Zurich's One-Third Non-Profit Housing Target — Cost-Rent Cooperatives and a 2050 Goal Still Short of Delivery

In 2011 Zurich voters approved a goal, now in the city's Gemeindeordnung, that non-profit housing (mostly cooperatives and city-owned flats) should make up one third of rental apartments by 2050. Non-profit landlords charge cost rent: rents cover financing, maintenance and management without added profit (ZHAW working paper, 2021).
SRF reported on the city's 'Programm Wohnen' (presented 27 January 2026) that about 27% of rental flats are non-profit — the highest share in Switzerland — while the vacancy rate was 0.1% in summer 2025.
The 2026 programme has three strands: more housing (city purchases of land and buildings, building-right grants to cooperatives and foundations, budgeted in the hundreds of millions of francs); fair access (allocation and occupancy rules, protection of existing tenants in renovations); and coordination (dialogue with private developers, and planning tools that can require a non-profit share when density is increased).
Caution: an opposition-party analysis (AL, an interested source) found the share roughly flat at 26% to 25.9% of the stock in a 2020 city report and that growth of about 1,000 flats a year would be needed against roughly 600 a year in the prior eight years. This is not independently verified. No causal evaluation of the target on rents or affordability was found.

Read the full analysis: https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/wohnungsnot-so-will-die-stadt-zuerich-fuer-mehr-wohnraum-sorgen