The petition demands a right to reuse for existing buildings based on three key pillars: (I) tax reductions for renovation works and reused materials, (II) fair rules to assess both potentials and risks of existing buildings, and (III) new values for the embedded CO2 in existing structures.
Here is the organization’s website: https://www.houseeurope.eu/
Nope.
I’m saying that a tax cut is just a different form of taxpayer money and asking why, in the first place, we should want to use taxpayer money to increase the value of the assets of people (or companies) who own buildings.
I would really feel for that poor-poor landlord who would no longer be able to live off the rent they are paid every month (and who surely would not just increase such rent), but I still wouldn’t want to use my money for improving their building.
PS: income is not a measure of wealth. One can live off their wealth (often inherited) and still generate little or no income.
I’m afraid you know little about the real estate business, and are blinded by the assumption that landlords are all just rich bastards.
Your PS is correct if you, like Elon Musk, are able to live borrowing money using your wealth as a collateral. For most of wealthy people that’s impossible.
Did I ever say landlords are a bunch of rich bastards? This is twice you put words into my mouth. IDK if it’s a way of thinking or a deliberate debate technique, but please stop: it’s really irritating.
Also, since “you are afraid I know little about the real estate business”, would you be so kind as to enlighten me with your wisdom? or should I defer to your authority and just trust you? (BTW: we are not talking about how things work - we are talking about how we think they should work. I know full well that building and renovations -among other activities- are often incentivized. That has much more to do with politics than ethics).
Mind your tone if you don’t want to be misunderstood.
Sure. Real world example:
Total: €2.880/year. To that, subtract the fees for the agency and occasional maintenance that can range from €100 to a few thousands per year. Yes, it’s possible to go negative.
A minimal renovation to improve the energy class (like changing the windows) is in the €10-15.000 range that means that no landlord will find it economically reasonable. A lack of renovation of rented properties means that who lives in them (including poor working class) will have higher energy bills and lower quality overall. When an apartment becomes too old to be rented out, it is sold and typically stops to be rented out limiting the number of affordable homes for the low income class.
So, before complaining because a tax cut may help “poor-poor landlords”, remember that without them there will be no renovations (so 0 taxes instead of a positive discounted amount) and low income families will not see improvements in their places very easily.
Hence the need for fees/taxes to dis-incentivize not doing that.
For the rest… landlords are people who chose to invest in a building (rather than bonds/stocks or whatever). [edit: Specifically, they are not benefactors of humanity who provide a home for those who can’t afford to buy one (I’m not saying that’s what you think - it’s just something I often hear, similarly to entrepreneurs who “give jobs” rather than buying work because they need it)]
It is not my responsibility that their investment bears fruit.
If more people need to sell buildings, prices go down and buildings become affordable for people who previously couldn’t afford them. This is not considered in your reasoning.
Politics treats landlords with special regard for exquisitely political reasons: landlors are lots (many more than - say - factory owners), and they are generally either “small” and naive (ie. the typical one-to-a-few-buildings landlord usually decides by gut feeling rather than actually calculating things out), or “big” and comparatively very powerful (think mega-rich people or real estate companies).
Usually, this leads to populist proposals that cut property taxes or that (like these incentives) transform taxpayer money into increased value of private assets (buildings).
Such proposals actually mostly benefit the “big and powerful” landlords, but are nonetheless also backed by the small ones, too naive to actually understand that where they spare a few hundred euros per year, the mega-rich get to buy an extra mansion (and too full of themselves to understand that the poorest who don’t own buildings pay without getting anything in return).
The result of that would be a transfer of the cost to the tenant at least until a large part of the house stock is affected.
This is exactly the bet that the Netherlands did introducing heavy regulations on rentals. For a large portion of the market, the price of the rent is now decided by law. While the market still needs to settle (it’s a recent change and now they are touching the taxation) there are the first negative effects: more cheap houses for sale, less cheap houses for rent, the price of the houses grew anyway, and the shortage of cheap houses pushed up the rents in the upper segment of the market. Moreover, developers stopped building cheap houses because it’s less convenient now.
Basically, cheap houses for rent may be cheaper, but they are fewer so people end in the free segment of the market where they pay more. Who lost were the tenants, not the landlords.
That’s an admirable initiative! I didn’t know about that.
I think we trust the free market (which is rally the market of the strongest) way too much and IMHO basic necessities (rent, utilities, public transport) should have a set price.
I can’t really comment on that law (I mean… I do like it in principle, but of course the devil is in the details).
I don’t really see why pushing for renovations without the incentives should have the same effect as setting rents by law, or how a supposed increase in the supply of houses (*) could screw up the rent market (I mean, rents are gonna go up across the field… that’s just normal since house will be better and utility bills lower. If you fear that people will not be able to afford rent anymore, give incentives to poor families who don’t own their house, instead of paying landlords for renovations).
(*) “supposed” because I don’t really think many people would be forced to sell because they can’t either renovate or pay the fees for failing to do so - but of course the law could be written to demand unreasonable renovations and impose unreasonable fees… it’s a quantitative problem, not one of principle.
On paper it is. It is not working well though.
I’m not an economist, but I really doubt that it would work. When there was a shock on the gas market, the electric companies raised the prices and that pushed down the consumption, but with fixed prices the electric companies would have needed taxpayer’s money to integrate the losses (or cut costs like jobs). A new player would struggle to enter in the market if it was unable to lower the prices and build a base of customers. On the other side, a company would not be able to offer premium services at higher costs.
It seems nice on paper, but the effects may be negative for everyone.
It has a similar effect. If you force the renovations, you eat the profits and people may leave the business exactly as it happened when they fixed the prices. The effect may be a shortage of affordable houses.
The case of The Netherlands is basically like that. You own an apartment that used to be rented out for €1.200, but with the new rules the price dropped to €800. You are not forced to do anything, but doing the math your conclusion could be that it’s better to sell and invest somewhere else.
Regarding the renovations, last thing I’ve heard is that by 2030 (or maybe 2035, I don’t remember now) it will be illegal to rent places below a certain energy class (a relatively low one, but it will require at least modern windows). Those expenses will trigger the reasoning I described above. Some people will sell and there will be less affordable houses, other people will renovate and increase the rents to recover the costs so, again, less affordable houses.