A milder version of this is what there is in Switzerland. In Switzerland a person cannot rent an house/apartment that costs more than 1/3 of what they earn.
While clearly there are more and less expensive areas, it kills the race to unreasonable prices (like, let's say, NY or London or... everywhere) and allows essentially everyone to have an house (and who cannot still afford there are social helps but that is for another post)
I am not Swiss but I have lived here long enough to realise they don’t do that out of simple generosity.
They realise that desperate people do desperate things.
And this jeopardise things that the Swiss value like quietness, not having to worry about crime, etc.
In the end nobody is an island and if someone is desperate the whole society is impacted a bit by that single desperate… a lot of desperate people and the society is impacted a lot by it
What about differently sized apartments with different amenities? Sounds like this would force standardization and a race to the bottom on minimal amenities.
Have you? In my city there are a wide range of sizes (flats/multi-room) in different areas (near different industry sectors) with different amenities (washer dryer hookups/pool/dog park/none) across different ages (new builds/recent/decades old).
We see barely any building ever since the government introduced higher taxes on social housing corporations. And the nitrogen emissions are also very high due to industrialised agriculture, causing new build projects to stall (too many emissions in a certain area =/= no permit to build).
To be honest, what I see is that the market is frozen, and while there are a lot of different houses, almost all are occupied. I rent from a corporate landlord in a high-rise, and the law keeps them decent. That said, their occupancy is basically single digit units free out of tens of thousands in the NL. It's bonkers.
I guess what I'm saying is that these measures, like min wage help band-aid over the absolute worst problems, but they don't make the market good. More building, more units, especially if built by the government to alleviate problems, would be good. If I understand correctly however, the previous few governments were all leaning neoliberal, so that did not happen.
The issue is that you'll just have an influx of the highest yield housing types. I think the best bet would be requiring a percent of your owned properties in a market, say 20%, to have rent not exceeding a cap tied to minimum wage. That'll ensure at least 20% of the rental homes are at an affordable price for minimum wage earners, and open up the other 80% to be higher cost, better amenities, etc.
