des trucs

Finding a – bigger in my case – flat in Geneva is proverbially a nightmare. I am living it for 3 months and still have no hopes to get out of the bad dream-stream soon.

A 3 rooms flat in Geneva means 2 ‘real’ rooms and 1 kitchen. As I have been told, ‘the kitchen is furnishable, so you can live in it!’. The symbolistic of this innovative interpretation of the kitchen space should suffice to grasp the coordinates of the housing issue in Geneva . In 3 months, we found around 10 apartments that would suit our needs – and we are not picky, no no no, I am far from adequate housing concepts, I am talking about roof- over-the-head and 45-50m2 criteria for two people with many many books. We applied to all 10 – complicated stuff to apply, fill in form, send salary slips, official proof that you have no debts and pray if you are not an atheist. We got 6 refusals. What’s the deal?

Acc. to a prof. of mine only 5% of the market is mobile, the rest is owned by financial institutions which prefer to keep the apartments empty rather than renting them(?). Almost nothing is being build – no, no, you are not right, total permanent immigration declined ‘somewhat’, however the demand for flats continues to be huge. So the regies, the wonderful private firms that administer the buildings with the very few dream and not-so-dream flats are the key actors here. And they are many, many, so so many that it takes me 2 hours per day to check the websites of aprox. 30% of them. You would expect the competition to give them incentives to treat you, the customer, decently. Wrong, huge demand and tiny offer, a sort of oligopoly where not the sellers are few but the sold products. And you as a customer are a huge-immense-absolute nothing!

So what’s my problem? I want the state – make it cantonal cos we are in Swissyland – to regulate. I want them to make sure that the mighty regies inform you about the status of your application and the criteria they used to reject it. I want to know that I am not rejected because I am a woman or an – I hate this horrible so-much-telling word – Ausländer. And this call for regulation comes from someone that gets close to physically violent when she hears words such as ‘comrade’, a true Eastern European that is grateful for having lived during communism to understand how absolutely deeply she values market economy. 

And the perspective…

I am in the HR ‘business’ so I am aware of the many many homeless people around the world. Still that did not give me the perspective. On Sunday however a friend, 28, healthy, had a heart attack and died. And yes, my housing worries become suddenly superfluous. Nonetheless, today on the day of his funerals, I am searching the 20 or so regies’ websites… maybe a new apartment appeared in my nightmarish immobilier market economic hell. I don’t have the same zeal though…