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Zurich – The deregulation of real estate markets and the global stock exchange trade in real estate is ‘out of control’, says Swiss architect Ernst Hubeli. In Europe alone, at least half of the urban population suffers under excessively high rents. Cities are at risk of being deserted.

Ernst Hubeli is sounding the alarm. As he said in an interview with the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger, cities are becoming the playthings of large real estate companies that are only interested in growing their portfolios and profits. But in doing so, they threaten to destroy what they have plundered. “If urban society becomes a corporation and the city becomes more and more expensive, then everyday urban life will dry up,” said the Swiss architect.  

The stock market-driven real estate market is out of control, according to Hubeli. “If the housing market cannot guarantee basic housing, then it is unconstitutional, in my opinion.”

The first victims in this are tenants. “In Europe, at least half of the urban population suffers under high rents,” says Hubeli. Tenants are afraid of finding themselves banished to a suburban ghetto, and cities are at risk of gentrification “with vacant investment apartments just waiting for property prices to increase”, as can be seen in Zurich’s Europaalle.

According to Hubeli, one way of preventing this outcome is through rent caps, which have already been introduced in Berlin and are currently being discussed in Basel and Geneva.

He would also like to see housing corporations with more than 3,000 apartments expropriated, pointing to Vienna as a positive example of this, where 65 percent of apartments are in the hands of cooperatives. This would also open the door for innovations that would otherwise be ignored by the market. “A city only works if everyone who wants to live in it can,” says Hubeli.

Hubeli has been the co-owner of the architectural firm Herczog Hubeli in Zurich since 1982 and was head of the Institute for Urbanism at the Graz University of Technology.