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/
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).
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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.
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