I live in Spain and own property in Spain. There's clearly a gap between imaginary noble okupas addressing housing crisis via occupation of unused bank property and reality of weed smoking anarchists and their collaborating deoccupying mafia harassing mostly not-so-rich middle class, who can't afford the security measures the rich can. It's not a small problem, there's like 12K cases per year last time I checked. Everybody knows the problem exists, most people take extra, otherwise not necessary measures against it. The leftist govt adds to the problem somehow rationalizing it and trying to channel poor's frustration onto middle-class, while the actual abusers, who are well aware of the problem, stay safe.
> There's clearly a gap between imaginary noble okupas addressing housing crisis via occupation of unused bank property and reality of weed smoking anarchists and their collaborating deoccupying mafia harassing mostly not-so-rich middle class, who can't afford the security measures the rich can.
I had a friend who bought a house that needed a lot of work. Before he could get started on the remodel, someone broke in to the empty house, changed the locks, and started occupying it.
I remember being shocked that someone could do this and be protected under the law. He had to follow a formal eviction process, even though they broke into his house and never had any agreement. The perpetrators were known to the police as professional squatters and they advised him on all the things to avoid doing so they wouldn’t countersue him, which was mind blowing.
Even weirder was to watch the reaction on his social media when he posted the story. A lot of people, including many of his friends, jumped to defending squatter’s rights or trying to make some broader point about inequality.
There’s something about squatting that appeals to people who think it’s always a RobinHood situation: Stealing from the rich, giving to the poor. It’s more fun to imagine these people as noble warriors against an unjust society, rather than seem them as people abusing the laws for personal gain at the expense of random victims. Even here on HN there are comments trying to downplay the issue by portraying the victims as mostly wealthy or landlords, which are presumably acceptable victims to people who like these kind of narratives.
It can be surprising to be on the other end of something and see the lack of sympathy.
I went on a group hike once and somehow ended up telling people that my house had been broken into. It was a bummer. Actual monetary damages about 10k, but so many little gifts and heirlooms that were irreplaceable. It's hard to express the sense of violation. They also stole some of my wife's underwear which was just gross.
Someone replied with "well maybe if they were paid a living wage they wouldn't have to steal". Because obviously stealing my wife's underwear is much like stealing a loaf of bread to survive ala les miserables.
It's like all nuance has been lost. Some people think that if you believe that the housing situation isn't great then you just have to be pro anything that calls itself a solution.
I hope they eventually figure out that's not necessary.
People also maliciously ignore the obvious fact that living in a society which is lenient towards burglary automatically attracts opportunists, who were not actually poor in the first place.
People like watering down good versus bad as if it were binary. They don’t care to think a good person can sometimes be bad, or that many crimes are crimes of opportunity, because then they’d have to question their own goodness
Do you really think people he met on some random hiking trip are "maliciously ignoring obvious facts" as some convoluted political tactic?
Personally I think it's because people have these standard narratives floating around in their mind, and pattern-match them reflexively even when it doesn't make sense.
I have several teachers in my extended family, so I hear a lot of teacher stories. There’s a similarly weird phenomenon that happens when they have to do major discipline like suspension or expulsion: Critics come out to heap blame on the teachers for “failing the students”. They defend the child as the victim and heap blame, either collectively or individually, on the teachers involved. Some times they hand wave it away as blaming society. However, the one thing that is not allowed in these discussions is any appearance e that the child has responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Note that some of these children are nearly 18 years old at time of expulsion.
For some people, the only lens they have is a 1-D spectrum of perceived societal power. Blame can only flow up the spectrum and victimhood can only flow downward.
As soon as anything violates this idea of how justice, blame, and victimhood should work, they jump in to defend the side they think should be the victim in their worldview. They inject unrelated or assumed narratives to try to load up the victimhood of the lower side (living wage) while trying to downplay any victimhood on the upper side of their 1-D worldview (insurance can pay for it, you have enough money to replace things). By rewriting the narrative with something new that they injected , their worldview is protected and they can continue to feel correct.
In the teacher example above, this has a sad side effect where the problem students now know they have advocates to protect them despite their bad behavior. Some of them are becoming very good at reaching out to those advocates to share a sob story and replace their narrative with one of being the victim on social media. It’s creating a scary environment when kids know that not only are there no consequences for bad behavior, they know they can find someone to help defend them for it.
Living in Spain, I have friends from both ends of the spectrum: those speculating with houses and those who cannot afford to buy one.
We can blame the okupas, calling them lazy if that suits you. But we are missing half the story if we don't consider the other end of the spectrum: people buying property purely for speculative investment. For example, consider the housing crisis in Majorca [1].
Since we have enough money to buy a house, it's easy to blame the okupas. However, you should ask yourself: How much would housing prices need to increase before I can no longer afford a home? What would I do with my kids in that situation?
Justice should be defended with a veil of ignorance about your personal situation. It's easy to talk about what is fair regarding housing if you own two or three properties. Talk to people, and you will understand how lucky you may have been.
> We can blame the okupas, calling them lazy if that suits you. But (...)
I think you are completely missing one of the main origins of okupas in Spain: organized crime involved in extortion schemes.
I personally witnessed a case where individuals took over a store lot previously occupied by a restaurant. As the story goes, the restaurant operator tried to negotiate lowering rent to no success, followed by spending many months not paying rent until they were evicted. As yet another retaliation tactic, the restaurant operator managed to find a kind of service where he arranged for a lawyer team supporting a group of indigents to take over the store space, report it as their home address, and declare squatter's rights. The indigents were day in day out involved in disturbs, all sorts of vandalism, assaulting passer-bys and patrons in neighboring stores, etc. Nasty bunch, they were even caught on film shitting in a sandbox of a kids playground nearby for absolutely no reason. The police came in every single time, but every single time their lawyers were a moment's away. It took a couple of years of due process and multiple court cases exhausting with the lawyer team exploiting all possible legal recourses until the okupas were kicked out. The landlord had to hire a round-the-clock security because the exact same indigents, once kicked out, repeatedly tried to invade the same space.
The street was packed with businesses. The restaurant was a business hoping to profit by taking over someone else's property against their will. Once their profiting scheme failed, they resorted to pull extortion schemes at the expense of every single person living in a 4 block radius.
You're here talking about greed as if the businesses trying to freeload off of everyone are social justice warriors, when all they were doing is trying to turn a profit by putting everyone around them in danger.
I’m not sure how they do it in Spain but in the US merely lowering the rent is not always realistic with the way financing values properties based on rent values (collected or not).
Housing is expensive because:
1. Progressive governments making incredibly difficult and expensive to build houses, apartments, etc.
- E. g. I'm trying to build a house since SEVEN YEARS ago. Do you know what's the financial cost of having the land sitting there for 7 years? Who do you think is going to pay for that? Not me: it will be whoever buys that house.
- E. g. the 2023 Housing Law making mandatory to offer 40% of the housing a lower prices. Since construction costs are fixed and very well-known by now, who do you think is going to subsidize that 40%? Correct: the other 60%.
2. Rental prices are up, and will be even higher, because landlords have no protection against quatters and default tenants. I have suffered the problem myself: I put out for rent the apartment were I used to live until a few years ago and the tenants only paid for the first month. Then it took me 18 months to kick them out. That apartment will not for rent until the law changes. There's MILLIONS of apartments in Spain like that. Protecting the landlords (eg kicking squatters and defaulters in 2 weeks instead of 2 years) would make one million apartments available immediately, bringing prices down.
Maybe the housing crisis is related to the lack of legal security that owners have, which severely reduced the offer and obviously increased the prices.
The housing law that the current government passed wasn’t very clever…
Your apartment is being squatted and you're selling it at a discount, not being prepared to navigate the legal landscape. The buyers evict the squatters, fix it up and list it at a higher than market price. They do this as a commercial enterprise.
> That logic also applies to demand. Why would you buy a house if someone can waltz in and...
The clear answer is you'd buy one if you know how to handle squatters. In other words, you are well connected and have enough capital to take preventive measures described in the article.
In other words, rich can get richer by having lengthy security apparatus to protect their property. Middle class investors, who might want to buy an extra house to have a stream of income from rents gets that ladder pulled away from them.
One might believe that renting itself should not exist and making money from housing is immoral. If so, let's pull that ladder away from everyone including the rich (though that won't end well since not everyone can be a homeowner).
Criminals who were behind the bars for 20 years, just came out and have nothing to buy a house with.
Families moving to another city for 1-2 years because one of the parents found a lucrative job assignment (I literally have some extended family members in this situation).
People who declared bankruptcy recently and cannot have any assets in their name by definition.
Grad students who are in a university town only for 1-2 years (I was one and I know dozens of my classmates who were in the similar situation).
and on and on. Society is just too complex to make everyone a homeowner. Lot of people need to rent.
> Criminals who were behind the bars for 20 years, just came out and have nothing to buy a house with.
Criminals who were behind bars for 20 years, just came out and have nothing to pay rent with either. This isn't logic.
We shouldn't be releasing people from prison with no way to house themselves because that's practically guaranteed to push them back into crime. Solutions to that unavoidably involve giving them housing in some way: if your solution gives them rent, all your solution does is add landlords as middlemen and ensure that criminals never become homeowners. Giving them housing that they can work to buy is a much better solution.
> Families moving to another city for 1-2 years because one of the parents found a lucrative job assignment (I literally have some extended family members in this situation).
Why can't they buy a house for 1-2 years? Why are you assuming that housing liquidity would remain just as bad as it is now, when rentals and speculation removing liquidity from the market?
> People who declared bankruptcy recently and cannot have any assets in their name by definition.
That's... not how bankruptcy works. Many bankruptcies do not result in homeowners losing their residences, because that's obviously bad, so there are options to not do that. You may not be able to buy a new one... but maybe that should change, i.e. if you're selling your house to buy a newer one, that should be allowed, even encouraged if you're downsizing.
> Grad students who are in a university town only for 1-2 years (I was one and I know dozens of my classmates who were in the similar situation).
See previous.
> and on and on. Society is just too complex to make everyone a homeowner. Lot of people need to rent.
Well, right now your examples just sound like lots of people are forced to rent by current systems which are designed to maintain rental properties as investments.
> Well, right now your examples just sound like lots of people are forced to rent by current systems which are designed to maintain rental properties as investments.
Rather, right now your arguments seem to be based on some idealized utopia with fancy assumptions - perfect liquidity in housing market without any friction of transaction costs, perfect society with ideal treatment of prison population, perfectly rich grad students who can buy housing etc. If such things were possible, other initiatives based on ideal human nature would have succeeded as well (eg. communism).
I will flip your argument back to you - show me a place where the system is NOT designed to maintain real properties as investments.
> Rather, right now your arguments seem to be based on some idealized utopia with fancy assumptions - perfect liquidity in housing market without any friction of transaction costs, perfect society with ideal treatment of prison population, perfectly rich grad students who can buy housing etc. If such things were possible, other initiatives based on ideal human nature would have succeeded as well (eg. communism).
No, this is just a perfect solution fallacy. We don't need perfect liquidity, frictionless transactions, or rich grad students to make this work. We need no landlords and no speculative investment in housing: the rest will take care of itself, due to basic free market principles because that's massively increasing supply with a demand that's bound by population. And it doesn't have to happen perfectly, just well-enough. If you don't believe in supply and demand I'm not sure you have much grounds for accusing me of communism.
> I will flip your argument back to you - show me a place where the system is NOT designed to maintain real properties as investments.
I am truly confused how you think this is flipping my argument back at me.
You were downvoted but you're hitting the nail on the head.
The housing problem is an issue of supply and demand. Currently demand is bigger than supply and that leads to problems, no matter what you do. Either renting prices go up until many people can't afford to rent anymore, or if some law is put into place such as restricting rents or reducing owners' rights, supply will become even smaller and demand even bigger.
To solve the housing crisis the government has to either decrease demand or increase supply, or both.
