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The Swiss have voted to limit the number of second homes per region.
What this means for the immediate future is that no further permissions to build second homes will be given in areas where this 20 percent limit has already been reached, Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported. This will immediately affect 135 of the 176 municipalities in Graubünden, a popular tourist destination.
http://www.thelocal.ch/national/20120312_2801.html
Spain has allowed its coast to be savaged by mindless develpment. The Swiss would never have allowed that.
I love Switzerland. So beautiful and civilized, such good food.
@mark wrote:
The Swiss have voted to limit the number of second homes per region.
What this means for the immediate future is that no further permissions to build second homes will be given in areas where this 20 percent limit has already been reached, Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported. This will immediately affect 135 of the 176 municipalities in Graubünden, a popular tourist destination.
http://www.thelocal.ch/national/20120312_2801.html
Spain has allowed its coast to be savaged by mindless develpment. The Swiss would never have allowed that.
I love Switzerland. So beautiful and civilized, such good food.
I’m really surprised that you hold such an opinion Mark. Why should anyone have a right to limit how many properties one can own and how to use them? It’s like monopolizing a market and we all know how that turns out. This will in the future mean higher rents and probably a shortage also. The only ones benefitting are the ones that at the moment hold such properties. Regulating the real estate market or any market will have horrendous consequenses. The reason why the world went so overinvested in property the last few years was because credit have been to cheap for to long… interest rates was so manipulated by the FRB-system so people could afford to buy property left and right. It’s really simple “supply and demand” signals that are being manipulated so the system doesn’t react as it should.
A bad bank should go bankrupt and a bad property developer should share the same fate… like in any business.
Agree with Ardun. Swiss can take this line on many grounds.
They are a small Country, small population always built there state Balance sheet on ill gotten monies of all & sundry of the world, Nazi’s, Dictators, Drug Barons, Corrupt Politicians, tax evadors etc.I lived in Geneva for just over two years, loved it. Wonderful country. Versoix where we lived was about 5 mins drive from the centre and a few minutes from the lake. Never met any dubious people there….unlike Spain!
In Switzerland you meet as many dubious people as anywhere else in the world. The diffrence is their very strong Balance sheet and this covers many sin’s.
Well, I think Mark deserves some support on this one! This is about ensuring local people can find somewhere to live and highly desirable locations the world over do this – close to home in the UK we have Jersey, Guernsey and (courtesy of the Duchy of Cornwall’s freeholds) the Scillies. If you don’t provide enough affordable accommodation for the ordinary folk who live in a country then you destroy the very culture that attracted you there in the first place. Switzerland has very limited building land – (it’s the mountains that do it) and by restricting non-Nationals from buying they make more of that land available, by default for the Swiss. The article acknowledges that defining a “second home” is the tricky bit, but the principle is sound. (And the food is indeed great and most Swiss people I know are cool, liberal and a bit embarrassed about the whole Nazi gold thing!).
I understand the reason for it but I think it will be a big failure.
Did this limit foreign ownership?
A problem I see with this is how will the EU react to this? Switzerland have many many treaties with the EU about certain things and I no nothing about how they are setup. If I was in the EU I would straight away do the same thing against people from Switzerland wanting to buy property in EU countries. Just to show that it goes both ways… my wish would ofcourse be that they changed their minds.
I have only been a day in Switzerland and I must say it’s a lovely country.
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