Paris introduces rent control

Been a disaster in very country where it's been enforced.
Even Sweden is having a go and it's resulting in more people being excluded or ripped off (.http://www.thelocal.se/20150821/how-to-navigate-swedens-crazy-rental-market)
Fortunately as the article says it will not be enforced in France, and the municipalities are suggesting with-holding data, which is a very French response.

Pre-Thatcher rent control was the norm in this country.

Aug 29, 2015 -- 9:18AM, salmon spray wrote:

Pre-Thatcher rent control was the norm in this country.

Pre-Thatcher 3-day weeks and the dead piling up on the side of the streets was the norm in this country ;)

the dead piling up on the side of the streets



Utter bollox.

Most of the French who want to work and succeed are already living in other countries.

SS like most lefties creating their own Godwin law - mention St Thatcher on every thread. They are obsessed be her.


Thatcher came to power almost 40 years ago. SS provided zero evidence that rent control was "the norm".

There has been plenty of time since Thatcher to vote in a government who would impose rent control if the UK electerate wanted that.

Aug 29, 2015 -- 10:02AM, Captain Wurzel wrote:

the dead piling up on the side of the streets Utter bollox.

Careful you'll get Angel Gabrial here with that sort of behaviour.

I happen to know it was the norm Mexico. I worked in the Valuation Office in the 70s when we were carrying out a revaluation. Rateable value was based on a market rent. Our valuers were driven nuts trying to find houses that were actually let at market rates. There were hardly any in Sheffield. A few years later as a student I took our landlord to a rent tribunal and got the rent cut by about 50% ( Tbh I wouldn't have bothered but we were on a prepayment electricity meter and the bastard failed to pay it to the Board and we were cut off )

OK SS-
And do you believe there has been enough time in the two decades + 6 general election  since Thatcher left office to bring in rent control if the ?UK public wanted it.

Blair/Brown has more to do with lack of UK rent control in 2015 than Thatcher

the only form of rent control I would advocate is to strictly limit how much the government will hand out in housing benefit.

Rent control needed in London as the market rates are now getting out of hand and only the very well heeled can afford. Won't happen under a Tory, free market government though. Proving impossible for more and more young people to be able to pay the rents in London and save for a home of their own, unless they up sticks and move well out of town, and then be met with very long commutes and £4k per year in rail fares. Doesn't help the living standards of 'the hard working families' the Tories are forever saying they support, unless those families have an income well above the average. Approx. £70k plus and even that won't get you much in the capital.

You may well be right about Blair/Brown Mexico but Thatcher certainly went a long way down the deregulation route. However my time in the midst of it had passed so I'm not sure who did what.
I quite accept that people on the whole would not in the last 30 years or so have gone for rent control. That's because a majority either owned their own homes or had reasonable expectation of doing so in the foreseeable future. At some point not far away that looks as though it will no longer be true. Attitudes may well change then. Incidentally I DO own my own place.

Been a disaster in very country where it's been enforced.

Well since I could rent a flat in Paris and Stockholm and Berlin for less money than a provincial British city, or all three for less than a London flat, I think we know where the disaster is, bongo.

Work to live or live to pay rent, depends on which country you live in.

Some strange logic at work here biscuits:
Until now France, Germany and the UK do not have rent controls in the private sector.
But UK rents are massively higher than France and Germany.
Therefore rent controls are the solution.

Stockholm is different as rent controls operate, and you're right that if you can get a flat that comes under the rent control system then it's cheap. But dream on because you can't, because there's a shortage. (.http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/19/why-stockholm-housing-rules-rent-control-flat)

London is different to German cities in having a green belt which is subsidised to constrain people within it, and having sensational levels of Housing Benefits and public sector workers also keeping people inside the metropolis. These need addressing.

Rent is high in London yet you still want to import people from the Horn of Africa and give them houses there.

bongo - I know that rents have been controlled in Dusseldorf since the end of WWII. 