In Spain there are lots of empty apartments, from the bubble and IIRC are more than 2 million empty , but prices are still going up, most of the market is on the hands of foreign funds who are emptying the cities with their prices. There's a lot of speculation with housing in Spain.
Not to talk about the campaign in the media about squatting, sowing fear continuously. The supply is artificially being held by the owners.
Then the government should make it less attractive for speculators to hold those homes, e.g. by introducing taxes for empty properties.
And on the other hand they could make it more attractive for them to rent them out, e.g. by improving owner's rights.
The problem imho is that a lot of people, not only "the very rich" but also some very "middle class" people/families, have access and can make use of houses as investment vehicles, but houses (aka shelter) is also a primary need for humans. If you hold share of a publicly traded company, you can hold it forever until you think somebody can accept to buy it from you at a price that you like, hoping to make a profit if such price is high enough, and nobody will suffer from this process. But with houses, there is always somebody in absolute need for it, which means that either they will accept to rent it to a price that covers extra taxes applied by the state to you (as a landlord), or they will try to squat if they can not. It's really hard to enforce the right set of disincentives that are wide enough to convince people not to "hold" but at the same time does not apply to too many people but mostly the ones that are using houses as investments.
The whole thing is complicated by being geographically unequal: for example I think even Spain is full of affordable houses, only they are not in Madrid or Barcelona or Valencia, which is where people really want to live. So if you have a second house in an unpopular town you actually have not much - thus you are not rich - and you have often an empty house (nobody wants to rent/buy it) which is an easy target for squatters, and therefore you will become "one of the poor people ruined by squatters", while othen you are somebody who accepted the narrative that using houses as investment was a good idea, both an investment house cheaply in a town that never attracted enough people, thus "lost the game" and is now also losing the house to squatters...
> The problem imho is that a lot of people, not only "the very rich" but also some very "middle class" people/families, have access and can make use of houses as investment vehicles, but houses (aka shelter) is also a primary need for humans.
As an example, we bought our house for $280k in Iowa seven years ago. It held steady for a bit, but jumped up to close to $400k shortly after Covid. YIMBY policies in my area could cost me as much as $120k of wealth that I now possess. What percentage of home owners are going to willingly give up tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in wealth to support more equitable housing? Even for a liberal, $120k is a hell of a lot of money and it's only growing year after year under our current system. With that equity continuing to grow, maybe I have some hope of retiring in the future? That's a hell of a lot to put on an individual to ask them to support more equitable housing. Other people's suffering is their only chance to not suffer constantly until they die. And when you think in terms of not just my suffering but my family suffering, it becomes a lot easier to slip into NIMBYism.
How do you decouple primary housing from investment without fucking over literally millions of homeowners who have done the best they can under the existing rules? It's something I'm personally interested in. But I also don't want to be working until the day I die. What is the compromise that satisfies the majority of people?
The most building would do is cool off the market and limit future gains. I believe only a proper economic crash is capable of smashing prices at this point.
End foreign owned property, tax vacant property harshly, and offer discount loans to first time owners... there are plenty of options to reduce the pressure on the unhoused. Your house isn't a business and does not continuously create value for the community, why should you be guaranteed profits and have advantage over everyone that cones after you?
Those three points wouldn’t do anything significant but change how property companies organize themselves perhaps. only building more housing to meet the demand would cool prices.
So the speculators set up a company, buy the property and list it on AirBnB at several times the market price. Now it's not an empty property, it's a business. Business is slow so they only have to bother with guests during spikes in demend.
Introducing speculator taxes and then making it more attractive to be a speculator (landlord) just means that speculators pass the speculator taxes on to renters.
Letting people get rich off holding people's basic needs for ransom is never going to be part of the solution to homelessness.
> We can blame the okupas, calling them lazy if that suits you. But we are missing half the story if we don't consider the other end of the spectrum:
I disagree. Two wrongs don’t make a right. You don’t have to put different people’s situations on to a spectrum and allow only one of them to be wrong and therefore anything the other person does is right.
It’s also disingenuous to pretend like all of the okupas are from desperate people who have no other choice, when there’s plenty of evidence that the okupas is being abused for extortion, crime, or just for fun.
If you can’t afford a home its still not justifying squatting. Just rent like everyone else in that situation the world over. At the end of the day homes aren’t priced to be impossible to afford for everyone or else they wouldn’t sell at all. You just might need a better job than the first one you can find. Afaik Spain seems to do better with producing housing to meet demand than the US or a lot of other places too.
> Consider laws restricting how many houses a person can own, or maybe an increasing property tax on each unit. These are good solutions.
So they set up a company and buy the property using the company. Pressure is always the answer, whichever tactics are used.
I understand the issue in Mallorca after visiting Mabella. Also the locals don't have to live on a holiday island, but they can elect pressure the speculators and their clients. Somehow this doesn't happen in Greece.
Until such laws are instated -if they ever are - then "theft" is very much an answer .
I'm sure smarter people than me here can come up with a good number of examples where you would agree that "condoning theft" is a good thing. Such ethical problems are never black and white.
Theft is a violation of property laws. If you recognize that property laws are in some senses arbitrary/designed to fit a purpose (which you seem to, since you are proposing changes to them) then I think you should also recognize that treating theft as a purely black and white topic does not make sense.
Not advocating for the burglary higher up the thread, still a shit thing to do so someone
I'm curious how you read that as an endorsement for that sort of behavior?
Your 'but indigenous peoples' reeks of point scoring behavior. If you wanted to explore that topic you'd be more specific. If you were engaging in good faith you might assume that I'm generally opposed to genocide. Taking an abstract point about theft and property laws to accuse me of endorsing genocide ('immoral barbarism') is not good behavior.
I didn't read it as an endorsement of theft, but defining theft as malum prohibitum, contingent on a time, place and legal system, is a flawed argument. Laws can be wrong. But the fact that a bad law or an unjust system bans theft does not make theft ok. Lots of bad laws enable theft (e.g. those enacted as post-justification for land theft), which also doesn't make it ok. No bad law can sanctify what is morally and universally wrong, and no rebellion against a bad law can sanctify it either. When we say a law is bad we mean: There is a larger moral framework in which it is unjust. Therefore the same is true in resisting bad laws: Resistance can't justify morally repugnant behavior. That was the point I was trying to make.
I didn't pick indigenous land theft to score points, but only because it's the most obvious example of some type of unregulated theft still being universally recognizable as wrong - and it's frequently brought up by many of the same people who make the case that other types of theft are in the service of justice.
Well HN's favored solution seems to be not caring that people are homeless until they start scaring rich people, at which point you lock them up in "mental health" institutions that are less about helping them and more about keeping them away from rich people.
My solution is not letting people own homes they don't live in, but that's going to crash a lot of rich people's investments, so we can't have that. Making sure the rich get richer is apparently more important than meeting citizens' basic needs.
So frankly, theft is the best answer currently available. I'd prefer they stole from the people actually causing the problem, the rich who buy up housing and make it unaffordable. But when they don't, maybe the middle class being stolen from shouldn't be so confused about why that's happening.
Ultimately I'm not sure why you don't have the same moral outrage about rich people buying up people's basic needs and holding them for ransom so they can get richer, as you do about poor people stealing to meet their basic needs.
I think people angry about squatters are thinking that squatters are squatting for political reasons, because for people angry about squatters, this is a political issue.
For squatters, this isn't primarily a political issue, it's primarily a survival issue.
Squatting in the summer house of a CEO does solve your survival need for shelter, but it leaves a bunch of your other survival needs unmet because you're far away from, for example, grocery stores, and don't have the resources that the CEO has to have staff deliver and prepare your food. So I'd guess that's why squatters aren't targeting these properties.
The narrative that squatters are being disingenuous about their political beliefs because they squat the wrong homes is really just a tool to paint squatters as disingenuous political activists. The reality is that while squatters might hold political beliefs, few people would choose to squat if they had other housing options. It's not a secure housing situation. Most squatters are squatting out of necessity not political motivations.
> So I'd guess that's why squatters aren't targeting these properties.
The primary reason they won't target homes of the rich or well connected is because they can afford to be in areas with private security that will make any squatting attempts a complete non-starter.
Thus squatters can only harm the middle class homeowner who can't afford such protection measures.
> The reality is that while squatters might hold political beliefs, few people would choose to squat if they had other housing options
Here in Seattle, time and time again, studies are done which show the majority of homeless, when offered shelter, turn it down and prefer to live on the streets. Which seems to completely contradict your claim that they would make use of housing options.
Maybe Seattle homeless are different than your homeless. I don't know why that'd be the case. The same people with the same political ideologies blame the cause of it on the same things, in both places, at least.
Interestingly, they've found the opposite effect in a number of places in Europe, which suggests that the Seattle homeless population really are quite different, or that there's something odd in how these sorts of policies are being implemented in Seattle. I suspect the latter: you're talking about temporary shelter accommodation, but the policy of Housing First is to give homeless people permanent flats and houses of their own. I can understand why people would not be interested in the former but would accept the latter.
There’s also the fact that compared to Europe, you can do quite a bit of hard drugs in public in Seattle and not really have a cop go after you over it. This also precludes shelters, since accepting the offer of shelter probably means accepting withdraw symptoms as well since you aren’t allowed to do drugs there.
Maybe the shelter comes with strings attached, like no booze on the premisses. This is a nonstarter for people living on the street where they can freely drink booze.
"We offered housing to people with complex pyscho-social circumstances on the condition that they will stop having those circumstances. And yet they continued to have them - this was unacceptable."
At least here in France, the "housing" they offer is just a mattress in a huge room with no intimacy and dangerous people around. Most homeless people are skeptical at first, but after getting robbed/assaulted they certainly will refuse temporary housing for the rest of their life.
If the authorities really cared about the homeless, they would requisition empty dwellings and assign them individually so people have a proper home to rebuild their life.
Sure, but does it not occur to them that property owners might be performing an important function such that a policy that causes most of them to leave landlording might worsen the situation of homeless people and other poor people?
Suppose the government instituted a rule that applies to any game developer and in particular to the developer's office or whatever structure he likes to be inside when he is developing games or meeting with the other developers working on the same game. The rule says that if the game developer leaves his office and fails to hire a security guard to watch the property, then 72 hours after the game developer's departure, anyone (including career criminals) have a legal right to take over the office (even if the developer's office is his home). Wouldn't that curtail -- possibly severely -- the quantity and the quality of new games developed in whatever jurisdiction the rule applies to? Or at least raise the price of games (to cover the cost of the security guards and to compensate developers for the hassle) with the result that some of the consumers who used to be able to afford to buy video games are now priced out of the market?
> Sure, but does it not occur to them that property owners might be performing an important function such that a policy that causes most of them to leave landlording might worsen the situation of the homeless and other poor people?
Sure, but I think most people feel stronger about helping people at the bottom of society, rather than the ones closer to the top.
Worst case scenario for the homeless, they remain homeless and have lesser life expectancy. Worst case scenario for the landlord with vacant properties losing their vacant properties, less wealth in the future.
> Suppose the government instituted a rule that applies to any game developer and in particular to the [...]
Yes, that'd be a terrible policy. Same if it applied to property. So luckily, there is nothing like that in Spain that works like you described it, regarding properties.
> Sure, but does it not occur to them that property owners might be performing an important function such that a policy that causes most of them to leave landlording might worsen the situation of homeless people and other poor people?
Yes, actually, that did occur to me, and when I put any thought into it at all I realized it made no sense whatsoever.
Owning things is not performing any function whatsoever. Landlords are leeches on society who remove much-needed resources and provide nothing.
Before you make the tired "but they provide homes" argument: no, builders provide homes.
Before you make the tired "but they make repairs" argument: that's a handyman, and a handyman generally does a better job and is not paid anywhere near as much as a landlord.
Before you make the tired "but not everyone can own homes" argument: the reason not everyone can buy homes is that our entire housing structure is based around making short-term home ownership and home ownership for cheaper than rent impossible. If you remove landlords from the equation, those incentives go away.
