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I need something better than anecdotal evidence for your claim that tenancy rights are the primary problem. You can find horror stories about problem tenants in any city, same as you can find horror stories about terrible landlords. Do you have quantitative evidence that documents the scale of this problem? Property vacancies, speculation, rents, and related issues are hardly unique to Paris; this is an unsolved problem in economics precisely because living accommodations are not simply fungible commodities and applying crude economic models to complex economic situations leads to inefficient outcomes.

IMO you are being a bit lazy here not researching the issue yourself. These kinds of comments are easy to make but hard to respond to. Do your own research and respond with what you find before asking OP to do the same.

ptaipale is the one who made the assertion, the onus is on him to provide evidence, not the person questioning the assertion.

Sadly quantitative evidence (i.e. statistics) also don't prove anything.

All I can tell you is that here in France property squatter have rights, and the more the original owner awaits before calling the police, the less he has a chance to recover his property and evict squatters. I would be interested in knowing if others country have the same laws ?

"Sadly quantitative evidence (i.e. statistics) also don't prove anything."

Still better than a single anecdote on the internet.

Plenty of other jurisdictions have similar laws. Adverse possession is a common law legal doctrine designed to prevent the non-use of resources by an absent owner.

It varies from place to place. What you describe is, here in the US, generally called "adverse possession," but frequently it requires the "squatter", as you call it, to make his intention to take ownership known (e.g. by placing a document in writing with the local government department that keeps real property documents).

I see nothing wrong with this. Private property ownership is protected by the government, but almost always predicated on the assumption that the property will be put to use to the people it grants ownership to. Owners have the right to let their properties sit idle, but not without risk. This is a good thing: property is a finite (often arbitrarily and unfairly divided) resource. In my view owners have an obligation to put their property to use, and if I had the power to do so I'd make having idle property financially onerous (at best).

First poster has a point, no need for people to live abroad and to rent their places to have problems...

Laws in France are really leaning towards the tenants. First there's the "trêve hivernale" which could be translated as "winter truce": from November 1st to March 31st, you are not allowed to evict anyone (unless for safety reasons for instance).

By law, when the tenant ceases to pay rent, the owner must inform the renter through a bailiff about that. Then after 2 months, if the renter still hasn't paid, the owner can go to court.

So really, just at that point, if you did the bailiff thing after your tenant failed to pay for 2 months (because you're nice and didn't do it after just 1), by the time you go to court (because you have to wait 2 months), you're already due 4 months of rent.

The judge has the final call about the eviction delay, up to 3 years. So if you are lucky (not possible) and see the judge at that 4 months mark, judge who decides your tenant should be gone, you'll have to wait another 2 months. Because you can't legally kick out anyone without letting them a chance to find something else: they have 2 months to do that.

So that's 6 months already. I'm sure you can at least add 2 or 3 because courts are slow.

If winter comes, and unlike in Game of Thrones, it comes every year, you'll have to wait for the winter break.

The bottom line is on average, an eviction takes 18 months...

I could add the judge can give a payment delay to the tenant: from 2 months to 2 years.

You can google it, it'll be difficult to find a good translation but: https://www.french-property.com/guides/france/working-in-fra... https://www.french-property.com/guides/france/working-in-fra...

Then comes the nightmare of getting rid of someone who pays (because got want to, for some reason, like having a friend renting your flat).

Basically, it is impossible. Strictly impossible during theft compulsory 3 years rent contract and almost impossible after if the renter does not want to leave.

If you want to sell the flat, good luck as week : not possible during the rent period (except with the renter in the package) and you have to give the renter priority in any case.

I do own rental properties, including 2 in France. While it is difficult to get rid of a non-paying (or worst paying only time to time), it is not impossible to get rid of them. I did after 3 years of being payed on and off. One thing the landlord can do, is get all the social aid (Caisse d'Allocation Familiale) being sent directly to the landlord. So, at least the landlord does get something every month. Then as mentioned you can go the court route. You can also not renew the lease (granted, in France a lease is 3 year, so be patient) by sending an letter 6 months before the end of the current lease (which I did). The bad tenant left with about 4 missing rents (and damages in the apartment), but I obviously did not give back the deposit. All in all I did lost some money, but that is part of rental properties, that is not CD (Certificate of Deposit) with fixed interest. Like most investments, it incurs some risks too.

