Radical, yes, but I don't believe that there is any other viable solution left, including "unoccupied taxes" - because when the tax over a year is lower than expected value gain, investors just pay the fine instead of complying.
Such declarations should not justify extraordinary action if you don't have a clear plan for how you are going to get away from the emergency. They are a tool of political trickery to avoid regular checks and balances of democratic policies.
For comparison, France declared a "national emergency" in November 2015, and has then extended it repeatedly, and now France lives in a perpetual "state of emergency".
If you need to keep extending the state of emergency, you should admit that the "emergency" is actually your normal state of affairs.
If you have a problem in housing, with a really substantial part of your housing stock empty, your rental market isn't working. Don't blame evil capitalists for it; blame the rules of the market you created with legislation. For instance, unreasonable tenant protections at the expense of the owner.
Most often this is, however, just a diversion. Empty housing is not the real problem; the problem is lack of building permits and zoning in areas of population growth, and generally meddling with the market.
Beware of "dead simple solutions"; silver bullets offered as solutions to complex problems are usually bogus.
I agree with this, therefore the trigger for a "housing emergency" should be something that can be measured in qualified facts (e.g. ratio of migration influx vs build of housing stock, queue length for welfare housing).
> If you have a problem in housing, with a really substantial part of your housing stock empty, your rental market isn't working. Don't blame evil capitalists for it; blame the rules of the market you created with legislation. For instance, unreasonable tenant protections at the expense of the owner.
Housing is a human right. Tenant protections are not unreasonable, they're often enough the only thing preventing capitalism from its worst excesses. The countless stories I have read alone on HN how in America people are kicked out of their homes just because the landlord wants to have more money should be proof of why tenant protections are needed.
> Empty housing is not the real problem
It is. Empty housing causes entire zones going dead - look at London. Wherever a large number of "investment housing" appears, the small shops etc. have to close because there are no customers.
> the problem is lack of building permits and zoning in areas of population growth, and generally meddling with the market.
I highly doubt the problems in Berlin, London or Munich are related to a lack of building permits or population growth. It's just that it fetches more money for real estate developers to build luxury apartments instead of affordable housing, therefore the solution is more zoning, not less.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/oct/12/london-popul...
If housing is a human right, who is responsible for protecting this right? If I decide to sit on a couch all day and not get a job, does a private property owner or the government still have to provide housing for me? If I become homeless, who or what entity is depriving me of the right to housing? If I am entitled to housing, am I entitled to housing anywhere I want or in any city I want?
>it fetches more money for real estate developers to build luxury apartments instead of affordable housing
Perhaps this is a signal that it's more economically productive for the rich to live in cities than for the poor to live in cities.
> If I decide to sit on a couch all day and not get a job, does a private property owner or the government still have to provide housing for me?
In Germany (and other civilized countries), the government actually has to do so.
> If I become homeless, who or what entity is depriving me of the right to housing?
The government must provide you with adequate housing by law (again, in Germany). That it often fails to do so without consequences is the sad reality.
> If I am entitled to housing, am I entitled to housing anywhere I want or in any city I want?
In Germany, housing is the responsibility of the city where you live in (which includes sometimes paying motels to house people). I'm a bit unsure about the details on what happens when you relocate, though, and the core problem is many of the homeless do not really trust authority or do not like that many of the help-homelessnes-programs enforce crap like no-alcohol policies - thankfully there are first programs under evaluation which follow the policy "housing first, remainder second".
> Perhaps this is a signal that it's more economically productive for the rich to live in cities than for the poor to live in cities.
F..k this mindset. Or wait, just let it happen and let the rich rot away in a city where no one else lives and they can't buy anything, eat anything or where there are no cops, firefighters or schools because the staff cannot find any place to live (hint, in some areas of Germany this already is a problem, and I remember having seen some reports on HN that this is also valid for the US and London).
Cities are there for the entire population, not just rich foreign investor .... wanting to make a quick buck.
No one is sitting around waiting for property to appreciate when they could sit around and collect rents waiting for property to appreciate.
There's a solution for this, too: lower the rent to market prices.
> or the cost of repairs to make a place rentable isn't worth the rents it would generate
Well... as a landlord you're supposed to provide for continuous maintenance, and if you have cut corners on this out of greed (like it's common in Germany, just google for "Vonovia Skandal"), it's your fault. And there's always the possibility to tear down and rebuild.
> No one is sitting around waiting for property to appreciate when they could sit around and collect rents waiting for property to appreciate.
You haven't heard of London, I assume? Quote from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/04/london... :
> Key to this is tackling buy-to-leave investing, a growing and unwelcome practice. The model is simple, buy a property, leave it empty – in the knowledge that investors do not then need to comply with regulations covering the rented housing market – and sell it on for a profit.
And rents are enough to pay for maintenance, which you have to pay for whether you rent or not. Just try re-selling an uninhabitable investment home.
And you need to be a more critical reader. The guardian article is full of red flags. It "claims" 57k vacant homes in London, where there are 8.5M households. So less than 7%. How many do you think should be vacant, considering that homes are vacant when for sale, when waiting to find a renter, and when waiting for the owners to move back if they worked out of country for a few years?
Secondly the paragraph on "buy-to-leave" investing indicates that rental regulations are so absurdly onerous that it is keeping properties off the market. Reforming them is the real solution.
Dealing with renters in that equation dosent make any sense, because the returns will be tiny, even with sky high rents like $3000 a month on say an $800k property appreciating 20% every year (a real situation in many cities). The presence of renters will ensure you cant sell it when you want to, and instead have to deal with them, an insane hassle for a foreign investor.
Compounding this is the fact that much of this property investment is being driven by wealthy (and to a huge degree corrupt) chinese looking to funnel money out of china, before the CCP can take it from them. Real estate is one of the few foreign investments allowed by the CCP. Tie this in further to the investor class visas many countries have, where you get the equivilent of a green card if you invest X millions of dollars. In these circumstances people dont care much about returns, or even taking somewhat of a haircut on their investments, because its better to have some + a get out of jail free card as a resident of another nation, than be stuck in china in jail, with no assets at all.
Your continued incredulity that these properties arnt being rented out dosent change the reality of the situation, a massive percentage of them are not, and are built specificly to NEVER be rented.