- How tedious will it be to find suitable tenants (do you want to go through 1000 emails)?
- Will they make a mess of the place?
- Will they call you at random times to complain about neighbors?
- Will you have to organize and deal with mechanics when e.g. the heating breaks?
And so on. If property prices go up x% per year, buying housing is a great investment even if you leave it empty. And yes, this is a serious problem in larger cities, where investors (domestic or even foreign) just buy up housing without any intention to let people live there, exacerbating the problem.
To be clear, I am just a tenant, but the above incentives for investors are straightforward to see.
Because then you get the property price gains and the rental income on top!
I don’t doubt this is happening, I’m just trying to wrap my head around it.
Rents are so high BECAUSE there are empty housing units. If all available housing units went on the market, rent prices would collapse along with the real-estate speculative bubble, which is precisely what landlords are trying to avoid.
People can't live without housing so demand is not elastic. Plus the housing market is special regarding spatial location. Applying regular market rules as if the housing market behaved the same as, say, the screwdrivers market, does not make sense at all.
The private investors won't do infrastructure either - it is expensive - so they want to build where the infrastructure is already in place. So that's why we see trying to increase density.
So the zoning rules are there as a conterweight to this.
In any case, my point is that applying market rules to housing does not make sense, it's not a competitive market at all and never can be.
So my bad for giving a wrong number the >1 million is in fact 3 millions for the whole of France (~8%). For Paris it's "only" ~240000 (according to 2019 paris.fr numbers) which is on the scale of one empty apartment in the heart of Paris for every mishoused person ("sans domicile fixe") in the whole of France, according to official statistics (which may be too optimistic on the number of mishoused people).
https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/3572856
According to INSEE (official statistics), between 1990 and 2015, population has grown 0.4%, housing units have grown 1%, while abandoned housing units grew 2.8%. Now may be a good time to say that secondary housing (vacation houses for the privileged elite that can afford it) is NOT abandoned housing according to these stats.
Building more is definitely the wrong solution to housing. Just remove the capitalist vampire landlords making a profit on basic human needs, and let everybody enjoy free housing for life!
EDIT: Corrected stat.
EDIT2: Funny to see people downvoting without argument. Are you all against Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, stating "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services" ?