Having been a renter for years, I understand that renters need some protections and also an easy way out if they have some financial difficulties. There is a balance to find between landlord and tenant. If we could make easy for a tenant to move and find a more suitable place, I am sure tenants will be less willing to stick (and eventually not pay) when their financial situation changes (e.g. loss of job). But right now, it is almost impossible for someone who just lost his job, to seek a smaller/cheaper place. Hence he gets stuck with the current place, with a rent that is not matching anymore his income.

>All in all I did lost some money, but that is part of rental properties, that is not CD (Certificate of Deposit) with fixed interest. Like most investments, it incurs some risks too.

But are they worth it? Unless you're making a really large profit, it seems like you're far better off just putting your money into an S&P500 index fund or other stock funds. With a stock fund, all you have to do is put your money in there, and wait. With a rental house, you have to deal with repairs, collecting rent, using the legal system when tenants don't pay, etc. Unless you're making a 100% profit, I fail to see how rental property makes any sense as an investment at all in that environment.

One word: leverage.

While your $50k investment is making 6% ($3,000/yr) interest in an index fund, my $50k downpayment on a $500k house is making average of 6% ($30,000/yr) equity growth. And I get to deduct the mortgage interest, taxes and maintenance costs of the house while someone else pays most of the mortgage.

I should really have kept that property...

You seem to be assuming that property values are rising. The 2008 crash proves that's something you can't count on.

If you look at a few years out of the last 5 decades, sure. If you look at the trend over decades, which is the timescale I'd expect to be looking at for a real-estate investment, yes, prices are rising.

when the 3 years rental period is over, you may end the rent (as the owner) only under specific conditions (see for instance http://www.dossierfamilial.com/immobilier/locataire/locatair...).

It is not like you can end the rent to get another renter (except if it is a close family). This is really crazy and have always been a turn - off for me when wondering about investing in flats (I am French)

I need something better than anecdotal evidence for your claim that tenancy rights are the primary problem

Protecting predatory tenants is a problem but the big one in almost all Western cities is zoning: https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/r....

Contrast this NIMBY approach with, for example, Japan's system: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3c....

>the big one in almost all Western cities is zoning:

Or property taxes that are far, far too low which allows the land value to be captured by landlords rather than the community.

>Contrast this NIMBY approach with, for example, Japan's system

Where people get 100 year multigenerational mortgages...

I guess how you frame the property tax policy debate depends upon how much of the national income you believe should be earned through rent and interest entitlements and how much should be earned by doing actual work...

Currently in most western countries there is a drift from one towards the other driven by targeted tax cuts.

Thanks for mentioning property tax, one issue that is sadly overlooked in practically every discussion. In Germany there's a small initiative of cities and citizens that aim to restructure property taxes to actually incentive productive use of land: http://www.grundsteuerreform.net/ (unfortunately only in German)

Basically it aims to remove all taxes on buildings and _only_ tax the property it's on, at a rate that is propertional to the value that society (the people living in the city around the property) and the city itself (through infrastructure) provide to the property.

The tax would then strongly encourage productive use of the land instead of speculating with it.

It's encouraging that LVT is actually happening somewhere.

What is LVT?

Land Value Taxation.

Yes and the properties in Japan are cheaply made, unbearably uniform, tiny and expensive even by Paris's standards.

No-one has been able to show anything other than property developers are good at price gouging in any regulatory environment where the government does not build houses.

The source article on vacant homes is practically anecdotal. It's not even successfully argued that vacant homes are a meaningful problem in its listed cities.

No methodology is provided. (Spoiler: it's different for each city which are therefore uncomparable). No baseline metric is given. No supporting or relative terms are present. It's only worth is starting a conversation.

It is a very well known problem in France. Tenant protection absolutely bonkers here. It actually hurts people looking for apartments as well... you have to earn triple of the rent, you have to give up all of your personal information (e.g. Three years of tax returns) AND have two people to sign a contract that they will pay if you stop paying (all of this is in additions to insurances the landlords already have from banks). As somebody without a family in France to vouch for me, is has been a total hell to rent a place here every time.

Social sciences cannot very well prove things by experiment, but one statistics you can look at is the price difference of apartment sales depending on whether it is vacant, or occupied by a tenant.

In a normal housing market there is not much difference. A bad tenant is a risk but a good tenant coming with the apartment is an asset.

In Paris, the price difference is significant, with sales prices around 10 % lower for an apartment which has a tenant, depending on area and type of apartment. This shows that tenants are seen primarily as a risk and the housing market is off balance.

This also means that an apartment owner does not wish to take the risk of leasing out in the short term, and the regulation actually increases rental housing shortage.

> Paris has very extraordinary tenant protections, even for people who weren't actually tenants and who don't pay their rent.

