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.
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.
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)
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).
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?