> Suppose the government instituted a rule that applies to any game developer and in particular to the developer's office or whatever structure he likes to be inside when he is developing games or meeting with the other developers working on the same game. The rule says that if the game developer leaves his office and fails to hire a security guard to watch the property, then 72 hours after the game developer's departure, anyone (including career criminals) have a legal right to take over the office (even if the developer's office is his home). Wouldn't that curtail -- possibly severely -- the quantity and the quality of new games developed in whatever jurisdiction the rule applies to? Or at least raise the price of games (to cover the cost of the security guards and to compensate developers for the hassle) with the result that some of the consumers who used to be able to afford to buy video games are now priced out of the market?
We have an actual reality we can talk about, we don't need bizarre hypothetical scenarios.
Nobody is saying that squatting is the solution we want. What I am saying is that if you refuse to address the actual problem, i.e. you refuse to get rid of landlords, then you can't be surprised when people whose disfranchisement you support decide to find solutions you don't like.
> > What is it about this issue that makes so many people wish to treat landlords harshly?
> Compassion.
I don't feel like that's the true motivation. Where is the compassion for the middle class worker who can just barely afford some house, just to have it stolen (see parallel threads in this discussion for accounts of that happening) then?
If it was actually compassion, we'd be advocating for the government to provide adequate services to all homeless, paid for by taxes with progressive taxation so the rich also pay into the solution.
> compared to how they see the people with a lot
As noted in parallel comments, the people with a lot are immune from having their property stolen/squatted because they can afford private security measures that make this impossible. The victims here can only be middle class property owners who can't afford private security to watch their property 24x7.
> If it was actually compassion, we'd be advocating for the government to provide adequate services to all homeless, paid for by taxes with progressive taxation so the rich also pay into the solution.
I think that is the solution which pretty much everyone who has compassion for the squatters is advocating for. I'm comfortable saying that almost nobody thinks squatting is a good solution to this problem.
The problem is, providing adequate services to all homeless, paid for by taxes with progressive taxation so the rich also pay into the solution, has to happen first, before you get rid of squatting protections. Because otherwise you're just taking away the bad solution and leaving no solution, for the people most harmed by the current situation. And mysteriously once the squatting protections are gone and property owners' problem is solved, homelessness stops being a conversation until the next time it causes a problem for a rich person.
You're noticeably vague on what you think "adequate services" means. I refuse to be that vague. There is one, and only one, solution to homelessness: homes. Not shelters, homes. Not mental health services (though that would be good, too), homes. Homes: places where you can have privacy and security and pets and the right to decide who gets to enter the space. Services that do not result in homeless people being in homes are not adequate.
Until I see a real solution to homelessness implemented I'm really not interested in solving the problems homelessness causes for better-off people. Solve homelessness, and those problems will likely go away on their own; if not we can talk about it then. But until then, I'm quite okay with society dealing with the ugly consequences of its ugly failure to provide homes for its people.
> But until then, I'm quite okay with society dealing with the ugly consequences of its ugly failure to provide homes for its people.
This ignores a fundamental characteristic of human nature. If you want people to help you out, you can't screw them over.
While I don't know anything about the legislative process in Spain, I guess it is not too different from elsewhere, so you probably need broad support from the masses (middle class) to make big changes.
We already established (elsewhere in this discussion) that the rich don't feel any impact from squatting. They have private security forces, so it is a non-issue to them.
So if we want the government to provide for adequate services, middle class support is needed. If we allow all middle-class property to be stolen by squatters, there will be zero support from the middle class to provide any help to the thieves. Like it or not, basic human nature.
> This ignores a fundamental characteristic of human nature. If you want people to help you out, you can't screw them over.
This is a totally naive approach. I have 0 hope that the rich will "help us out" no matter what we do--rich people don't become rich by being generous. Either we use our majority to make them be productive members of society and pay their fair share, or we get nothing from them. This idea that we're going to concede to them on a few issues and they'll suddenly stop hoarding resources is a total fantasy.
> We already established (elsewhere in this discussion) that the rich don't feel any impact from squatting. They have private security forces, so it is a non-issue to them.
I disagree. The middle class has largely been disfranchised from owning the homes they live in, so the idea that there's some massive section of the middle class that owns second homes they leave empty doesn't hold much water. The people you're talking about aren't middle class.
> So if we want the government to provide for adequate services, middle class support is needed. If we allow all middle-class property to be stolen by squatters, there will be zero support from the middle class to provide any help to the thieves. Like it or not, basic human nature.
Thank you for the strategic advice, but no thanks. This strategic advice you're giving sounds suspiciously like you trying to represent rich people as middle class, and represent rich people's goal of enforcing property rights as a step toward achieving goals that you don't even support. That may not be your intent--for all I know, you completely support the progressive taxation and regulation of landlordism necessary to provide (free) homes for the homeless. But if that's the case I think you're being naive: the promise that if we just give the rich people what they want they'll magically become generous and start giving back has been part of the conversation for decades, and those promises are never kept.
> > If you want people to help you out, you can't screw them over.
> This is a totally naive approach.
I would've thought this was the entirely uncontroversial part of my premise!
Are you seriously saying that you feel the way to get people to help your cause is to screw them over?
We're going to fundamentally disagree there. The whole premise of politics is to find ways to make alliances to achieve goals. If you make most people hate your cause, you won't get very far.
> the promise that if we just give the rich people what they want they'll magically become generous and start giving back has been part of the conversation for decades, and those promises are never kept.
Of course. That's just a variant of trickle-down economics, which is nonsense. The rich will keep it all very happily and never give anything back.
> The people you're talking about aren't middle class.
And yet, they must be. The actual rich are immune from house occupations. Their houses are either in private enclaves where you can't possibly get in, or in the case of standalone houses they have private security coverage where you can't possibly get in.
This is how it is in the US. I realize the article is about Spain, so perhaps the very rich act different in Spain and they just let their multiple properties sit unguarded for long times.
> Are you seriously saying that you feel the way to get people to help your cause is to screw them over?
No, I'm saying that we don't need rich people to help our cause, because non-rich people are the super majority.
> And yet, they must be. The actual rich are immune from house occupations. Their houses are either in private enclaves where you can't possibly get in, or in the case of standalone houses they have private security coverage where you can't possibly get in.
There's a lot of rich between "private enclave with security force" and middle class that can't afford a second home to sit empty that you're ignoring.
Sure, multibillionaires are above it all. But I think you're drastically underestimating how rich one has to be to have even one empty home. If you own the home you live in you're already on the upper side of middle class. And if someone breaks into the house you live in, there's no place in the world where that person has legal protections.
> No, I'm saying that we don't need rich people to help our cause, because non-rich people are the super majority.
So, we agree on that.
We just have different perceptions of who "the rich" are.
A software engineer making $100K/yr (in a low cost of living part of the US, not in silicon valley) is not "the rich", but these people often have multiple apartments. I know first hand since many my of my friends are in this demographic.
> Sure, multibillionaires are above it all.
It doesn't take a multibillionaire to own more than one house/apt. It just takes a middle class income person in many parts of the country.
> And if someone breaks into the house you live in, there's no place in the world where that person has legal protections.
Ended up watching a few news reports from Spain to understand these home invasions better.
Here's one example where an 80 year old woman left the house she was actively living in for only two days to visit her son elsewhere. After coming back two days later the house had been invaded. The police say they can't do anything. That they supposedly have to wait 24 hours (then changed to 48 hours) and start a judicial process. Even though this was her primary residence and was only gone two days.
> I don't feel like that's the true motivation. Where is the compassion for the middle class worker who can just barely afford some house, just to have it stolen (see parallel threads in this discussion for accounts of that happening) then?
If you have someone trying to break into the house you live and stay in, you don't call them "okupas", it's trespassing/breaking and entering. One quick police call and you'll get help to have them thrown out.
The squatting/"okupas" thing is about occupying otherwise vacant properties.
Being offered one night in a shelter that won't let you and your wife sleep in the same room is not a good faith example of being offered housing. It's not at all surprising that people prefer living on the streets to sleeping in a crappy shelter.
> > The reality is that while squatters might hold political beliefs, few people would choose to squat if they had other housing options
> Here in Seattle, time and time again, studies are done which show the majority of homeless, when offered shelter, turn it down and prefer to live on the streets. Which seems to completely contradict your claim that they would make use of housing options.
Shelters aren't homes.
Can they store their things there and reasonably expect they won't be stolen? Can they have pets? Can they have privacy?
Would you stay in a homeless shelter? I mean, come on. The fact that anyone at all says yes to staying in these places shows just how bad staying on the streets is.
> Well HN's favored solution seems to be not caring that people are homeless (...)
I think you're not realizing that "homeless" and "okupas" are completely separate problems, and "okupas" in Spain are typically criminal organizations dedicated to pulling extortion schemes.
I'm talking about lawyer-types riding in BMWs which get a hold of indigents to invade a space, and proceed to demand "compensation" from property owners to "convince" said indigents to walk out.
This is not new or rare. It's a Spanish twist on the old protection rackets, and one which only exists because useful idiots convinced themselves that siding with organized crime networks is somehow benefiting society.
This is like toddler logic. “If I can’t have anything nice neither should anyone else.” The energy spent colluding with organized crime to squat is probably better spent trying to get laws passed that support new housing construction if the problem is to be solved.
My logic is more, "If some people can't have one home, then other people shouldn't be amassing multiple homes."
Toddler logic is pretending you don't understand what I'm saying.
And to be clear: I own a home, and I'm not squatting. It's just I have a sense of basic empathy too.
> The energy spent colluding with organized crime to squat is probably better spent trying to get laws passed that support new housing construction if the problem is to be solved.
"Energy spent trying to not be homeless would be better spent... being homeless!"
Let me be abundantly clear: this is a political conversation for you, it's a survival need for them. Demanding that people remain homeless while they fight for justice by rules that are made by people like you who clearly neither understand nor care about homeless people is absurd.
I mean let's be serious, when do you think this will be solved? This problem has been going on for decades, and we cannot even get people like you to agree that the solution to homelessness is homes. People like you don't have solutions and you oppose every solution that would actually solve the problem. And people like you make the rules. So you can't be surprised when the people you're screwing over don't care about your rules.
I mean, supporting new housing construction is great, but how are you going to prevent investment capital from just snapping up all the new inventory and continuing to jack up the rent? Houses are sitting empty now, because it's profitable for them to be sitting empty. This isn't going to stop until we end landlords. But let me guess--you oppose that, too?
So yeah--we should implement a real solution to homelessness. But given we aren't going to any time soon, you can't be too surprised when people don't follow the your rules just because you make the same broken promise that if they just do things the right way solutions will surely come.
> Even here on HN there are comments trying to downplay the issue by portraying the victims as mostly wealthy or landlords, which are presumably acceptable victims to people who like these kind of narratives.
After skimming some of the comments here I'd even go so far as to say that it's the majority of the comments here.
Im amazed your friend didnt come up with a swift solution, and what would the squatters do? call police and say they were squatting? show their rental agreement??
Sorry, but you have no idea what you're talking about. The "swift" solution would send you to jail in mere hours. You're presumed guilty. Yes, it defies any logic, but that's the way that it is.
My mom's husband had rented his previous flat (to complement his pension) to two women. They were working, very "normal" persons, and the contract specified that no other person could live there. One of them started dating a man and, a year later, there were three, then four (a child) living there. Then the other woman left (the guy was violent) and then the mother and her child had to flee too.
So my mom's husband had a guy that he never had any agreement with, living in his property, not paying rent, and not paying utilities. Now the law forbids to cut the utilities so you have to pay utilities for him. I think at the time (five years ago) it was still possible to cut. But the guy didn't care. After a year and a hell in courts, the flat was free again but a complete mess, broken furniture, mountains of junk. To weeks were needed just to clean, then paint, fixing doors, plumbing, etc.
He sold it ASAP. Now, I don't wonder why there's so little housing for rent.
What stops you from showing up with a locksmith and a few hired security paid to just throw their stuff out of the house onto the street and then change the locks? Thats how they do it in the US.