The problem is that for every story about bad tenants, I can find a story about a shitty landlord. And, often, then shitty landlord affects WAY higher a number of people since shitty landlords all too often have multiple properties.

This is actually a bit of dilemma in small towns in the US. Many small towns have a very poor rental market, so they have many tenants who can barely pay. This also means that the landlords need to keep rental prices very low--which translates into shitty slumlord rentals. However, if regulation steps in to make the place better, it effectively bankrupts the landlord who then abandons the place and now the city gets the joy of what to do with the abandoned property.

Hoarding of inner city land occurs because inner city land is valuable and naturally scarce. It is valuable because it is possible to leverage it to effectively levy a privatized tax on others for its use (rent).

Gold is also hoarded and not used because it is scarce and valuable, not regulation. It feels odd to have to point that out.

There is basically one (good) solution to this problem: tax land values higher (e.g. raise property taxes). That doesn't eliminate scarcity but it reduces the incentive to hoard and it reduces speculation. Increased land value (which in cities is created by the community) would instead accrue to the community via taxes. Hoarding and not using land would lead to heavy losses.

Property investment would become more of a normal business where high quality construction matters more than making lucky gambles (like the kind that made Trump rich).

   tax land values higher

If you don't also remove, or at least weaken, strict zoning laws, who would be able to pay high property taxes?

> tax land values higher (e.g. raise property taxes).

More specifically, taxing land irrespective of the value of what's built on top of it.

Ideally LVT, but it isn't necessarily prudent to spend political capital to set up an entirely new form of taxation. Property taxes are still a close enough approximation of LVT in cities like San Francisco, Vancouver and London where the majority of the value of a property is derived from its location.

In Vermont USA we have homestead declaration. I declare the home I'm living in as my homestead, can only do it once, and the property taxes are less hardcore because it's my home.

I approve of this arrangement. Why, just because land ownership CAN be a money sink for abstracted accumulation of wealth and power, MUST it be that rewarded money sink? Why is it sacrosanct that people should be able to hoard 'location' beyond what they personally use? Note that I don't think there's a real limit to how big of a property can be 'home'. Versailles? Knock yourself out. You figure you should own 12 Versailles, and keep 11 of them empty? Uh nope. There is only so much area on the planet.

Amusingly, even if everyone had their own personal Palace of Versailles, we still wouldn't cover the entire surface area of the Earth.

Not many people want a property the size of Versailles in someplace like Siberia or Antarctica. Only a small amount of the Earth's surface is land (30%), and of that, only a fraction is land that anyone wants to live on.

I looked up some context out of curiosity. Siberia appears to be home to 40 million people (half a percent of the world) now, living at a population density of five Palace of Versailles per person. Antarctica isn't doing as well, with only 1--5 thousand people at a time.

Millions of people live on land that was formerly water. For example, many people in the Netherlands live below sea level. A sixth of the current land mass of the Netherlands has been reclaimed. Of course, worldwide it seems that only slightly more than about 1% of 1% of land is reclaimed.

Not many people literally live on water, but it seems that the worldwide total is at least 100,000 (or a small multiple thereof).

Estimates of what portion of the land on Earth is "habitable" varies, but is usually about half of the land. At that rate, we would have to share each Palace of Versailles with all of 5 other people.

You're still equating all "habitable" land as equal. I'm sorry, but land in northern Canada or the Saudi Arabian desert is not equivalent to land in Hawaii. Only in one of those places can you enjoy being outdoors year-round; the other places will literally kill you if you stay outside for very long. That's exactly the main reason there's reclaimed land in places like the Netherlands. No one cares about reclaiming land in Siberia because very few people want to live there (and those that do, likely live there just because of work and because they have no easy way of moving someplace nicer).

Finally, those people living in Siberia likely do not have that much living space per person, certainly nothing like the palace of Versailles. More likely, they live in mining towns or small cities, in small houses or apartments, with most of the land area being unused.

If you're away for a year or two, DON'T give your apartment to let.

But the main issue, in the large, with the epidemic of vacant apartments isn't that these people all just happen to be going away for a year or two. It's that the apartments are bought solely as vehicles of speculation (or to store and/or launder wealth) -- and are effectively no longer "living spaces", in any meaningful sense.

Then it's now fashionable to frame this as a xenophobic "rich foreigners come and hoard our apartments and cause housing shortage".

Yet there's a lot of evidence that this is exactly what's happening (substituting "exacerbate" for "cause"). And it's not "fashionable" or "xenophobic" to call something what it is. It's called speaking plainly and directly.

