations“, anything, but definitely, we repeat, definitely not you, the ordinary citizen. Pinky promise 😁
It’s a move in the right direction, Altough there’s much more to be done regarding Housing rights in switzerland.
This will lead to it being impossible to find a flat.
So many people bashing the initiative and defending owners without understanding shit. 1- Yes we should abandon the “neighborhood” rule for increases. That only incentivizes unspoken cartels, it is enough for every big owner to keep steadily raising prices and then say “well, the whole neighborhood is at this level so it’s justified”. The demand is inelastic (people always need a roof, and a lot want to come here and need a place) so the market cannot cure this unbalance of power alone! 2- I also don’t like the argument “if owners can’t make lots money out of it they will not build/renovate”, guess what: they would still make money, just a little less. Also, that would make the price of land and buildings go down, so that they would become available for purchase to the general population and not only for Swiss-fucking-Roc or childless couples working at UBS/Pictet/Roche. Then maybe the owner-to-renters ratio could become like in the rest of the world. It’s absurd how nobody sees that Switzerland’s housing market is a world anomaly that blatantly favours the riches.
They just need make building housing cheaper and quicker,… If supply exceeds demand prices will sink.
Would fail miserably and every mainstream economist can tell you why
Good.
Now disallow NIMBY-ism in the context of building infrastructure and housing and make new buildings deprecate (i.e. housing is not to be treated as an investment asset), similarly to how Japan handles it.
The housing problem would be solved within 10 years.
Rent controls (in whatever form they take) reduce the supply of properties. There are already fairly good systems in place to keep tabs on rental prices. The market needs more supply, not less.
I am completely clueless, just shocked by the price increase within the last ~5 years.
Yay, rent control, it has never worked in theory, it has never worked in practice but every idiot with half a brain cell is in favor of it.
This is nonsense. As someone who rents out apartments, I acknowledge my bias. However, initiatives like this have never worked in any country or city. For a local example, look at Basel, which already struggles with this issue.
If you are not a large property owner, renting out apartments is not worthwhile compared to selling them to a pension fund and investing the money in an ETF. The main argument is that renting out is less risky, which is true if you own 50+ properties. But for anyone with 1-5 properties, it simply isn’t. Rent is already capped, and this cap prevents you from breaking even if an apartment is empty for a month. It gets worse if a tenant stops paying or if the deposit doesn’t cover the cost of repainting or damage.
Feel free to downvote me for being an „evil and greedy landlord,“ but this won’t solve any of our problems. It merely promotes small landlords, who are usually already cheaper, to sell their properties. It also discourages investing in renovations or building new properties.
>In the future, landlords should no longer be able to increase rents with reference to local or neighborhood custom, the association’s president Michael Töngi told the Swiss News Agency Keystone-SDA
This is already illegal, the initiative only exists because the existing law isn’t sufficiently enforced. Therefore it’s not even a discussion of rent control or making landlording „less attractive“, it’s simply closing the gap that the current system has.
Switzerland doesn’t have a system of market rent, it’s a system of actual costs + reference interest rate + 2% of profit for the landlord. So currently they can make a 3.5% net profit, which is super generous for an effectively risk-free and tax-subsidized investment like real estate.
There is only one solution for the housing crisis: Increasing the supply. It is absolutely ridiculous just how difficult it has become to build anything in most places because every NIMBY has a vast array of options to halt or delay construction projects. There are cases where the objections take 10 years or more to get resolved. It is staggering to see how many people have nothing better to do than to fight all and every construction project in their area. (No joke: During a municipal meeting, a grown ass woman started crying and whining like a child when a construction project was introduced. Said construction project wasn’t even in the same place where this woman lived. She threw a tantrum in front of us when the project was approved and immediately went to a law firm to send as many objections as possible to delay and cancel the project. It has been 5 years and the project still hasn’t started with the building phase due to her objections)
Rent control failed in Ireland and Sweden. When are they going to learn?
Prices can not be fixed artificially. Sparsity is balanced by price, and those who are willing to pay correspondingly can live in the center of zurich. If you offered all apartments for 100.- per month, nobody could ever move to zurich because there would be exactly zero apartments free, because suddenly everyone will find that they can easily live in zurich, and they don’t have to do any tradeoffs, so everyone will do that.
Fixing prices artificially will lead to much more, much harder to fix issues down the line. The only sustainable ways out of sparsity are either increasing the amount of apartments by building more and higher houses, or lowering demand by curbing immigration.
What people forget here is that about 50% of rental properties are owned by private landlords. Only around a third is owned by the „greedy“ real estate companies.
What i think is going to happen if this initiative gets passed: Most private landlords (except maybe the ones owning dozens of properties) will likely be incentivized to sell their property, because rent control is a major headache for the small landlord that owns one or two apartments. Also, these landlords lack the large portfolio and the financial means of a large corporate landlord, so they have even less incentive to invest into their properties – or to rent them out at all. But they have to still deal with all the financial risk, without the portfolio and money needed to alleviate/distribute that risk over a large amount of properties (like the corporate owners can do).
