Hundreds demonstrate against high rents in Zurich

Re:Hundreds demonstrate against high rents in Zurich by H8crilA on Sunday November 05, 2023 @03:05PM (#38155076)

Just so you know weekend protests in Zurich are extremely common, people living in the city center sometimes don't even bother to look at them passing by their apartments. They are well secured and well scheduled, sometimes back-to-back with other protests, as one would expect from the Swiss.

We also have zoning here, which as far as apartment price goes mostly interferes by limiting the maximum height of a building to just a few floors. ~All buildings have the same height. There's also price control which definitely does something to the market - I know this because the amount of applications per apartment lease contract is through the roof, and it's sometimes very hard to get an apartment even if you qualify (income) and apply to tens of them. But I don't know where would the prices be if price controls were lifted.

(and yes, the rent here is too damn high)

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Re:Hundreds demonstrate against high rents in Zurich by seanmcdirmid on Sunday November 05, 2023 @03:30PM (#38155342)

When I lived in Lausanne in 2005-6, getting an apartment was really tough. The rents were high but not unaffordable, but every apartment had a hundred applicants. Ya, they couldn’t just jack up rents to be more selective, so no one was priced out but supply was still limited.

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Re:Hundreds demonstrate against high rents in Zurich by alephnerd on Sunday November 05, 2023 @03:13PM (#38155159)

> They are well secured and well scheduled, sometimes back-to-back with other protests

Whoa. That's pretty cool. It's similar in the UK I believe. Also vaguely reminds me of Speaker's Sqaure in Hyde Park.

> We also have zoning here

Why hasn't Zurich (or more like it's Canton's govt) expanded suburbs into the farmland surrounding it? For the size of city, it is quite small. And the southern portion towards Egg seems pretty flat and easy to build. Even with suburbs that have a fraction of the density that Zurich has, it would probably alleviate population pressures. I'm assuming local politics?

Actually, how is local politics (sub-canton level) organized in CH?

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Re:Hundreds demonstrate against high rents in Zurich by seanmcdirmid on Sunday November 05, 2023 @03:33PM (#38155371)

You actually can live in the suburbs, like Renens in my case when I was living in Lausanne. But your commute sucks so no one wants to, even with decent public transit people still want nice lives. But the suburbs are definitely an option (I don’t know specifically about Zurich).

But another problem: the suburbs are actually nice and in demand also. So how far do you want to live from your job? Freiburg (works for Bern and Lausanne!)? It’s like, ok I’m going to commute a lot and finding a place to rent is still hard. And Switzerland is not not dense.

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Re:Hundreds demonstrate against high rents in Zurich by alephnerd on Sunday November 05, 2023 @04:58PM (#38156069)

> You actually can live in the suburbs

True! But the suburbs seem much smaller than any I've seen in plenty of other similarly developed countries.

Like downtown Zurich to downtown Egg is 10 miles, yet it's almost all farms. Just in that small a radius alone you could make 10 additional Eggs (or 3 additional Usters), and house an additional 80k people with the exact same density.

Is there some kind of greenbelt restriction like the UK?

> the suburbs are actually nice and in demand also

Same in the US. In the Bay Area, the suburbs like the Tri-Valley, San Mateo County, Palo Alto, and southern Santa Clara County are all in greater demand than the city of San Francisco (it's cheaper to buy a family house in SF than it is in any of those suburbs). It's a similar story in Boston (Brookline), Seattle (Redmond, Bellevue, Bothell), Washington DC (southern Maryland), and New York (Hudson River Valley).

Yet why haven't construction companies in CH built similar high net worth suburbs? All the ones I am seeing are basically just historic villages.

In British terms, why isn't there a Milton Keynes or Reading in the Zurich metropolitan area?

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Re:Hundreds demonstrate against high rents in Zurich by FirmwareBurner on Sunday November 05, 2023 @06:14PM (#38156744)

>In British terms, why isn't there a Milton Keynes or Reading in the Zurich metropolitan area?

Maybe because Zurich is so much smaller than London.

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Re:Hundreds demonstrate against high rents in Zurich by seanmcdirmid on Monday November 06, 2023 @01:04AM (#38159390)

A lot of farmland is protected by local and federal laws. The Swiss don’t want to abandon their farmer roots even if they import most of their food these days.

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Re:Hundreds demonstrate against high rents in Zurich by alephnerd on Monday November 06, 2023 @12:17PM (#38165430)

That makes sense. I was doing some further digging into local govt in CH and I think this pro-agrarian viewpoint seems to be an SVP thing (who vaguely remind me of the Farmer–Citizen Movement in Netherlands, but a bit more mainstream)

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Re:Hundreds demonstrate against high rents in Zurich by throwaway536638 on Friday November 10, 2023 @04:54PM (#38225052)

The main reason cities in Switzerland do not have new large suburbs is that since the last version of the federal spatial planning act has been accepted by the voters in 2014 there is a strict restriction on the buildings that can be built outside designated urban areas (in canton Vaud where Lausanne is it is 1 % of additional population per year, details may vary by canton). The planned amount of buildings outside these areas is enforced via zoning rule (only some land can be built and ant a given density. The main idea of this law is to avoid destroying farm land (which is important for strategic and ecological reasons) and increasing density of cities (which reduces various infrastructure costs compared to urban sprawl).

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