At least where I live (Helsinki region in Finland), the main issue with empty apartments is not that they are bought as vehicles of speculation. It's that there's not that much vacancy to speak of. The numbers are inflated in the discourse, often ignoring several factors:

1) in a rental market, there is a natural vacancy rate of a few percent due to people moving every few ears, and that

2) apartments that are in statistics "vacant" are not really vacant or empty; they are merely apartments where no person has a permanent address - there still may be people living there. Workers from elsewhere in the country who work in the city for the week but have their permanent address elsewhere with their family; undocumented migrants, etc.

3) apartments belong to elderly or sick people (cancer etc) who are in a care home or equivalent, but don't want to give up their home because they hope to be able to return, or to old people who clearly are not going to return but whose heirs cannot sell the apartment until the owner has passed away. If it were rented out, the care payments would increase with the amount of the rent income, and the only thing owners would get from renting out is risk of a bad tenant.

Yes, no one is living in that apartment just now. Still, it's not primarily a "vehicle for speculation".

Fair enough, but (very clearly) the article wasn't referring to places like Helsinki.

But rather to white-hot, globally active real estate markets like NYC, London, Paris, etc.

The article had a headline "Vacant Homes Are a Global Epidemic". If it only covers white-hot real estate markets, it's not very global.

This Paris thing was immediately grabbed by local city activists as proof that Helsinki should do the same.

"in Hot Real Estate Markets" was the implied ending.

So with the shorter title they were just trying to simplify - not lead anyone astray.

BTW, forgot to add this example of "hoarding". An apartment not used for 70 years...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2323297/Inside-Paris...

Sydney and Melbourne have similar housing bubbles and vacancy rates, despite having extremely oppressive tenant laws.

What laws? Home owners can charge whatever rent they want, evict you with a few weeks notice without giving any reason for it, raise the rent as much as they want etc. There's no affordable housing in either of the cities. Investors are hoarding properties and claiming negative gearing and locking first home buyers out of the market. Renters need better protection in Australia if the government is unwilling to do anything about the negative gearing and housing market, which they said they won't do anything about. After all they're paying off these assholes' properties.

Edit: good analysis in this podcast if you're interested http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/2016-1...

Melbourne will soon have a Vacant house tax as well.

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/vacant-property-tax-expect...

It is possible to have similar symptoms but a different core issue, especially when comparing 2 countries with very different regulations.

San Francisco has a similar problem. There are many hundreds of "in-law" units that go un-rented because the owner is terrified they will never be able to get rid of the tenant. This article from a local public radio station explains the situation concisely: http://kalw.org/post/growing-number-san-francisco-landlords-...

Not something exclusive to Paris http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/james-regan-profession...

And if you leave someone in your apartment/house at least sign a contract.

A contract saying what?

They void their unavoidable tenant rights?

Rent is X Euros per month, but is waived for the 1st N months.

A form of rent warranty is required after N months (this might be on the tenancy laws already, I'm not sure)

Or, you know, get references before you let anyone live in your place

I don't see how any of that helps the situation at hand: how can I use my existing property to give an acquaintance a roof over their heads?

The correct solution to this problem is insurance. If the risk is say 0.1% and you get 1k per month in rent for 1 year then. The insurance could pay out up to 1 million and cost 100$ per month leaving a huge net gain.

However, even if it takes 3 years to elect someone that's not even close to 1M in damages.

I haven't read the story but there is a lot of misconception in this familiar story. As it is the same in most developed countries once someone moved into a flat it becomes their dwelling. This is independent of rent. If I let a friend stay with me and not pay rent while they get their life together i can't kick them out.

The owner is a member of the building association. She agreed to pay maintenance and renovation charges. That is an agreement between her and the association. The tenant did not make that agreement so has no say in it.

There is a process to evict someone. This owner sounds like she doesn't want or can't be bothered to follow it. It's a long heartbreaking process that involves courts and police. And due to abuse in the past the judges and police want to be sure every step is followed.

> It sounds like Paris is regulating to beat a problem that is at least in a a significant part caused by regulation.

The solution to regulation is always more regulation.

It very possibly is.

Society is not a software algorithm.

No. But at scale members within a society behave in a reliable way. It's often predictable. Sometimes it requires the benefit of hindsight to realize a behavior choice. But going forward it's generally pretty reliable.

Those bad behaviors are often incentivized by regulation. And the best fix is often to simply remove those regulations. Not by adding more. Especially when it comes to real estate, zoning, and rent control.

Shame on this comment.