One can already see that in Basel-Stadt, where the cantonal rent control initiative was mainly accepted (and also „advertised“ with this argument) due to the greedy big (institutional) landlords maximizing profits – the actual rent control measures mainly (and overly drastic) affect smaller private landlords. Rent control measures in that canton are already quite extreme, e.g. the landlord cannot even install a washing machine in the apartment at the tenants(!) request (with both parties agreeing(!) in advance on a small rent increase for the machine) without having to get this approved (with expensive fees) by the cantonal rent control authority.
So, what do you expect private landlord will do, when they have (in addition to the already existing administrative burden of having to deal with complicated tenancy law as a private person) suddenly also this rent control stuff to deal with? They‘ll probably sell their properties to the highest bidder, which likely is someone wanting to live in the place themselves.
So the (unintended) sideeffect of this initiative is that there will be even less apartments on the rental market, due to what i just mentioned and also due to less construction from the corporate landlords (also due to rent control).
And the private landlords that keep their property are probably gonna be forced to think twice about every renovation and investment, thus leading to apartments (looking at it overall statistically) being older in less good shape – which the tenants likely are also not going to appreciate.
The better solution would be to put some limits on immigration, make construction less burdensome (e.g. get rid of some of the crazier requirements that lead to major construction costs, like overly specific technical norms specifying everything into the last detail and with a lot of times requiring unnecessary „features“, easier permit process with fewer involved government authorities, incentivize financially certain things like coop owning apartments, subsidies for climate friendly heating, solar systems, etc.), incentivize new constructiom of rental properties, and maybe even incentivize owning an apartment/house for personal use (living there yourself) so that the percentage of renters (vs. lives-there-themselves-owners) goes down overall.
There are A LOT of low density, high value land where developing is not allowed in Switzerland. This is usually where rich people live, which means they don’t want to see it change.
Upzoning those places should be the number one priority to fix the housing shortage. This way housing will get built with little or no subsidy, given that those places are in high demand.
Instead the current approach is to build heavily subsidized apartments in the worst available land, far from the center. This costs a fortune to the government because this land is too crappy to be developed on its own without subsidy.
eliminate rent control and let people build
Another way taken away from the market to adjust the price. It’s a bandage to a real problem that is not solved that way. Build more apartments or have less renters, anything else doesn’t solve the problem.
Personally i‘d like to have a rechenbeispiel to somewhat understand the landlord‘s situation
As i live in an old city house with 8 tenants that pay 2000.- monthly i always imagine my landlord swimming in money
How much profit is a landlord making from rent? 10%? 50%?
Living in my apartment for 10years i paid him over 200k and i was recently arguing with him to replace a broken lamp as it’s „too expensive“ to call an electrician…
How’s that possible?
It’s funny nobody wants to address the bureaucratic nightmares of actually building flats in Switzerland.
NZZ and other media had good reports on those. You have 100s of pages you have to hand in regarding building codes, environmental protection and noise emissions (vs. two dozens of pages in the 1980s). Then you have the neighbors or some Verein blocking the project because the roof is flat, color not appropriate, building to high or simply because they have the right to do so and exercise it. This has gotten completely out of hand and because the monetary stakes are so high, parties can essentially blackmail builders. In some cases projects are blocked for 5+ years and instead of legally solving it, the builder simply solves the issues by paying up to the parties blocking the project because it is quicker than waiting to go through all the different courts. In one of the most expensive places in the world, can you imagine how much income gets lost simply by delaying these kind of projects? And then add up all the money flowing into pockets of unproductive bureaucrats and lawyers.
That on one hand explains why only large developers (who are cash rich and have the legal know-how) will embark on any large scale building projects. It also explains why rents are so high: limited supply and developers will factor in the losses and costs associated with the legal proceedings and pass on as much as possible as rents paid by us.
I’d also point out that all of this is not only an issue for the „greedy large capitalist“ developers, but also for all the cooperatives in Zurich. NIMBYs block tons of projects.
Within a small country, with free land scarcity, with heavily regulated construction industry and strong unions, real estate (and rent) is really hard to make low. Even with the help of a referendum.
The result of banning market elements from the rental market is insufficient supply which has been proven again and again and again.
It’s the wrong policy.
The right policy is ensuring that enough houses are built to deal with the number of immigrants.
The reason rents are going up is too many people chasing too few houses.
Knee-jerk reaction initiative, nothing else. It will make it even worse and push ownership towards corporations. We see the negative effects of such knee-jerk ractions in basel or even worse in other places like germany.
What we need is MORE affordable space, not less. Prevent bonzen and mega-corporations from tearing down affordeable places. Right now the richer the easier it is to replace them with a luxus-villa. Just two years ago a friends had to move out of an perfect and cheap place so the whole multi-family building can be torn down and replace with some luxury buildings which will be empty for the coming years.
What we need is help to build more affordable space. Maybe even prevent mega-corps from buying up all spaces too and let normal people or the city own them instead. And replace brain-dead regulations which prevents sustainable methods with regulations that actually help. I’ve seen how Basels knee-jerk reactions prevents responsible homeowners from installing better material or solar-cells on roofs because it „hurts“ the city image.