Geneva Freeport | Hacker News Reader

Geneva Freeport

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57 pointsausbah14 comments

There was a good Wendover Productions video on this subject on YouTube. Check it out, and his other videos if it seems interesting to you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsA_L1t4vXY

While the world has art stores in warehouses that nobody gets to see, every major city has housing that people don’t live in, but keep around just in case to the harm of everyone else.

It’s nice to see democracies fighting back against housing as a store of wealth. Vancouver charges 1% per year to keep a property empty. Since enacting the change, vacancies have very gradually started to increase as the wealthy sell off or rent out their properties. In some areas of town - particularly wealthier suburbs - you can rent an incredible house for very little relative to the property value.

Example:

For CAD $7,500 per month [1], you could rent a waterfront home worth CAD $5.5M [2].

[1] https://vancouver.craigslist.org/nvn/apa/d/west-vancouver-or...

[2] https://www.rew.ca/properties/R2397894/6277-taylor-drive-wes...

> vacancies have very gradually started to increase

You mean 'decrease'?

Vacancy would imply it's on the market. Before they would just be kept empty and off the market.

No, I actually mean increase. As in the number of available vacant properties is rising.

Wow only $7.5k a month in rent, what a steal! /s

Relative to the house value, it most certainly is.

The value of the house is massively overinflated

I live nearby. I wonder how many works of art will lie there unclaimed for decades.

Same here. Lived in the same area as the freeport, and all questioned myself while biking around, how many stolen or confiscated arts pieces are in there. Most of the focus has been on Tax fraud, and terrorist funding from arts stolen in Syria, but I would like the Swiss Customs to evaluate arts from 3rd world countries, especially Africa and south america.

> As a result of this and other cases, art collectors began to pull their collections from the facility.

So as soon as the Freeport no longer provided a safe haven for art crime "collectors" started pulling out. Wonder if they ended up on a watch list since it's highly unlikely that any collector owning 100% legitimate art would care about illegal art being confiscated.

Singapore and Zurich freeports allow their works to be exhibited in city museums without paying tax. Not sure about Geneva.

It doesn’t matter which Freeport it‘s stored in Switzerland as customs law is on a federal level in Switzerland.

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