Geneva is surrounded by mountains and a lake, it's hard to build more.
Similarly for Zurich, there are significant hills around and most flat space is already built up.
I think it's not just that but the fact that the country is literally packed. It's about 2/3 of my country's size,yet has 3 times more people. Haven't been to Switzerland but I can imagine most parks and other public spaces must feel quite full with people.
Switzerland is only the 13th most dense country in Europe. Notably, the UK and Germany are more dense.
You can easily double it, because neither Germany nor UK have mountains covering half of the country.
Zoning is also an issue.
Re:Danes Get 20-Year 0% Mortgages
by StillBored on Tuesday January 05, 2021 @06:21PM
(#25652650)
Its not really helping places like Austin TX. All that happens is the developers move a couple miles further outside of town build a bunch of houses, usually for what works out to be roughly equal to the cheapest house in town. Repeat the process next year. Within a few years everything doubles. So the housing market is inversly priced by distance from downtown and the lakes. Sure you can get a house for $250k, but your likely looking at sitting in your car for 3 hours a day. If you can handle a million $'s you can probably live 10-15 mins away from your work. If you have a few million you might even get a nice place.
Sadly, it's not always that easy. A large amount of swiss property is owned by pension funds, which are legally limited in their possible investments. So increasing the supply of housing will also defund the pension funds.
Alas, that won't work in Denmark. Any politician threatening to do something that would result in housing prices going down would be voted out of office by angry homeowners and Copenhagian landlords.
So maybe the problem is a broken political system which serves the interests of only one group of people, rather than high or low interest rates?
Well, there's always that, but I've always figured it's about taxes and government spending. There's a very large amount of over-valued houses in and around the larger cities in Denmark. If the property value goes down, so does the property taxes, which means less income for the local authorities.
There are cheap houses available outside those areas, but getting a loan for them can be tricky since their value is too low and there's no money to be had from lending the money.
Furthermore, most people have their homes as security (not sure if it's the right word in English) for their loans. If the property value drops then many will be forced out of their homes. Also a lot of landlords and real-estate agents, will be out of a job, but that's probably a smaller issue.
This can be resolved any time cities want to build a lot more housing: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/anti-growt.... Outside of Tokyo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501, no or very few cities in the Industrialized world have chosen to simply build lots of housing, which will tend to bring prices down towards the cost of construction.