If the squatter is allowed to break in while you're not home and change the locks, why can't the owner wait for them to be out and also break in and change the locks?
Does the law specifically say that breaking in is allowed by anyone except the legitimate owner?
so you're saying if i book a flight to spain tomorow, find someone who has JUST moved into a house, perhaps scouting for moving trucks, scream loudly, call police and say they threw me out by force, the guy just moving into his new house will be hauled away to jail and presumed guilty? no, that is not how it is.
what will happen is, police will come, you are in your house, some idiot claims to have legal right to the house, he cannot present SHIT, and at worst he will file some police report about you throwing him out, of which you might be fined.
> call police and say they threw me out by force, the guy just moving into his new house will be hauled away to jail and presumed guilty? no, that is not how it is.
That’s silly. You have scope out the place with your friends, and then wait till they leave for the weekend somewhere then break in and change the locks.
He might be hauled away if you manage to provoke him to hurt you, or cut your electricity, water. There is this idea that the squatters are all ignorant people. A lot are quite well educated on the legal aspects of the operation, have accomplices, and know exactly what to say and act when confronted.
They may be begging for it, but the law is on their side so they have nothing to fear from it. If they go to the police you'll end up in jail and I'll still be in your house.
how exactly does that work? you went into my house, I throw you out, you call police and they come and haul me away? what stops me from calling the police on random guys claiming they threw me out? what will you say when police comes? "I was trying to steal his house and he threw me out"?
im not saying to beat the squatter to a bloody pulp, im just saying, you go in, they are evicted, end of story
When the police come the squatter says that they are illegal tenant that has been living there can you beat them up and threw them out. They say that you were renting them a room or some nonsense like that.
In California the courts hold squatters innocent until proven guilty through a lengthy legal process. Meanwhile you are charged for with no delay because it is illegal to beat someone even if they are squatting in your house.
I don't like it, but this is the situation when the law is on the squatters side.
we were talking about spain I think, but either way, I didnt say beat up, but then,
what stops me from going outside a random house, call police, and have the residents hauled away saying EXACTLY what you just said?
and IF what you say is true, I would think that any squatter trying such a thing would be suicidal, because IF this is the outcome that would happen, perhaps residents might consider a slightly different solution
> you went into my house, I throw you out, you call police and they come and haul me away?
It’s just as ridiculous as it sounds. Unless they agree to leave, throwing them out will look like an assault. They’ll call the cops first and good luck going through a 3 year court process while the squatters live in and trash your place. And you better not turn the electricity or water off! They’ll complain as having have medical and sanitary needs and you put their lives in danger.
Yeah. Reminds me of a funny one in France where a stolen car had a tracker and it's location, behind a garage door, was known. But the police was saying: "Nothing can be done".
Turns out: the owner of the car had a friend who was a farmer. He came up with a tractor and ripped the garage door apart.
That was his definition of "nothing can be done".
If motherfuckers play dirty, play dirty with the motherfuckers.
my brother had a motorcycle stolen, and police didnt do shit. Eventually my brother managed to find out who stole it, and police still did not want to come. Turns out the thief also had some problems(owing money) with hells angels. A deal was struck with the fine angels, and the location of the perp was exchanged with (later that day) a recovered motorcycle. He was told the guy probably wouldnt be stealing motorcycles for a while :)
well yeah, the regime is 100% out of control. Also, it was a pretty short negotiation, pretty much like: "yo, i give you location, i get my property??" "deal."
> It’s more fun to imagine these people as noble warriors against an unjust society, rather than seem them as people abusing the laws for personal gain at the expense of random victims.
Allow me to present a third option: maybe these people aren't noble warriors, they're just victims of an unjust society trying to meet their basic human need for housing. People like your friend are certainly unjustly harmed in this situation, but the people who don't even have their basic needs met are far more harmed.
If you don’t have your basic needs met there are options beyond squatting and exploiting laws surrounding it. I’m sure Spain has public services that are much better than the US if the train network is any proxy for effective governance. There’s presumably training opportunities to upskill both formal and informal. All this to say the person who is squatting is probably not someone who lacks any other option but someone who is exploiting a condition and potentially tied to organized crime to boot.
> If you don’t have your basic needs met there are options beyond squatting and exploiting laws surrounding it.
Links?
> I’m sure Spain has public services that are much better than the US if the train network is any proxy for effective governance.
Maybe you should be less sure.
> There’s presumably training opportunities to upskill both formal and informal.
Just because something can be presumed does not mean one should presume it.
> All this to say the person who is squatting is probably not someone who lacks any other option but someone who is exploiting a condition and potentially tied to organized crime to boot.
Seems like what you think is probable isn't based in much evidence.
If we want to do away with the godly rights of property owners and let people keep whatever they can take and defend, I am deeply in support of this plan, but I can't imagine it shakes out how the squatters like to think it would.
We'd just be taking the scenic route to roughly what we have, except I'm short a bunch of ammo.
> Yeah, it would be shocking to those who are used to the godly rights of the property owners on their property like in the US.
The story you’re replying to happened in the United States.
There was nothing noble about it. The squatters stole someone’s house and prevented them from occupying it. This wasn’t noble squatters versus evil landlords leaving houses empty. My friend literally bought a house for his family and someone squatted in it before he could move in.
Amazing that such a comment would come along and prove the point I was making: Some people can look an obvious injustice dead on, ignore the details, inject their own imagined narrative with victim and perpetrator reversed, and claim moral superiority for the perpetrator.
> The story you’re replying to happened in the United States.
I haven't seen any indicator of that at the time. Your comment does not mention anything in it about the US. Everyone is reading as if it happened in Spain. I don't even know whether occupying is possible in the US, bar a few specific states in certain conditions.
Regardless, it could have happened in Spain, and this is a topic related to Spain, my earlier comment still serves to make a statement in relation to the actual topic at hand.
> I had a friend who bought a house that needed a lot of work. Before he could get started on the remodel, someone broke in to the empty house, changed the locks, and started occupying it.
Was this the person's primary residence that they were planning to live in? Or a property that they intended to flip or rent out? Makes a big difference in how the courts would see it.
> Even here on HN there are comments trying to downplay the issue by portraying the victims as mostly wealthy or landlords, which are presumably acceptable victims to people who like these kind of narratives.
I mean, if you can afford to purchase more than one property in order to gain financially from that second purchase, you are wealthy by most standards in this country.
> Or a property that they intended to flip or rent out? Makes a big difference in how the courts would see it.
Are you implying that there is something morally wrong about purchasing a rundown (apparently barely liveable) property, renovating it and selling or renting it? How do you expect the supply of housing to increase (and prices to go down in turn) if you disincentive such behaviour? Seems rather absurd...
It's besides the point what I think is morally wrong or right.
There is a legal difference between "occupying" someone's primary residence, and occupying other types of properties. The first isn't considered "occupying" here but rather "breaking and entering", and the local police are very quick at acting on those types of crimes, especially if the criminals are still inside the property.
No. It doesn't matter whether it is a primary residence, secondary residence, or an investment property. It is the property of someone else. Without permission, opening the door or window and going into it is breaking and entering.
And do not try to argue that breaking, entering, and squatting somehow reduces the housing shortage — the effect is the exact opposite. With insecure property access and rights, people will be LESS likely to invest in fixing up unliveable places. Just think for a second: with solid property rights, it can be an enjoyable practice to invest in and improve a run-down property to a rent-able or sell-able state. But if you are 50% likely to lose your investment and get a massive headache, you'll just go do something else, and let it rot, so no one can use it. Multiply this 100k times, and you have 100k fewer units on the market, just falling into dust.
Or the owners of those 100k units that are just left to rot can accept that their "investment" can't (and shouldn't) make them money faster than inflation, and lower the asking price.
The scenario you describe only exists because the number of "investors" buying up properties to flip and turn a profit vastly outnumbers the number people looking to buy their personal residence, and have the skills and disposition to fix it up themselves.
And judging by the build quality of a lot of flipped properties, the investors don't have the skills or disposition either.
I think we are conflating Private Equity, small-time house-fixer-flippers, and vacation homes.
I think we agree that the PE crowd can rot in hell — they're buying properties to standardize, corner the market, and charge extractive artificially-inflated 'market' rents. They won't be idle long, and I don't think squatting is the fix for that.
I'm quite sure that the PE companies are the primary driver here, not small-time fix-and-flip investors. PE firms are taking the houses off the market for good.
The small-time fix-&-flip people take houses off the market for only a short time, and upgrade the property. If they take too long, they WILL lose money, which is also why even if squatters do zero damage (never heard of it happening), the mere delay can cause it to be unprofitable.
Getting PE out of the market WILL reduce the competition and bring down prices. The same is not true for small time fix-&-flip investors.
The small-time fixer-flippers are taking a risk. Their properties may or may not increase in value at all, even with improvements. The goal is to add value greater than the cost of the improvements. From the people I know who have done it, this is mostly accomplished by sweat equity, i.e., they do a lot of the work themselves, hiring trades only where necessary, as if it is all full-price trade work, it will NOT be profitable. If you think that individual enterprising people adding value, including bringing non-viable housing stock back to market viability —AT THEIR OWN RISK— is somehow bad, we should make a regulatory or tax policy against it. Making random people subject to arbitrary effective confiscation at the whims of random squatters is not fair to anyone.
Same for vacation homes. If you think it bad policy that they exist, then enact new tax or regulatory schemes.
Making random people subject to random confiscation and expense will not get the results you want. It will get people even more strongly motivated to be angry at squatters.
Don't misunderstand me, I think squatting is a bad thing.
But its worth understanding why it happens, and a major factor is that home costs, to buy or rent, are out of control, which lowers the perceived ethical barrier to doing so.
There will always be that weird self-interested-self-described-"anarchist" who has convinced themselves that "property is oppression" because they don't want to pay for stuff. I'm not proposing anything to address that guy. I'm saying we should do what we can to prevent people from agreeing with that guy in the first place.
And one of the ways to dissuade people from agreeing with the professional squatter is by discouraging the PE-driven fix-and-flip (which is distinct from the small-time fix-and-flip, but only early in the development of that business. Eventually, you're successful enough that it makes more sense to buy cheap, in cash and without financing, hire others to fix at your leisure, and rent. That's the transition from labor-class to capital-holding class).
You can upgrade from trespassing to B&E by gently pushing an unlocked door to gain access so I think the term is a little loaded here, considering you are trying to claim moral equivalence between 1) entering someones home for burglary or to actively displace the residents and 2) squatting a vacant and unused building
For 2), how do you tell the difference between a building that is truly abandoned, and one that has just been bought and the new owner is in the process of arranging to repair and upgrade it?
Unless you are going to setup surveillance and track every footprint, there is a LOT of process before the hammers start swinging.
I didn't say abandoned, I said vacant and unused. The biggest difference between the two examples is that one included home invasion. Not any qualification for authentic, artisanal squatting
This is still the same issue. Simply saying a building is "vacant and unused" and is therefor qualified for confiscation (which is effectively what squatting is), would be a travesty.
I owned a house that was "vacant and unused" for many months before I could sell it. I moved in with my wife-to-be, and it turned out to be right at the housing market crash. Sale fell through, zero interest for months, so we took it off the market and invested in some upgrades. There were many months where there was zero activity, except for intermittently mowing the lawn or clearing the snow. Eventually, we made some upgrades, put it back on the market and sold it.
Had someone squatted in that house, especially with the typical trashing of the place, we would have lost both houses and been affected for decades.
Yet you are saying this would be OK for someone to just move in because we're having a hard time getting it sold? Seriously? (if so, my response to your lack of knowledge about how things actually work and your lack of ethics is unprintable in polite society)
Please re-read the last couple comments, I feel that I was quite specific and clear about the distinction I made to the point that I am having trouble reading you as acting in good faith.
My prior point was about emotionally manipulative language, which is what I see on display here with you trying to hold me accountable for a hypothetical. Please do not do that, it is very frustrating, I don't ask you why you beat your wife so don't ask me to justify squatting as morally acceptable.
