Why A Quarter Of Paris Is Empty 

Skip the waitlist and invest in blue-chip art for the very first time by signing up for Masterworks: masterworks.art/obf

Who exactly was in Paris?

The biggest problem is that instead of treating a property as a home, it is now considered a successful investment, therefore the wealthier will invest in additional property. Compound this change by government policies such as "buy to let" in the UK. If government legislation becomes too onerous for the "new" landlords to risk letting then they will still regard the property as an investment but will forgo the extra profit activity of letting.

That Danish law seems pretty great, finding tenants for those empty homes. Like everything I'm sure there are downsides, but that could be part of the solution to housing shortages

As a middle-class Gen Z Parisian I fucking hate not being able to see myself living in my home city, I hope the problem will be solved soon...

I've a better question. If a quarter of paris is empty why are they building new suburbs on the outskirts? The same is probably true of pretty much every city on earth.

This is all the more insane considering I have seen a family with two children living under a bridge in Paris. They live in a house made from tarpaulin and plywood, and I assume the conditions are not at all safe

i live in Paris and have been trying to buy a house recently, i can kinda confirm how bad it is. usually prices are at around 10k per square meter, however, you can easily see prices going up to 16k to 20k per square meter. basically, prices in paris have went up by 70% in 10 years, mostly due to speculation i'd say.

You have missed a couple key points in your summary. I lived in Paris and the rental laws are archaic. Many property owners don't want to rent because of this. You can't evict someone in the winter, if a tenant doesn't pay the rent you can't just evict them, you have to go to court to get them out and that takes years and costs a lot. French people know the laws and take advantage of it. Property owners realize that it is easier to rent to foreigners as they are more reliable and pay the rent, and take better care of the property.

you totally need to talk about spains population density. the issue is way bigger than in france, being that almost the entire population lives either in the coast or in madrid in the center, leaving a huge ring around madrid where many parts are called "la españa vacía", literally the empty spain. take a look at it it's very interesting

This big problem also combines with the fact that Paris is centralising so many public services. A lot of specialised public schools are only in Paris, meaning you have the choice between spending tons of money on your tuition for a private school or spending tons of money for the rent and grocery prices. And even when some of those big unis decentralise (like Sciences Po Paris), the Paris campus is always the one with the most prestige and opportunities. The Paris rent market has the same effect as legacies and high tuitions for American schools: unless you already live in Paris or are super rich, you're fucked

Britain is looking at doubling council tax for some Welsh towns that have the "the entire town is on airbnb" problem

Its been 2 am I'm just about to sleep OBF : why a quarter of paris is empty Well well well lets find out why🤣😂

The vacant home issue that is the result of speculators is not as big of a problem in much of the US. Property taxes discourage leaving a house vacant as you have to pay taxes on the property so if you don’t live in it or don’t rent it out, you paying a lot of taxes with no earnings to offset.

You didn’t mention rent control. My cousin has a rent controlled apartment in Paris and he only pays 100 euros a month for it, but he and his fiancé only stay in it when they have work there. They live half the length of the country away, primarily. I think this might contribute a lot as well.

AirBrb is an amazing invention. It's like they're running a distributed hotel, and they've offloaded all of the risks on to the people who actually own the property. Spectacularly exploitative, like Uber. As for the speculators, I propose partially offsetting the gas shortage by burning them for heat.

Shouldve looked into the province Zeeland in the Netherlands, some months some villages alongside the seacoast are utter ghosttowns due to the vacant housing from Germans.

Thank you for this interesting video. Pay attention, however, to the accuracy of the images displayed : lots of images of Versailles instead of Paris, image of Le Panthéon instead of l’Assemblée Nationale when you talk about policy makers, etc. Details matter !

I haven't noticed anything that looks to be suspiciously similar to other videos, so congratulations on your authentic work

In an ironic twist renter protection laws make French homeowners very reluctant to rent a second residence as the eviction process can take years. Imagine you rented out a place for a year and at the end of the contract you plan for your adult kid to move there, except the current resident does not want to move. If they continue paying rent you cannot evict them. If they stop you can start legal proceedings but no actual eviction for years.

Do 30k homes make such a big impact in a city of so many million residents? Or is it just pointing the finger at a rather smll problem caused by "the rich", instead of facing the bigger issue of not having built (or rather allowed to build) enough homes, which would not have such a clear-cut villain to bash and might mean certain people don't ge re-elected? TBH I would also be very tempted to blame millionairs if I was a Praris official ...