Germany[edit]
German rent regulation is found in the Civil Code (the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch) in §§ 535 to 580a, and particular rights for tenants on termination are in §§568 ff.[1] Rental price increases are required to follow a "rental mirror" (Mietspiegel), which is a database of local reference rents. This collects all rents for the past four years, and landlords may only increase prices on their property in line with rents in the same locality. "Usury" rents are prohibited altogether, so that any price rises above 20 per cent over three years are unlawful.[2] Tenants may be evicted against their will through a court procedure for a good reason, and in the normal case only with a minimum of three months' notice.[3] Tenants receive unlimited duration of their rental agreement unless the duration is explicitly halted. In practice, landlords have little incentive to change tenants as rental price increases beyond inflation are constrained. During the period of the tenancy, a person's tenancy may only be terminated for very good reasons. A system of rights for the rental property to be maintained by the landlord is designed to ensure quality of housing. Many states, such as Berlin, have a constitutional right to adequate housing, and require buildings to make dwelling spaces of a certain size and ceiling height.

biscuits - that reads like second generation rent controls.
First generation rent controls, which most of the world know as simply 'rent controls' are about the starting price of your tenancy, and Germany doesn't have them until 2015.
.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-34066100

Correct but initial rents must not exceed the average by more than 20%, and the second generation rent controls suppress the average.

www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/sn06747.pdf  - section 3.4

So it is incorrect to say that Germany does not have rent controls in the private sector. I completely agree with you that housing benefit is a great ill and a heavy cause of the mess here in the UK; and thank you for your link. £400 a month sounds good.

Germany does have rent controls now ( in 2015 ) but didn't have them in 2013
.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/10/22/uk-germany-coalition-property-idUKBRE99L0VC20131022
It was a big election issue and Merkel has given in to her coalition partner on this.
That parliament link says 'not strictly enforced' and in any event allows landlords to set a price up to 20% above the going rate, which is no control at all in practice.

Curiously George Osborne announced rent controls in the summer budget for UK Housing Associations from 2016 onwards. They will have to reduce rents by 1% a year every year for 4 years.
.
http://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2015/jul/08/social-housing-rent-fall-chancellor-budget

There's already predictions that this will mean fewer housing association dwellings getting built, and according to Inside Housing about 10 housing associations have enquired about quitting the affordable housing game, but it's complicated as they would have to hand back the subsidies they received when building their houses ( currently 20k per dwelling ).

And all the while this is going on, intensely farmed land within an hour of London gets 85/GBP an acre agricultural subsidy, plus zero business rating, plus inheritance tax exemption, plus cheap red diesel, when that land is of far higher value if we built on it.

Land is a form of capital - if you have a choice of two ways to use it, and one of them is low value and one is high value, if planning laws compel you to always choose the lower value option and get the nation to subsidise this choice then the nation itself will become poorer.

Germany has had rent controls since WWII. From the parliamentary link:

The private rented sector in Germany has some unique characteristics compared to
other countries. In particular, renting is not seen as an inferior housing option but as a
fully accepted alternative to owner occupation. This is particularly the case in cities
where the majority of private households live long periods of their life or even their
whole lives in a rented apartment or house. German households’ propensity to rent can
be partly explained by a strong regulatory framework, which gives tenants a high
degree of security but also by a long tradition of renting as ‘the standard option’
amongst all groups in the population.45
Since 1971 initial rents have not been strictly regulated thought they must not exceed the
rents for comparable dwellings in the same area by more than 20 per cent. Rents can be
increased during a tenancy — within a maximum of two years and not by more than 20 per
cent within a three-year period — if they are demonstrably below the local rent levels for
comparable dwellings,.
46

Before 1971, btw, the rental sector was state controlled in West Germany. The legacy of their history in this sector bears on every rental there today. How could it not, when anything that comes on to the market is wedded in price to that of existing teancies? It's not as if the studio flat in your first link would otherwise be on the market at £2,000, as it would be in London. It is priced at £400 because that is within 20% of comparable rents in the area.

Contrast the private renting experience in Germany to the abysmal state of affairs in this country, where a prospective tenant gets charged up to £150 for a "credit check" before being allowed to hand over his first month's rent and the deposit that he's never going to get back at the end of his tenancy. Over there, they still get ahead by generating ideas and making things, here we advance by finding tenants to pay for us sitting on our pivots.

Your rents would go down if you stopped importing dependent Muslims with their many wives.