Or, to put it another way, I'm literally saying that we shouldn't use the same language to describe home invasion (behavior that can get you lawfully killed in some places), to describe squatting, because it is emotionally and intellectually dishonest.
I agree that we may be having a problem of definitions, and we may be like the blind men discussing different parts of the elephant.
I am definitely discussing in good faith, as I'm seeing situations where relatively ordinary people have second homes, are in transition, or indeed are trying to add value to a property to resell, and are entirely unfairly losing the right to enjoy their property, and being saddled with the costs of evicting a squatter and repairing their damage.
In particular, at what point is a building "vacant" and at what point is it "unused"? More specifically, at what point do these get to the level where they should be subject to what is effectively confiscation by squatting?
Would you consider that the house I moved out of, but didn't sell during a market downturn and before making upgrades, which was vacant for more than a half year, be "unused" enough that I should have been subject to the whims of squatters? What about if that caused my wife and I to also lose our newer primary residence?
What about seasonal vacation homes? I know people who have them, purchased long ago, with kit houses, and are closed and inaccessible during the winter, but are used extensively other seasons, when extended families and friends travel from across the continent to use the places. Are those sufficiently vacant and unused?
I'll agree that a case may be made for places that are truly abandoned and unused. I might even agree that a 'no-harm-no-foul' rule could work, as in if the squatters may enjoy it and must leave when asked and leave no trace of their presence, it'd be OK/legal.
But I certainly disagree that granting squatters rights to either of the owners-in-transition or seasonal-homes examples is reasonable.
So, please provide more clarity on exactly what you think should be the boundaries.
> people will be LESS likely to invest in fixing up unliveable places.
Someone's still paying for the house flipping. By definition the flipper makes a margin between what they paid, the repairs, and the price they get at the end.
So why should we encourage house flipping instead of having howners buy the damaged property and pay for a renovation company ? Housing wise the end result is the same, minus the flipping.
If your argument is that the buyer converted a 4 person house into a 20 doors appartment, that's a better proposition, but they're also in a much more protected position and won't be bogged down by squating laws.
Of course they are - even in the case of 'flipping', they are at least working to add value. Barring complete incompetence, the repaired and upgraded place is MORE valuable.
>>By definition the flipper makes a margin between what they paid, the repairs, and the price they get at the end.
NO; there is nothing 'by definition' about it. While investors all desire to make a profit, many actually lose money, either due to poor planning and/or execution of upgrades or just ill-timed market downturns. The RISK of loss is reason to justify a profit. Moreover, SQUATTERS ADD ANOTHER RISK that almost guarantees a loss — even if they do zero damage and somehow the costly eviction process is free, the loss of time itself costs money.
>>So why should we encourage house flipping instead of having howners buy the damaged property and pay for a renovation company ? Housing wise the end result is the same, minus the flipping.
YES, I agree, this would be better. However, the result is not necessarily the same. While many flippers have poor or overly trendy tastes so that their upgrades don't add value, individual homeowners are even more unskilled. Plus, people upgrading buildings for a first or second living bring advantages and economies of scale, including buying materials at trade and/or bulk prices vs retail prices, ability to employ workers more efficiently across multiple properties at once, etc. OTOH, the homeowners have the advantage of caring more because they'll live there.
But notice, BOTH of these are ONLY MADE WORSE option by squatters. An investor may take a loss on one of a bunch of properties due to a squatter. But a homeowner who buys a run-down home to upgrade and move into, can be bankrupted by a squatter. Now, you have two homeless families, no just one.
There is simply no justification for giving people the right to steal other's property just by breaking and entering.
If we want to make a process, perhaps akin to found valuables, whereby someone can claim a property, and the previous owner must show that s/he is actively working to upgrade it, I could support that.
I might even support some kind of people can move in, but must cause no damage and move out when caught; a kind of 'no harm — no foul' rule could be reasonable. But, just "gee that looks empty, let's move in, and we have rights greater than the owner!", is a hard NO.
> economies of scale, including buying materials at trade and/or bulk prices vs retail prices, ability to employ workers more efficiently across multiple properties at once, etc.
You're arguing for having professional home renovators, that works the same if the house is flipped or not. So let's choose not.
> squatters
You're protected from squatters when it's your primary residency. You make it sound like you'd go buy some groceries and when you're back at home your house is occupied with no recourse. No.
It only becomes a legal quagmire when you're flipping properties, it was your winter vacation house, or you're actually spending your life in the Bahamas. Nobody's having issues while their house is actively renovated and they move in as soon as it's finished.
>>you're flipping properties, it was your winter vacation house, or you're actually spending your life in the Bahamas
So, you are saying that people who do any of those things should be subject to arbitrary confiscation of their property or rights to it?
NO, that is absurd and obscene. Everyone who has a second property is not wealthy to the point where it doesn't matter. I know many people who have remote properties that they visit intermittently or seasonally, who struggled to earn and invest enough to make it possible and have spent decades working on and improving the property. In some cases, the value has increased greatly, and in others, it's still just a remote camp on a remote wild spot.
Under what ethical reasoning should they be deprived of their property? Particularly, that they should be deprived of it randomly and at the whim of squatters? (e.g., if society decides that no one should be allowed to own a second property, then we should pass laws to outlaw and/or tax them out of existence in an organized way; there's no justification for arbitrary taking)
EDIT, add:
>>You're arguing for having professional home renovators,
No, this does not necessarily mean professionals, it means anyone doing it repeatedly or at scale, including a lot of semi-pros. Professionals and trades are often involved. And once you do it a few times (I know people who have done some), you do get economies, efficiencies, and knowledge that makes things both more economical and have better outcomes than the average homeowner/first-timer can do. I still don't see the argument against flipping a house (except for bad jobs, which homeowners can also do), and certainly none that says anyone should be subject to arbitrary confiscation by squatters
> Under what ethical reasoning should they be deprived of their property ?
Ask the Spanish government ?
Otherwise most countries have adverse possession laws, the only difference being how drastic the requirements are. Spain just decided to lower the bar that much.
There is a genuine difference though, as in, the law in Spain treats the two scenarios differently.
I'm not sure where the GP's situation took place but given the article is about Spain the person you're replying to could probably be forgiven for thinking it was there
By incentivizing people renovating, then living in, the rundown house they bought, instead of seeing that option as equally valuable as just selling/renting the house? Its one thing to produce more housing, its another to somehow magically produce more housing in such a way that does not devalue the other resources. Step 1 is to disincentivize speculative/rent-seeking home purchases.
Its been said a couple times in sibling comments, but the problem comes down to the fact that people are buying houses as investments, and not as houses.
In most of Europe, the US and Canada, the cost of home ownership grossly exceeds the median income, to the extent that lending is almost always necessary. Thus owning a second home is always the realm of the wealthy, even if they are still ultimately laborers. Buying that second home is often the first step from the labor class to the capitol-holding class.
Its frustrating that the housing crisis is often described in terms of Marxist dialectic, but the crisis often feels lab-grown to illustrate the flaws of (literal) rent-seeking behavior by the capitol-holding class.
Hard like the people that got it cheap? Or hard like the people that inherited such things?
I guess you can fuck off to the sticks, but I'm not sure that works as a defense for a society that has made an element of participation contingent on absurd expense or debt. Does 'work hard' feel good when the thing you purchase with your labor is expensive in order to service the desires of the wealthy?
I'm not going to say our current setup is indentured servitude or serfdom, it clearly isn't and social mobility and changing your station are possible and even commonplace. I will say that our current system has resulted in a large class of people whose productive excess is routinely paid to a small group for the benefit of being allowed access to a residence (they don't provide other services or benefits, they don't actually labor to produce the house as a finished good).
Squatters fight against private property which is usually protected by law, it's very rare that it goes the other direction. A lot of squatters want to abolish the possibility of someone having to pay rent to another person to have a place to live, considering that relation inherently oppressive and against a self-ownership of the individual.
Refusing to pay for a place to live is simply theft and entitlement.
They expect people to build and maintain homes for them while doing nothing in return.
If you abolish property rights, your two options are state slavery or anarchy where the strong take whatever they can.
These misguided ideologies can only live parasitic ally on the fringe of a otherwise functional society. If they got their way, the society would be destroyed.
For most of our history humans did not have to pay for a piece of land to put up some yurt or hut and live there.
How is the current system not strong taking whatever they can? Private property is just a legitimized theft, because it leaves some people without access to land or natural resources that is required for survival.
It's not true that without private property you get state slavery or a strongman situation, you may check Zapatistas, they are rebels that created a stateless society of 300 000 in Chiapas, Mexico without private property with structure that is based on decentralized, horizontal, federated institutions.
Anarchism is not a misguided ideology, it's a product of highest levels of freethought that inspired many people to fight for liberation from oppression and for a world where every human can develop the the heights of one's potential.
That is an ahistorical perspective. For most of human history, you could be killed for putting a yurt or hut in someone else's land.
Even chimps will kill others for infringing on territory.
There were breif periods where humans entered virgin land, but these people migrated because other land and resources were spoken for.
>Private property is just a legitimized theft, because it leaves some people without access to land or natural resources that is required for survival.
This is reverse reasoning. people lacking resources doesn't imply it was stolen from them. The alternative is that they simply didn't start with any.
Rights don't derive from wants or needs.
My wanting a pony does not give me a natural right to a pony. My hunger does not give me a natural right to food
>It's not true that without private property you get state slavery or a strongman situation, you may check Zapatistas
The zapititistas did not acquire all their land, people, and resources through free choice, nor were people free to stop collaborating if they chose.
> That is an ahistorical perspective. For most of human history, you could be killed for putting a yurt or hut in someone else's land. Even chimps will kill others for infringing on territory.
I don't agree with you, there are books such as The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity that counter your rhetoric. Private property norms did not exist for most of human history.
> Even chimps will kill others for infringing on territory.
On the other hand Bonobo is not so territorial and is too one of the species that is the closest to us.
>This is reverse reasoning. people lacking resources doesn't imply it was stolen from them. The alternative is that they simply didn't start with any.
Why then some people usurp land and natural resources and not let others use them?
> Rights don't derive from wants or needs.
From what they derive? If you agree that there is no natural rights, then how do you justify private property rights?
> The zapititistas did not acquire all their land, people, and resources through free choice, nor were people free to stop collaborating if they chose.
Bonobos are not pacifist. There is less violence within the troop, but they will still kill and maim, especially in the case of territorial disputes.
Groups of humans have always organized for Mutual Aid, but it has never been unilateral or not subject to the approval of the group.
Norms around private property are different across time and depend on the level of abundance. At no point could a strange human come and take your possessions huts, or food without permission.
In general, I'm getting the impression from your comment that you have some overly idealistic beliefs, and that you're perhaps unwilling to engage honestly with ideas that are counter to your own, but in any case..
Re: The Dawn of Everything
You're saying you don't agree with him because of a book you read - but that book has legitimate historians making some pretty bold criticisms: "cherry-picked and selectively presented examples", "perilously close to scholarly malpractice."
There is some positive feedback as well, but in general, if a book claiming to be historical elicits this kind polarization, it's probably not something to base a strong belief on.
I'm also not quite sure why you would find it hard to agree with the notion that, throughout history, humans have been protective of their territory. The list of examples you could point to for this is unending.
> Why then some people usurp land and natural resources and not let others use them?
You're question here doesn't really do accomplish anything re: property somehow being theft. I would suggest that "the reason" some people aquire land and don't let others use it can simply be because they don't want to. Sometimes the answer is that it's not financially viable to share it. Sometimes the answer is that they fear the destruction of the land or resource if they just open it up to anyone. Any of these reasons is sufficient, because they don't actually need a reason.
> If you agree that there is no natural rights, then how do you justify private property rights?