It became so expensive that families can't live anymore in Paris. Schools are closing little by little because there are no more kids. Then in the suburbs, the pressure is so high!

You can see how much of a problem buy to leave has become in London by getting a train out of Waterloo. Huge swathes of flats that have been built in the last decade between Vauxhall to Battersea Power station as part of the Nine Elms redevelopment are never occupied. The biggest indicator is that so few have any lights on in the evening. And that the gentrification has hardly brought any new business to the area.

You have forgotten one key point that for me is a main one as far as I've seen. The law in France completely protects the renter vs the owner, which makes owners reluctant to rent their house unless they need the money. Just to give 2 examples : - An official renter can stop paying rent to the owner and not face eviction for almost 2 years. The renter just stops paying, the owner can't evict him but can start a legal procedure that takes ages to go into court. So the owner, on top of not having the rent money, has to spend money on a lawyer to sue the renter. At the end, the owner, if he wins, will at best recover the non paid rent and not even the lawyer fees. And if the renter is judged incapable of paying then he will just be evicted and the owner gets nothing to compensate. - Any person in France can force the entrance of a house and just squat it. If they can prove that they have been staying there for more than 48h, then the owner can't legally force them out without a legal procedure again that takes ages. So a person, with no contract at all can just take possession of you house and stay there and you can't do shit about it. if you try to force them out then you can sue you and you can even go to jail. These laws are completely fucked up, and that's why my friends and I are particularly reluctant to rent and very careful about squats.

You need to check out the rules and regulations about renting property in France. This is one of the reasons the property is empty.

I wouldn't dispute any of this - but do the controls in Denmark work? Copenhagen is one of the most expensive cities in Europe - and let's face it, it isn't Paris or London!

Left unchecked, Airbnb and such would be the reason why no one except the super rich will live in Paris at all! If you have a house or apartment in the city, at some you'll notice that if you just rented it on Airbnb, you'd make much more than if you did regular rent and living in the property wouldn't make any sense at all!

my mom stays in the 13th arrondissement of paris in an apartment building that was built early last year. since she’s a single mother with 3 kids, the city capped her rent at around €675 euros a month for a 3 bedroom apartment. paris habitat (one of the big social housing providers in the city) gave priority to tenants with children. you had to kind of “bid” in order to possibly get a unit within the building due to all of the demand for social housing in the city.

What are tenancy regulations like? Is it hard to remove a tenent for non-payment of rent? If it’s hard, owners would rather keep it empty. In NYC, it takes 9 months to remove a tenent. In the mean time, the tenent can be destroying the place. Keeping the place empty can make more sense given the tendency regulations. About AirBnB impact, maybe it’s because hotel rooms cost too much? It’s just an economic arbitrage with market forces at work. Separately, and usually, building rules limit the ability of an owner using the unit as an AirBnB. The other owners should make the rules.

is it a problem? Paris is crowded enough as it is.

Half the people who do live in Paris live in tiny apartments no bigger than a room elsewhere. I knew a school teacher who had to save until middle age to get one such.

It’s not 3,000 unhoused it’s 30,000 (For comparison LA is around 70,000 for a similar amount of inhabitants)

Some years ago, a couple of friends who were living in a large town in France, in building within walking distance of the stadium had 'ghost neighbours' upstairs, who were showing up only on evenings when a match was played by the local Premier League here... They had bought the flat when they were young, and finished paying it, had received inheritance in the meantime and could afford a new home from scratch in the countryside as a new main home. So the flat near the stadium was kept as a secondary home, used only 2 nights per month... Anyway, the video could have been more detailed about the recent history of housing in Paris, especially the huge impact of Chirac's policies that led to massive transformation of flat or whole residential buildings into offices...

in France you can't kick out tenants if they don't pay the rent, don't report problems like water leaks such so you get it fixed or straight up ruin the logement interior, when you manage to get rid of them you're not to keen on leaving the apartment for rent just to resume the ordeal right after fixing it. My sister had to deal with it with her apartment she straight up sold it, you cant have a job and deal with it on the side. i know peoples who own several apartment and rent them its like dealing with pre teen children in many cases, everting is left to decay noting is kept properly.

How is that a problem for the city govt. to fix? Less strain on the city infrastructure,less water use,less Healthcare etc. I make money pay taxes on it and I must pay extra taxes if I own an asset that is not rented out to strangers. Why is that a public good?

