I guess it was only a matter of time until this kind of initiative was proposed.
Well, be careful what you hope for. Regular review also implies increasing rents which are below market level.
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Aren’t existing rules already causing enough problems? Instead of the free market allowing to equally regulate prices, there’re new contract apartments entering the rental market at high prices and there’re old contract apartments that people stick to even when leaving for a year, or at best they try to pass them over to friends and family
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The problem is that vote-winning initiatives can be bad in the long term.
We already have seen examples from NYC and Berlin on the impact of such rules on the investment/creation of new housing stock.
I wonder how difficult it is for the government to just acquire land and build lots of housing units on it to help relieve the housing shortage.
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Beware of unforeseen consequences! The current housing providers would just love to have the government to take over responsibilities for the low end of the market
And such places have a way of turning into ghettos.
I think the best is to do nothing! No price control, no rental control, no government sponsored housing 
And let the market regulate itself
The so-called “market”is absolutely the worst regulator
Why wouldn’t it average itself out between a “friends & family” old contract of 1800 and a brand new contract of 3200? The latter pay the price for the intrusive social benefit of the first.
In the block we used to live in a few years ago before we moved out and bought a place, two of the apartments were rented by one of the Big Four companies for their freshly-landed overseas employees, and they paid almost double what we were paying. We were paying on a level with the area.
Protecting Joe Bloggs and his family from massive corporations pricing them out of the rental market is not a bad thing.
I was watching this yesterday. There must be SRF version in German out there. One of the ideas discussed is precisely that the city of ZĂĽrich does as Singapore: own the land and sell 1 century leases.
Apart from that, interesting reportage. Housing is not scarce because builders can build. The scarce resources is land where housing can be built. In many urban areas there’s no land build available, so the only alternative is to go up (densification).
The reportage also shows that living alone in an 80-100 m2 apartments. I’d say it’s a luxury, but people see it as a minimum standard of life. Very few people live close to these boundaries, but complain about rent too high anyway:
Housing with high floor area per capita is as idiotic as cars with high power engines. Somehow, big floor areas per person are not seen as wasteful and idiotic.
But the protection is at the expense of other apartment seekers, who are either new to the market or want to be more mobile moving across the country allowing also the economy to be more flexible. I can give you another example: from time to time there’re apartments in Lachen (SZ) for a good price like 2200, and those are by people moving out for 3-12 months, sometimes until further notice. For obvious reasons they don’t want to give the apartments up. BUT if there was no difference price wise whether you move or keep it, far few people would be sticking to apartments like this just for the convenience of having a specific home to come back to after indefinite time. Another example: people trading an old contract in Zurich for an old contract in Zug and vice versa.
Sure, but you’re answering a point I didn’t make. 
Such as? I am answering with counter example, my message is: yes, such socialist protections like this ARE a bad thing.
I’m struggling to figure out how you are hanging it on a socialist peg. You have a multi-billion dollar company scooping up loads of living space for employees, and paying well over the odds for it, to the point where the average working family can’t even begin to compete. How is control of that “socialism”?
It should be possible to build up. For example, if we look at Zurich HB. This has a massive land footprint, if you just built a 30 story block on top, that would create a lot of new usable space.
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Do you want to use this one example to define the rules? A corporate renting apartments for its employees for x2? How often does it happen in Switzerland.
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Socialist and Capitalist protections are both bad.
Longer well-thought out long-term planning is absolutely key. i.e. where do we want to be in 50 years? What do we need to do now, in 5, in 10 years to get there. Rinse and repeat every 5 years.
LOL.
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I think none of us would have statistics for that but it must be a luxury thing, AFAIK even the big players aren’t doing that much.
Furthermore, if it was easy to build or/and build up, and prices were averaging out, who cares if one of phenomena is like this.