To start, the other guy never claimed private property was a natural right. The rights we have emerged from people wanting to self organize for their mutual benefit. They needed to agree on some fundamental protections that enable an actual net benefit of their organized society, and giving people rights to own and protect their property is generally needed for people to feel confident that effort they put in to improve the land is effort they will be rewarded for. It's a nice idea that people will improve land for the good of humanity, but in reality, people are not motivated by that enough to overcome the people who would abuse that system by "free-loading". It should tell you something that private property + property rights have consistently emerged, whenever people have tried to put together a society.
> Please share your sources for this statement
I admittedly didn't know much about this, but on some cursory research, it seems pretty obvious to me that this was not an entirely "free choice" based movement..
"Rebels wore ski masks and used furniture and other office materials to barricade themselves inside of buildings once they had taken them over.[11] During the occupation of the city, rebels also painted pro-Zapatista statements on the walls of buildings.[12] While raiding San Cristóbal de las Casas, the Zapatistas released 230 predominantly Indigenous prisoners from jail and also demolished land records in protest"
> In general, I'm getting the impression from your comment that you have some overly idealistic beliefs, and that you're perhaps unwilling to engage honestly with ideas that are counter to your own, but in any case..
I like precise logical argumentation, that's not idealism, I don't make any unnecessary assumptions
> I'm also not quite sure why you would find it hard to agree with the notion that, throughout history, humans have been protective of their territory. The list of examples you could point to for this is unending.
Oh, that's very simple, for most of human history humans lived as hunter gatherers and they did not have private property or rent relations.
>To start, the other guy never claimed private property was a natural right. The rights we have emerged from people wanting to self organize for their mutual benefit.
No, there was an enclosure of commons that happened to exploit farmers as factory workers. Those rights were always about naturalizing oppressive human relations.
>It should tell you something that private property + property rights have consistently emerged, whenever people have tried to put together a society.
This is not true, many civilizations were against private property rights and private property rights were never universal, they are even not universal in this worlds, even if they exist in most places around the world.
>I admittedly didn't know much about this, but on some cursory research, it seems pretty obvious to me that this was not an entirely "free choice" based movement..
No one is coerced to join those rebels. And rebels are rebelling against unjust genocide of Indigenous Americans among others.
That's not quite how your comments elsewhere in this thread read lol
> This is not true, many civilizations were against private property rights and private property rights were never universal
Wanna name a couple of those civilizations that didn't have property rights that managed to thrive and grow beyond a population of like 10,000? If you're going to point towards something like Greenland or China where land is owned exclusively by the state and leased out.. that's the same thing as private property rights, the people who lease that land out have rights with respect to that land. Countries literally can not exist without property rights, and if you're gonna say "yea and countries shouldn't exist it's all just made up borders anyway, mann..." then you're username is incredibly fitting lmao
I also never said that these rights were universal, just that they show up. A lot. And if you want to claim that reason is because of some oppression, go for it. I happen to think this is wrong, and the fact that basically every time these rights are revoked things go to shit tells me that's because they exist for a reason. See
> No one is coerced to join those rebels.
Brother, they showed up with guns and took over buildings by force; they destroyed the land records for everyone, not just their specific "members" - if that's not coercion, what is? Please recognize that you may just be enamored with the ideals of what the group said on paper, and are therefore rationalizing their extremist actions that end up being counterproductive to any positive goals.
>Brother, they showed up with guns and took over buildings by force; they destroyed the land records for everyone, not just their specific "members" - if that's not coercion, what is?
What do you think about genocide of Indigenous Americans? Is it okay? Or can they defend themselves?
For most of human history, people fought over the right for members of their group to put up a hut or yurt on a piece of land. And/Or some other, more powerful group would come and take whatever they wanted, including sex and slaves, from other, weaker groups of humans.
Now you have a group (or multiple groups) of people that will use violence to prevent people from doing the things that they feel are wrong. Probably they'll decide on what those things that are worth using violence to prevent are, and probably they'll write them down so that everyone is on the same page. If they don't do that, then they are using violence for arbitrary and undefined reasons, which most people don't want. I think I see where this is going...
What is the vision for this scenario that doesn't just turn into new groups taking power and enforcing their rules?
The most important difference is everyone could create such a group without main authority monopolizing violence. Some would try to recreate current authoritarian relations, while others would oppose them.
It's a nice thought, many small bands of people each doing their own thing. But I don't see why people think it would turn out differently than it has turned out before, which is some groups becoming large and powerful enough that they push out, destroy, or absorb other groups, until they become large and powerful enough that they're just called government.
> Yeah, so indeed it's important to organize self-defense groups that can help you not get hurt or enslaved.
Did you realize you just came up with the system you were opposing?
We can organize into some groups, let's call them countries, with an organized self-defense groups, we can call them police and military, to prevent our yurts from being stolen.
> For most of our history humans did not have to pay for a piece of land to put up some yurt or hut and live there.
In those same times, anyone that wandered by who was stronger could simply kill them and take over the yurt, until someone stronger showed and killed them in turn.
Not a great way to live, and not a very long life.
Yeah, Zapatistas have much higher standard of living than other people that live in Chiapas, which is impressive. You have to always consider local conditions and if you can see that certain ideas help some part of some territory develop better then alternatives then it's a strong argument for them. Especially considering that rebels are fighting against colonially motivated genocide.
> Yeah, Zapatistas have much higher standard of living than other people that live in Chiapas, which is impressive.
Of course, the corrupt ruling bandits always enjoy a higher standard of living than their subjects. The same story in every anarchist and communist society.
Zapatistas are organized Indigenous Americans, they are fighting against genocide. Why for you people who fight for their own survival are bandits? Do you think that people who were committing the genocide are fine? Do you approve of genocide of Indigenous Americans? If so, then that's disgusting.
"For most of our history humans did not have to pay for a piece of land to put up some yurt or hut and live there."
You can still put up your yurt or hut in many places of the Earth, probably including Chiapas, but it seems that more people want to live in London, Munich, Tokio or Barcelona.
Show me a place with a stateless society and without private property that actually attracts nontrivial amounts of people. You speak of such places highly and reverently, but for all their highest level of freethought, they don't seem to compete well with traditional urban centers of the capitalist world.
When voting with their feet, people mostly move to wealthy countries that protect personal property, not away from them.
>I'm pretty sure they're talking about real property. Land and improvements. Not the strong taking away everything you have.
An individual has to be very careful not to create any real property value or improvements, otherwise it will be taken from you.
Conceptually there are lots of solutions to managing this problem. Historically, they rely on a state institution that goes around stripping people of what they create, forcing people to create things they don't own.
Communism almost always devolves into totalitarianism for this reason.
You can create value in the 99% of the world that isn't attached to your house.
Also a more conservative set of rules, like the limits I was talking about, would still let you own a house and upgrade it a lot in a way that you fully own.
> There are so many better ways to solve this problem than putting a cap on value creation.
Does "value creation" here specifically mean adding more living space?
Only a very tiny fraction of homeowner construction projects would be an issue. And if you want to do something like build a third house on your property, a rule like that would say "go ahead, but then you have to sell it when you're done". You can create tons of value and profit from it, you just can't own three houses.
Lets assume this rule is only about living spaces, and not other assets and infrastructure.
I like building and improving houses. I have one in the bay area I work to improve.
I have built a mountain home in the Sierra Nevada, and am working on a desert home in Nevada. These take nothing away from anyone. They were empty land surrounded by more empty parcels before I did something with them.
There is no shortage of land and nothing is stopping someone else from doing the same. When I die, they will probably be sold off, and there will be more options. until then, nobody is worse off. I have thought about renting them out, which is still better than if they never existed.
Who am I hurting, and why should I be forced to sell?
If there was a law I couldnt own three houses, I simply wouldnt build them.
There could be an exception for houses in the middle of nowhere.
But also in economic terms, if that house is in a zero-demand area and won't be on the market for decades, then it would be better if you don't build it, and instead either spend that money elsewhere or invest it.
Who cares about economic terms? It is my money, and I will light it on fire if I want to.
Furthermore, sweat equity is real. You can put sweat, blood, and 100k of materials into something and have an 300k asset. It doesnt matter if a desert lot was dirt cheap.
I find it funny when people forget you can create value yourself instead of passively investing in someone else who creates it.
> Who cares about economic terms? It is my money, and I will light it on fire if I want to.
You're the one that brought up value creation, not me.
If it's a "who cares" when it goes against how you want to spend, then it's also a "who cares" when it aligns with how you want to spend.
> Furthermore, sweat equity is real. You can put sweat, blood, and 100k of materials into something and have an 300k asset. It doesnt matter if a desert lot was dirt cheap.
> I find it funny when people forget you can create value yourself instead of passively investing in someone else who creates it.
A house nobody else wants has a value of zero dollars, and you didn't create value.
If that house is worth 300k, then I misunderstood your earlier description.
But this kind of situation is not what normally happens. Whether it's allowed or not doesn't really matter. The important case is what happens when people build/buy in areas with more than negligible demand.
Strange, for me owning a property is slavery, being pinned to a single location. I'm retired now, looking back, I was free, happy and productive in the years that I was renting and unhappy while owning.
If you could see the extent of organization that such a life requires, you wouldn't say that. Especially when the alternative is "I bought this place and now you have to pay to live there" which is the highest form of doing nothing.
How can that be worse than "there are millions of unoccupied places, most housing belongs to the same people who don't need it, and yet there are millions living in the street"
Most houses are owned by people who do not work for it. It's the rent from their other houses that give them even more money, effectively doing nothing. Let's not think those people deserve our praise for their parasitism.
> Refusing to pay for a place to live is simply theft and entitlement.
Holding other people's basic survival need for ransom is simply theft and entitlement.
What makes you think that people are going through all the complexity of squatting if they have the options of paying for a place to live?
> If you abolish property rights, your two options are state slavery or anarchy where the strong take whatever they can.
Anarchy where the strong (rich) take whatever they can is the situation we have now. Property rights as they currently exist are that rich people have property rights and nobody else does.
Unless you start talking solutions to homelessness, it starts to sound like you just don't care about the homeless and you're only interested in maintaining the power that exists.
If posting in favor of imprisoning the homeless is acceptable to you, but pointing out how awful that is, isn't, then I'm just not that interested in what's acceptable to you.
> If posting in favor of imprisoning the homeless is acceptable to you, but pointing out how awful that is, isn't
You know very well that the problem isn't your opinion but the way that you're expressing it, and your incredibly hostile treatment of other users.
HN is a platform for thoughtful discussion of interesting ideas and topics, not advocacy and emotional outbursts. Your kind of behavior isn't wanted here.
This kind of thing is not ok here—it's not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.
I understand moderating discussion is extremely hard. I understand that it seems fair at face value for you to just enforce politeness and not enforce ideologies, but that's not actually possible. You are taking a side here, if you decide to censor me, and not the ideologies I'm arguing against.
I am not perfect and I should have been a bit more polite in some of the posts you link.
People post absolutely reprehensible opinions on this site, and a rational, reasonable response to those opinions is not politeness. The startup community is supportive of and participates in a lot of extremely harmful practices, and believes a lot of harmful ideologies. If espousing ideologies that are literally killing people is allowed by the guidelines, but pointing out how horrific those ideologies are isn't allowed by the guidelines, then the guidelines are effectively supporting those ideologies.
Take for example this post which you linked (I'm linking the post it was responding to):
The above post I 100% stand by. I think I said that about as politely as I think is possible; any more polite would be miscommunication.
If you consider that post a problem, I understand, but I'm not going to comply with that. If that's the case, please just delete my account and all my posts, and I won't attempt to create another account. I'd rather not be associated with a site that's protects reprehensible ideologies in the name of politeness.
(1) plenty of HN users post comments from plenty of ideological positions without breaking the site guidelines and (therefore) without getting moderated; and
(2) users breaking the site guidelines from all different ideological positions do get moderated.
That doesn't fit with "you're taking a side". In my experience the causality goes the other way: when people get moderated they have a strong tendency to jump to "the mods are against my side" rather than look at how their posts are breaking the rules and/or go against the intended spirit of the site. In other words it's not "I got moderated because you're taking a side", it's "you must be taking a side, because I got moderated". So it's probably worth adding:
(3) The users who jump to "you're taking a side" are distributed across all the ideologies.