Why a picture of Versailles ? It is not in Paris

London has many empty houses as well.. This is a serious problem which makes housing market unafordable for people :(

the fact that only 3000 people are sleeping on the street in a city of 2+ million is insane in itself

Obviously Denmark has a much different concept of private property.

Paris population peaked in Pre-WW1 at 2.8 Million people ,then it has always decreased ,nowadays ,it has 2.12 Million people ,2nd most populated department after Le Nord (The North ,most northern French department ,where Lille is) that have 2.6 Million people (Which is the same exact amount of population all of France overseas territories combined possess) . The 3rd and last French department that have over 2 Million people is Bouches-du-Rhône (Marseille department) ,which have 2.04 Million people ,and in 4th ,the Rhône department (Lyon department) that possess 1.87 Million people .

Property taxes in France are very low compared to America, so if you own a place in Paris it might be taxed at 4k per year, in an American City a place of the same actual value in terms of sales price the taxes might be 25k to 50k.

Those are not empty. Actually they live here. They have another house in other towns where taxes are less expensive. Those secondary homes are empty most of the time like in Bretagne and they come over only three weeks per year (but they say they live there at least 6 months which isn't true)

If you are a seasonal worker or wtv, you are screwed because of the policies that the govt put in place. No one wants to rent to you.

Holy crap. There’s only 3k homeless in Paris? Compared to the US that’s really really low.

There is another side to this problem. A major industry in Paris is tourism, and few visitors can afford luxury hotel prices. The inexpensively priced hotels have largely been converted and renovated into expensive luxury apartments. AirBNB would never have become popular if their had been a shortage of inexpensive lodging. I wonder how these numbers compare.

Unfortunately they would rather nobody live in these properties than a family live there because they think it's to lower the property value if poor live there....Rich people are so cruel

I had no idea, we had that law in Denmark, but I'm glad we do considering Copenhagen's own housing problems.

Hey OBF, could you make a video about the homeless problem in Germany? I have been there and notices the amount of homeless; so I’ve done a little searching online and it appears Germany has the most homeless people in Europe, even more homeless than In the USA combines. Would be super cool thank you!

Why no increase in supply? The extra taxes on these could provide the funds to subsidize builders. Large units could be made into more small units. If 25% are to be vacant and supply increased 25% the short term profits would go away and rents drop

i dont really see why airbnb is a problem, the new policies cap the days you can rent out your house, and what happens the rest of the year? i doubt someone will rent a house for 2/3 or 3/4 of a year, so itll probably stay empty after the airbnb cap is reached and airbnb boosts the tourism industry by offering "cheaper" places to sleep than hotels which is obviously a good thing

Your video is interesting. The problem with Paris is not only airbnb is housing laws that are largely in favor of tenants over owners/ landlords. As you mentioned a lot of landlords prefer to keep the place empty and not taking the risk of having bad tenants.

That title is very misleading. 17% is far from being a quarter. And an Airbnb is not empty, it has tourists in it. Hotels are not condidered empty even though over the year their average occupancy rate can be very low.

That was the smoothest transition to an ad, my God

If all of these unoccupied homes were up for rent the rental cost would be quite big. How would that help the homeless?

As an American I alone get to decide who lives in the property I paid for. If the government wants to house someone let them buy their own house

Video fails to mention the huge protections that renters have in France. Owners don't want to rent, even if forgoing tax and income, because they can get trapped into losing control of the property with tenants they can't evict for years. Do a video on the all the protections renters have in France and the nightmare that owners can end up in. A force so strong that the result is many places just being withdrawn from the rental market and many never being built. Explain how tenant protection regulations can (and give the concrete examples of where they have) result is fewer rental places, higher rents and empty properties.

You would think a lot of vacant houses would lower rent and buying homes. Also in Denmark there’s a lot of empty houses

I guess you can't easily kick out/evict non-paying tenant, so finding proper tenant is difficult.

Easy: it is too legally risky to rent a home/apartment.. so the speculator keep their places empty. Simplify the law, reduce the risk for landlord and the situation will normalize.

I have to admire the way you transitioned into the sponsorship with masterworks, very smooth and didn't intrupt the video's main topic.

Apart from my own sceptical opinion of the housing market, I dont see how this is a market failure. Residences are offered to tourists who have a higher willingness to pay. Supply meets demand and thats excaclty what the role of the market is. Economic welfare is maximised. If you exclude tourists from the market, rents go down and the overall welfare decreases. This is of course favourable for long term renters but tourists and the owners lose. You could argue that this is politically favourable, but there is no market failure in the sense of its definition.

