Why are less affluent tenants evicted?

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What does it take to live? You have to build houses, maintain them and manage properties. Let’s add: The annual expenditure for new housing construction and conversion amounts to 30 billion Swiss francs. There’s also about 4.5 billion for architects, civil engineers and the like. And 2.7 billion francs for maintenance work.

According to the cost statistics of the Zurich building societies, the administration plus taxes were CHF 1,050 per flat and year. If we round this amount generously to CHF 2,000 and multiply by the 4.7 million apartments in Switzerland, we get CHF 9.4 billion, or a total of CHF 46.6 billion, or about 7 percent of GDP.

10,000 francs per square meter

That’s it for the relatively modest economic costs. There is also an element of redistribution – taxes that landlords can charge for temporary use of their land. They are responsible for Swiss households spending 80 billion francs on housing (excluding energy) in 2020 instead of 46.6 billion.

There are also the amounts that those who are looking for an apartment have to pay when buying. In the city of Zurich, the average cost of one square meter of construction land is around CHF 10,000. So far, no official body has dared to set an exact figure for annual land rent. Roughly estimated, it should have a decent amount of 50 billion francs, about twice the revenue from direct federal taxes.

Fire less affluent tenants

But that’s not all: landowners can only handle such high prices because first, global labor markets and our settlement policy provide them with a steady stream of financially strong tenants and buyers. Second, because tenancy law allows less affluent tenants to evict. But what benefits the landlords harms democracy.

This requires citizens who are committed to local issues and feel responsible. This requires a certain degree of inactivity, and a little love of home wouldn’t hurt either. Now land speculation is displacing some homeless location optimizers and others. sand drifting everywhere. Hard times for democracy.

Loneliness is the biggest health risk

But mobility, enforced by land speculation, not only undermines democracy but also undermines prosperity. Even today, the lion’s share of the work (without money) is done in the family and in the neighborhood. However, the productive power of these informal networks depends on the settled life.

Those who are removed from their traditional places of residence lose important parts of their social capital and productive forces. The more often and later you have to change your place of residence, the greater the risk of loneliness. As we know, loneliness is the biggest health risk before smoking, alcoholism and obesity. It is much more important to produce common ground in local networks.

undermines democracy

Conclusion: Land speculation hurts in three ways: It weakens social capital, our important factor of production. It undermines democracy, and third, it causes even more unequal distribution of income and wealth. Urban researcher Hanna Hildbrandt from ETH recently formulated what needs to be done in the “Tagesanzeiger”: “We have to think much more radically about property structures and taxation of land price increases, namely the so-called idle profits. ”

Source :Blick