There are also users of every ideological view making the case "my ideology is special; it requires me to break the rules, otherwise it cannot properly be communicated". This is disproven by all their co-ideologists who have no trouble communicating similar views without that.
I agree with you that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40136616 was not as bad as your other three comments I listed, but it still used the "people like you" trope, which is a flamewar + personal attack combo that leads to forum hell.
I don't believe you need personal attack, clichés of internet aggression, etc., to make your case for what you believe in. On the contrary, these things cheapen your position. Morever, they are fungible across all the ideologies—that is,
(4) commenters who resort to breaking the site guidelines resemble each another far more than they resemble anyone else. Ideology is not the high-order bit here.
By the way, I don't identify with your word "politeness". Enforcing politeness in not at all what we're after, and in that sense I agree with you, though I think you're misassessing what we do as mods. Politeness is profoundly uninspiring as a value, and I'd find it profoundly demotivating if that were the principle. But it's not.
The HN guidelines used to say "Be civil", but we changed that years ago to "Be kind", because civility (which I take to be close to politeness) doesn't go deep enough to capture what we want here. Kindness is a far better word. We want people to be in good relational connection with each other, even when they disagree about a topic. That's an ideal, of course, but it's the right ideal for HN, because it's needed in order to optimize for curiosity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
Perhaps then, the crux of your and my disagreement is that I do not think you are successfully optimizing for kindness. I believe that you intend to optimize for kindness, but you're not, you're optimizing for politeness.
You'll note that increasingly my posts here are on homelessness. There are nearly 600,000 homeless in the US alone, many of whom will die from homelessness-related problems. Many posts on this site both spread misinformation about that problem, and argue against any and all real solutions to that problem. That isn't kind, but it isn't moderated. And treating those comments as if they are not reprehensible, might be kind to the poster, but it's unkind to the 600,000 homeless in the country where a lot of HN users live.
Kindness isn't a simple thing: sometimes kindness to one person needs to be balanced with kindness to other people.
Kindness, as I understand it, has to do with how you treat the people you personally come into contact with. On HN, that means how you relate to other users.
I get that you're using the word differently and that's fine, as long as we understand what each other means by it. It seems like you're defining your political position (on homelessness in this case) as 'kind' while the opposing position is 'unkind'. Presumably someone of the opposite view might take issue with that, but I don't.
Since it's in your interest to argue for your views in a way that is personally kind to the people you're arguing with, I don't see any tradeoff between our two usages.
I support cheap and affordable housing. I support charity for people that are honest members of society.
I think unrepentant thieves need to be incarcerated, not because they deserve a housing, but to protect innocent people from their destructive Behavior.
>Quoting so you can't retract. I don't think you'll find much agreement there.
I think you'll find that you are in the minority. Look at laws for felony theft. I think most people would like even harsher penalties people that steal assets worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. All it takes is seeing it once and people swing very quickly against this kind of behavior.
You being hungry does not entitle you to my dinner. You being horny does not entitle you to my body. You being cold does not entitle you to my shelter.
> I think you'll find that you are in the minority. Look at laws for felony theft.
I think the laws for felony theft as compared to the laws for murder and rape are pretty solid evidence that rape and murder are considered more serious crimes than theft. And that's setting aside that there are plenty of theft laws that are even less serious than felony theft. In cases where people are stealing to meet their basic needs such as food or housing, it's not uncommon for perpetrators to receive lenient sentences including probation with no prison time.
What's your argument for landlordism not being theft? Shouldn't those people get a job too? Or is theft only a crime when poor people do it?
> What's your argument for landlordism not being theft? Shouldn't those people get a job too? Or is theft only a crime when poor people do it?
It is very simple. Theft is when you take something from someone without voluntary agreement. renters and landlords enter voluntary agreement. If a landlord has a job or not seems irrelevant. They didn't steal anything from anyone. Everything they have, they obtained through mutually consensual exchange.
How do you think landlordism could be considered theft? Is it just because people need/want shelter that they have?
Is a farmer who grows food a thief because people need food to live?
Is a doctor a thief because you die without surgery?
Is a mechanic a thief because your car needs repair?
In my mind, lacking, wanting, or even needing something does not mean that everyone who has it and charges you is a thief.
> It is very simple. Theft is when you take something from someone without voluntary agreement. renters and landlords enter voluntary agreement. If a landlord has a job or not seems irrelevant. They didn't steal anything from anyone. Everything they have, they obtained through mutually consensual exchange.
Wrong. The vast majority of people don't voluntarily agree to rent, they are coerced. "Pay rent or be homeless" is pretty powerful coercion.
> How do you think landlordism could be considered theft? Is it just because people need/want shelter that they have?
Stop this "need/want" nonsense. I think we can agree that homes are firmly a human need. People being mad that landlords are driving up housing prices for personal gain isn't just whining that people aren't getting what they want. People need homes.
It's theft because people who already have a lot of money, are buying up things that people need, so they can hold them for ransom. Owning things so that others can't own them isn't a benefit to society, and landlords do not provide services (before you trot out the maintenance argument--compare the prices of a handyman to rent). They're just leaches.
> Is a farmer who grows food a thief because people need food to live?
A farmer grows food, like a builder builds houses.
The landlord equivalent for food would be if someone decided to buy up all the world's food and jack up the price, letting people starve to death despite an excess of food rather than compromising their profit model. And that would be murder, not theft.
> Is a doctor a thief because you die without surgery?
Surgery, unlike a food or house, is a service, not a product.
Unlike a landlord, doctors performing surgery is actually doing work. And while the prices of medical care are high in the US to the point that people are dying rather than seeking preventive care, that's largely a function of rent-seeking healthcare companies, not doctors. And that's pretty equivalent to murder, too.
Hospitals are in fact required to provide surgery if failure to do so would result in the death of the patient.
> Is a mechanic a thief because your car needs repair?
Is a car a human need? In some places, maybe, but that's a problem of a society that doesn't provide other forms of transport.
Really, though, I'm less interested in defining landlordism=theft. We shouldn't need to prove it fits your arbitrary definition of theft to say it's wrong: if you don't get that causing homelessness for personal gain is wrong, your moral compass is pretty fundamentally broken.
>Really, though, I'm less interested in defining landlordism=theft. We shouldn't need to prove it fits your arbitrary definition of theft to say it's wrong: if you don't get that causing homelessness for personal gain is wrong, your moral compass is pretty fundamentally broken.
I think landlords prevent more homelessness than they create. Homes dont magically pop into existence. They are built for sale. I think people pushed into homelessness has little to do with profit seeking landlords. No landlords means nobody gets housing that cant afford to own
You seem to be freely conflating homelessness with regular people paying rent. This is misleading debate tactic to advance the entitlement of renters.
People who can pay rent, but want another's possession for cheaper, is simple entitlement.
Homelessness is a social and legal choice to make cheap housing illegal, or not provide social housing for those that do not work. This is orthognal to landlords. Someone with a vacation home or airBNB isnt the bottleneck keeping junkie bob from having a shelter.
I think pinning it on landlords is childish. You can help junkie bob and choose not to, because you dont want them in your house, or to pay for their shelter. Blaming landlords is simply a way for people to say it isnt their problem or responsibility.
Yes, builders build them. Landlords don't create homes. Landlords take them out of the market so that they can't be bought by people seeking to buy them and live in them.
> You seem to be freely conflating homelessness with regular people paying rent.
You seem to be freely conflating removing a house from the free market with providing one.
> No landlords means nobody gets housing that cant afford to own
Landlords mean that the vast majority of people cannot afford to own, and increasingly nobody can afford to rent either.
> Homelessness is a social and legal choice to make cheap housing illegal, or not provide social housing for those that do not work. This is orthognal to landlords. Someone with a vacation home or airBNB isnt the bottleneck keeping junkie bob from having a shelter.
1. Many homeless cannot work. Perhaps they could have worked when they became homeless, but being homeless quickly makes one unemployable.
2. The social/legal choice to make cheap housing illegal is driven by people trying to keep up the values of their vacation homes and airBNBs.
3. If you were homeless you'd have very good reasons to be a junkie too. The scorn you have for people less fortunate than yourself is horrifying.
> I think pinning it on landlords is childish.
I think not pinning it on landlords is willfully ignorant of basic economics in favor of an ideology that likely benefits you.
> You can help junkie bob and choose not to, because you dont want them in your house, or to pay for their shelter.
1. I don't own a home I don't live in, and the home is really not large enough for more than one person. Claiming that someone doesn't care about the homeless because they don't let homeless people live in their home is an intentionally ridiculous bar to set.
2. As for paying for their shelter, the amount of money I donate to housing-related charities varies based on how much I make (I have to live too) but I've donated around $1k so far to housing-related charities. I'm not making a lot of money right now, or it would be more. I also donate my time at a homeless shelter (mostly cleaning and moving stuff, I'm not there enough to do more involved tasks).
3. All this is beside the point that this is a childish ad hominem argument you're making. Not everyone is in a position to help the homeless--many are on the verge of homelessness themselves. Claiming we have to be actively helping the homeless to have an opinion is absurd. Is there any issue you care about, and do make any sacrifice as extreme as letting someone live in your house for that issue? Or do you just not care about anyone but yourself?
Do they actually? Would they allow the previous homeowner to come live with them? Usually they seem intent on kicking/keeping the previous homeowner out, which is enforcement of their own property rights.
Well, let's play it out. A squatter steals an owner's property while they're away on a Summer-long vacation. Later, the squatter spends some temporary time away from the property. During this time, another squatter comes along and steals the property from them. And so on. How does this not just lead to an unending string of lawlessness. Further, why would anyone invest in building and maintaining housing when their property can just be stolen from them without consequence? We'll be back to straw huts in no time. Claiming that renting housing is "oppressive" is absurd in the extreme. It is an arrangement of mutual benefit that is done voluntarily. It provides flexibility, mobility, and access that home ownership doesn't. In fact, the ability to invest in housing increases access to housing, not the other way around. No one is arguing that we should eliminate tenant protections against arbitrary eviction or unfair treatment. We should simply have sane protections for property ownership. There is no circumstances in which the theft of property is a smart or sane solution.
> neo-fascist
Your turn. How is pointing out that people have been seduced by a worldview that is neither fact based nor logical "neo-fascist".
> A squatter steals an owner's property while they're away on a Summer-long vacation
Realistically, if this would happen in real life (which isn't very common, compared to proper "occupations", which this is not), the police would kick them out quickly, as it's the owner's primary resident.
No one is arguing for squatters right for other's primary residence. The division comes when you start talking about properties that are bought/owned for the sole purpose of speculation.
There’s someone in this thread arguing exactly for squatters right for another’s primary residence, barring their ability to organize some kind self defense. Didn’t sound great
As always, there are extremists on both sides, that's no lie.
Generally, most people aren't so extreme as to say private ownership shouldn't exist at all. At least from most of the people I interact with here in Barcelona.
Besides what people think is right/wrong, the police does help you (quickly) to throw out people that try to invade your residence that you actively live in.
No, you just claimed one comment ago that "no one is arguing" that. Don't make those kinds of assertions in a situation when you know full well someone in this very thread is likely to do it.
Calling people you disagree with extremists is just an insult and it's not nice. It's rude. There is nothing extremists about fighting for a world where no one is oppressed and everyone can develop to the heights of one's potential.
The criterion of abandonment of private property I think should differ based on the local customs and on the type of private property, so for houses for example maybe it should be a year or 2 of you not living there before your house is considered abandoned and someone can live there. For for example mines I think they should be considered abandoned and ready for someone else to use much faster.
The main problem of private property is that it leaves some people without access to a place to live or means to subsist on, so they either have to die of hunger or agree to get exploited. This makes this concept oppressive.
> Your turn. How is pointing out that people have been seduced by a worldview that is neither fact based nor logical "neo-fascist".