Does anyone know what song is at 1:26? I've heard it in countless other places, I just can't seem to find it

Isn’t it better, if less people live in the city center and more people live outside so there’s an incentive having less geographic disparities

If these are investors that own this I am guessing they are familiar with the entire concept of rental property without you telling them. The problem is you never receive your property back in the same condition you rented it out. As a landlord I could tell you endless horror stories of vandalism, including an intentional flooding causing $35,000 in damage due to the tenant being angry over losing his job. Something the landlord had no control over. Parisians are notoriously resentful of anyone they believe has more money than they do so tenant vandalism and the inability to evict non-paying tenants is a problem. I am also guessing many of those apartments being rehabilitated were trashed by previous tenants. It is bad enough that it makes financial sense to nope out and forego tens of thousands of euros in revenue every year. If Paris wants more rental stock they should look at making it more viable for landlord.

Great video as always. Just to add, cities like Paris should also ban rich people from owning multiple properties or at least heavily tax the rich with multiple properties and use that money to build social housing.

Hello! Where do you get your maps from? Like the on of Paris at 0:06. Thanks!

Totally legit that you have a sponsor now, but you're mixing it into the story and that's a real problem of separation of church and state, mate

What is bad in Paris is that it's too much regulation. For those willing to be a tenant it should be easy to rent if you have the money, but it's very difficult with too much paperwork. Also, it should be easy to evict someone, there is way too much protection for bad tenants. By removing the regulation you let the city life. By failing to do so the city dies.

I'm generally in favor of certain types of housing regulation. However, at a glance I'm not certain about the idea of capping Airbnb days per year. If the homes are being rented out to bnb'ers for a majority of the year, does that not mean there is unsatisfied demand for this type of accommodation? I would expect this kind of regulation to simply move things around, rather than fix a problem. I've generally seen the issues cities like Toronto and Sidney face to primarily be with speculators, particularly overseas.

Funny that you're doing an ad for investing in fine art during a video about unoccupied urban dwellings, as many major cities have thousands of square feet of warehouses near their airports that only exist to store contemporary art in the dark for rich people to trade back and forth to each other.

Congratulations for 400 k subscribers

7:50 you mention making it mandatory to live in or rent out a home and leaving some % of homes with no residency requirements. how would the govt decide which homes and which people would get that option?

"Find a tenant for you and force you to let them live there" And surely I found people cheerleading this 🙄

DO ONE OF THESE FOR LONDON!

more and more people are leaving paris to cities like bordeaux,toulouse or nice due to works and paris is not charming anymore for us.

Congrats with the 400K subs

Bring in the land value tax! Georgism pave the way

Its a masterwork, i didnt knew about this :)

It is sad that rich people buy property and lets it sit there whilst other people struggle to find a place to rent. It is a problem here in Australia as well..

It's the equivalent of leaving several rooms empty in your house, just on a city scale

Rents are very controlled and it is extremely hard to evict a bad tenant.

at 6:58 when mentionning French lawmakers the builing shown is not the Assemblée Nationale but the Panthéon (church)

Did I just waste 15 minutes to figure out where the place from a stock clip at 9:06 is? Maybe... Is it around Václavské nám. 42-48, Prague, Czechia? Maybe...

It is like this in every city. People own apartments they do not reside in permanently. People cannot buy the homes, cause it's already someone elses property. This increases the prices of the other homes that are available. This is yet again, another reason why capitalism is terrible. Someone who's rich can buy a whole block of apartments, and simply occupy them to then sell them for way higher than their actual value. You as a normal, average citizen has no control over the housing market and it's prices. But those with money can chose whatever number they feel like.

Nice vidéo Greetings from Paris 👋

Landlords are charging too much for rent.

There was huge buy up for rent out in 2009

Actually usually they are rented under the table. Rented often.

No thank you! In many markets you can run a credit check but not a criminal background check. I have seen countless neighbors have their homes demolished by suspect renters who can't buy a home due to unstable income or due to a pattern of irresponsibility. You will find renters using drugs (fouling up the paint) and renting out rooms to friends. You may have up to three or more families sharing one home.

A complex problem as you have the competing forces of free market capitalism - the rights of people to invest their money how they want - versus the socialist issue that everyone should have the benefit of a secure and permanent home. It would seem, fortunately, that councils and governments are looking beyond the obvious clash and essentially either asking property owners to exercise their capitalist rights responsibly (and if they do, so their property one way or the other does not lie empty) - or if they would otherwise be quite happy leaving them gathering dust, to be imposing quite hefty taxes on that "privilege". Perhaps another way of ensuring optimal utility of such city real estate which I'm not sure was covered, is the introduction of incentives, perhaps tax breaks instead of taxes, for those whose property is well managed. This phenomenon is very grave in London where I live. Not only do you get the increased rent/scarcity of adequate housing for thousands as described in the video, another effect which is perhaps less often considered, is the diminishing custom to local businesses. About 8 or 9 years ago, I went to a really great French restaurant in Knightsbridge called Racine to celebrate a friend's 50th..... we had such a memorable experience and for the type (read quality) of the neighbourhood, you could not imagine a business more appropriate and fit for purpose. It was therefore somewhat wistfully, that I learned of its closure in June 2015. The article in Big Hospitality included an interview with the former owner who quite simply stated that what was a sustainable enterprise when he had opened just after 2000, had deteriorated by the gradual emigration of the authentic denizens of the area which had been replaced by Russian, Chinese and Middle Eastern property speculators. This is a much worse problem even than it seems since, not only are the owners of formerly prosperous shops and businesses losing their livelihoods, their exit from a Borough effectively guts the area and that in turn, diminishes the draw to the area which is good for absolutely no one. It is right, therefore, that governments "see the big picture" and perhaps clip the wings of over enthusiastic investors to maintain or improve the "shape" of a district by ensuring the ongoing protection or development of the physical environment and what it has to offer regarding commercial, sporting, cultural and/or community facilities. Again, I do not feel that turning whole swathes of London into a ghost town is particularly helpful to anyone in the medium to long term - or the short, for that matter......

It shows the end of 2000 not 2020

Spectulation, and super High prices, are the problem. But its in every big citie around the world.

It should be forbidden to own empty homes as investment. It’s a waste of space and it raises the price for people looking for home

First the art market is a fraud for rich people by rich people so advising to invest in such a market is irresponsible. Second, secondary homes (flat which are not inhabited) are taxed a lot and are a large part of revenue for the municipality. Third, a lot of rich people from outside the EU do invest in Paris and London to enjoy the advantages to live in the EU for Paris or the Commonwealth for London with all their fiscal paradise and fiscal/regulatory stability. Fourthly, in France, you are usually born outside of Paris, go to Paris to study and work until you have a family and good enough career to move outside of Paris (and even it's suburban area) and some people keep their parisian flat and buy a home elsewhere without taking care of the parisian flat (maybe to sell it later as you said) because renting is a pain in the ass in France and you can't kick out your renter if he doesn't pay the rent (sometimes it takes 3-4 years for the justice to kick out the guy). Fively, some entire districts are inhabited because they are in vast majority offices (8th,7th,1st,2nd,3rd,4th,6th districts) and so there is a vacancy more important in offices and especially because of Covid there's no need for such space of office since people work at home. This was some explanations to complete your video

2:24 Such a revolutionary concept 🤣

You have to realize there is a difference between rules passed & people getting caught, or avoiding them.

Empty houses are not the problem, who cares if they are empty. The problem is homelessness and affordability. In Paris we know 3000 are homeless,thats what he said right? I just looked it up and a quick google search says that there are SIX THOUSAND homeless in Copenhagen, half of the homeless population of Denmark. The next stat I saw was .12% of the Denmark population, which is ok I'm that bad at math, 5.8 million people, thats 580000 is ten percent, thats 58000 is one percent, thats 5800 is .1%, is that right? And thats despite technically homelessness is ILLEGAL in Denmark. But thats MORE than Paris, somebody else can look it up, but it seems that if you have MORE homelessness then its likely you also have more affordability problems, so you can't very well brag that your system is better than somebody elses. But highlighting public policy is a good point. Obviously the issue is a little more complicated IF that many are homeless in Copenhagen. It sounds like it MAY just have better PR though. I found numerous organizations talking about this, so if Denmark has such a strong safety net and STILL has that many homeless, thats a complicated issue. A number of polls of people are finding that danes are like many, and just saying 'the homeless are all junkies and WANT to live on the street'. And yet in these kinds of stories nobody ever actually ASKS the homeless people what they want.

Nice videos of Versailles you show in half of the report haha

9:04 Deffinitley not a Paris, but Prague, though...

One of my good friends has a condo in Paris he visits once a year