I explained above why is such a worldview logical, if you have some issues please answer. On the other hand utilizing such dehumanizing rhetoric like "infection by a mind virus" is not acceptable and is typical of people aligned politically with far-right, such as Elon Musk, who is among the most popular users of this term.
How dare you use "dehumanizing" rhetoric against me, you far-right neo-fascist! That's rude!
The thing about hypocrisy is that it reveals that you think you are superior to others and therefore entitled to rule over them using whatever means necessary, including dishonesty and, ultimately, force. It is the definition of anti-social and is considered unacceptable in society for good reason.
The mind is much like a computer: garbage in, garbage out. You have essentially been mis- (or mal-) programmed. If you were to free your mind of these destructive ideas, you could live a freer, happier life and contribute to society instead of trying to destroy it. Make the choice if you still can, for the longer you hold on to evil, the stronger its grasp on you.
I don't agree with you, I don't think you discuss in a good faith. You seem to write in a very emotional state, which possibly does not make you stable enough to engage in a coherent discussion.
I think everyone should have an opportunity to develop to the heights of one's potential and I think no one should be oppressed and exploited. I don't agree with you that I am anti-social or I have destructive ideas. Moreover, I am a very happy person, I consider myself completely satisfied with my personal life and that's why I am willing to engage in a fight for other people's opportunity to develop, even if they were unlucky in their life and they didn't have access to those opportunities. I am fine with propagating a complete deconstruction of norms very strongly naturalized in our current society if I find them justifying oppression and exploitation.
> A lot of squatters want to abolish the possibility of someone having to pay rent to another person to have a place to live
That's exactly how you end up with no new or maintained housing, utilities and other services. How do you imagine system like that working besides a totalitarian government directly taking over all private property and rationing housing? (I assure the housing situation in Spain is not even remotely as bad as it was in the USSR).
> don't have a logical counter-argument.
Trying to form logical arguments that refute completely absurd and irrational ones is not particularly productive...
* Of those ~15k, 5% are actually occupation of somebody's residence (allanamiento de morada) and 95% of cases are occupation of an empty and unused house/shop/office (usurpación de vivienda). That includes unused commercial properties, and homes that are neither rented nor used by the owner.
That is to say: it is a problem (the 500 - 1000 cases per year nationwide of occupation of people's homes is clearly problematic) but it's not a really widespread problem for most middle-class people (the vast majority of people even in the middle classes do not own totally unused property).
It is a significant concern if you're a commercial landlord with any shops & offices between rental contracts, or if you're directly investing in property as pure speculation, without using it at all (which imo should be discouraged regardless - although I'd rather punitively tax it).
In the really problematic 5% case of people's homes, my understanding is that the law has tightened significantly, and if you can show that you're registered as actually living there, in theory they will evict okupas within 24 hours (I don't know how well that works in practice though).
These stats don't account for the much more common case of people that start renting a house and stop paying the rent indefinitely because technically it doesn't fit the definition of "okupas." I've seen estimates of that number being as high as 1% of the people renting, making it ~30K extra people living on a house they don't own and are not paying for.
Can't find any numbers on how many people are not paying and indefinitely staying in flats. While I'm sure it's a slow process, personally I'd be surprised if there's that many people in that situation long-term, since there's clearly laws and a working process to remove tenants in this case (30k evictions for non-payment in a year means forcing an eviction is clearly possible).
Idealista has some details on the process and how long it takes here: https://www.idealista.com/news/inmobiliario/vivienda/2022/10... and suggests that 7-8 months is typical (really interesting how effectively Idealista dominates as the source for info on all these topics, superb example of content marketing).
In the US, I knew someone who owned a second house in the same city that they had never lived in and planned to rent out in the future. When someone broke in and squatted there early in covid, they reacted as though the squatters were in the house they actually currently lived in - describing their fear and trauma in a way such that people who didn't know the story sometimes literally thought someone had broken into their own residence.
So I wouldn't be at all surprised if a lot of those empty homes being squatted in are felt as personal attacks and violations by the absentee owner, which would make it feel like a much bigger problem for individuals if you move in circles where people own empty properties.
I don't agree with squatting on the whole, but this distinction clearly does matter. If someone squats a property that you were planning to rent out then you lose the income that you could have gained thereby. That's not nearly as bad as losing access to the home you currently live in.
It can be worse, as you are losing rental income, which can have larger impacts on your budget and life.
I have family in California that had to deal with squatters on a rental property. It cost them ~400k, which included their kids college funds and retirement.
Costs were 3 years of lost rent while they paid the mortgage 250k damages done by the squatters, plus legal fees.
It take a huge amount of materials and labor to build, and returns value slowly over time. Depending on the inputs and returns, this can either create positive or negative value.
Of course we should invest in actual property building, I meant investment class as in asset class - a thing you buy with the hope of capital increase. This is clearly quite different from investing in building houses that results in a new house.
But if "empty living space", space that's reserved but unused, is immoral would you extend it to any such reserved but unused living space?
Is an empty room in your house immoral? Or massively oversized rooms even if you live in them? In the end you're still blocking a lot of "empty space" that someone else could use if only there were smaller but more living units. Same applies when you live in a detached house and "blocking" any potential living space that could have existed on higher floors of a tall apartment building. Zoning laws can also be an issue but the question stands.
To put in in practical terms, one person having two 50sqm/550sqft apartments is immoral. One person having one 150sqm/1500sqft apartment is fine? Where is the line and how arbitrary do you want it to be?
It’s not clear exactly where to draw the line, but that’s true of all kinds of moral distinctions. So I don’t think that kind of slippery slope argument is very persuasive.
I didn't mean it as a slippery slope argument, rather an explanation of why calling "this in particular" immoral is probably just one person drawing the line in such a way that what they need/want is perfectly covered. It's more likely that their changing needs/wants move that bar, than that the moving bar changes their needs/wants.
So "buying a house and purposefully leaving it empty is immoral" is bound to change the moment they purchase a second, empty house.
Years ago I hosted some African refugees in my home for a short time while more appropriate accommodation was in the works. I cannot describe the feeling I had seeing one of the children understand how a modern toilet works: we do our business in a bunch of clean water, and then dump a bunch more clean water to take it away. Given their circumstances this was probably the most immoral thing we could have done in the modern world.
>It's more likely that their changing needs/wants move that bar, than that the moving bar changes their needs/wants.
This seems to be an unsupported speculation. And indeed it cuts both ways. Maybe you only think the second house is ok because that covers your needs and wants (either present or future anticipated). If you leave out the psychologizing, there's nothing to your argument beyond the slippery slope. Even if the exact location where individual people draw the line is psychologically explicable based on self-interest and their particular life circumstances, it still doesn't follow that a moral distinction cannot possibly be made.
More generally, it's fairly obvious that people who believe in strong property rights will tend to be people who have lots of property and people who don't will tend to be people who don't. That doesn't invalidate the arguments of either side; these have to be evaluated on their merits. You can say "I bet you'll believe in strong property rights once you own a house!", while a homeless person might equally say "I bet you'll have more sympathy for squatters once you've lived on the streets for a year!" Those sorts of examples tell us that people aren't perfectly disinterested when forming their moral outlook, but it doesn't tell us much about where moral distinctions can or can't be drawn.
What you do with it (or, don't do with it) is not morally neutral. I believe that hoarding it, preventing others from living in or purchasing it, is immoral.
No, because if there is not enough for other people they either are forced to get exploited by landlords or become homeless. Purchasing real estate is immoral, as is whole notion of rent-seeking through usurpation of unused land such that other persons cannot use it when you don't use it and occupy it.
A fair point. I thought what I was saying was too obvious to expound further, but here goes:
Buying a house in order to leave it vacant is morally neutral. To wit,
Mike Murderer buys up real estate along the river and leaves it empty so that the dead bodies he stores inside are not discovered. Mike has acted immorally!
Mayor Susan convinces the city council to buy up real estate along the river and leave it empty to facilitate moving the residents there to higher ground to avoid expensive and dangerous seasonal flooding. Susan has acted morally.
But they both took the same positive action: purchasing real estate. This action was morally neutral.
As other people in this thread have correctly noted, it’s the justification not the action that has moral implications.
It is correct. Moral neutrality is a mental defense mechanism to avoid bad feelings. The vast majority of folks find it easier to rewrite their interpretation of events than tell themselves no.
So if you buy a fixer upper, one that would be unfit for renting to people. You can't spend your weekends and holidays working on it for a few months to get it into better condition without being called immoral? Sorry that my lack of funds and desire to better myself offends you, but that's a crazy take.
I actually lived in a country where everyone had a right for free shelter. It was called the USSR.
The quality and quantity of said shelter was beyond abysmal. Several families sharing a single apartment, a family per room, was the norm.
If anyone attempted to squatter anywhere, they would very quickly find themselves free sheltered in Gulag. If they were to argue for their rights against oppression and exploitation, like you do, they would be very quickly free sheltered in a mad house and injected with generous doses of haloperidol.
What is ironic is that I’ve people living like that in the US too. I once lived in a building with a lot of immigrants from different parts of the world. I once got a glance in a living room walking down the hall: two bunks in the living room dozens of people inside. Another apartment was a studio apartment shared by two guys whose main source of income seemed to be charging lime scooters in the apartment. They’d be hauling scooters in and out all day.
So maybe things wouldn’t be that different at all for the poorest of this country but they’d not have the boot of monthly rent pinned on their neck.
Yeah, on the other hand you had Anarchist Catalonia or currently Zapatistas. In USA you had MK Ultra, where government experimented on people through for example drugging them and you have homelessness too. Moreover people who fought for liberation were diagnosed with schizophrenia.
We in the USA are the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. We could solve homelessness and hunger tomorrow.
I'm not saying that people should lose their property to squatters, that's not the solution. I'm saying that we could build ~300,000 new homes and give them to people for free and it would barely register on the national budget.
Would you sleep in a tent for a year to get a million dollars? I already have a house and would still do it.
Hell, I would do it for 10% of that. No job and drinking and camping for a year sounds like an epic vacation.
Before you doubt me, I was certifiably homeless in San Francisco for 3 months it was a blast. Slept on couches everyday, worked cash jobs, and partied every night.
It's crucial to understand that if we let a person that build a shelter keep it for eternity then that person can build many shelters such that there will be no land left for other people to build their shelters on.
How they can make something they can trade, if they have no land on which they can make it? Where can they go, if private property exists in most of the world?
Everyone is entitled to free shelter, but nobody is required to build them? Where do you think the free shelter is going to come from? Because, looking around, I don't see very many free shelters, so they're going to have to come from somewhere.
And if your answer is to take all the existing houses and give them, one to each family that needs a place to stay, that's great in the short term. In the long term, though, who's going to build a new one when it will just be taken from them? And if nobody builds new ones, where are new ones going to come from, as the population continues to grow?
At worst everyone should have an access to piece of land where they can build a shelter for themselves, or live in a yurt or an RV if they don't want to build the typical housing.
All Spaniards are entitled to enjoy decent and adequate housing. The public authorities shall promote the necessary conditions and shall establish appropriate standards in order to make this right effective, regulating land use in accordance with the general interest in order to prevent speculation.
It does not mean you have the right to live in a flat en La Castellana for whatever you want pay. It means the State has to implement policies to help people access housing.
Also, article 33 give citizens the right to private property. You cannot come squat in my house because article 33 should prevent it, even when article 47 exists.
Let's avoid considering outliers to maintain a balanced discussion.
While I don't believe anyone has the right to live in Castellana or the Royal Palace, it also wouldn't be fair to require someone to move to the desert to find a home.
I don't think there is a clear "N amount of days away from the residence means you're not actively living there", the court would look at many factors.
For example, if it's evident the owner is intending to return, there is personal belongings, utility contracts in the owners name and such, courts would (probably) consider it your primary residence even if you take an extended leave from it.
On the other hand, if you're away for several months, there is no clear intent to return and you've removed all furniture/personal belongings, courts can think it looks like it isn't your primary residence anymore, especially if you own other properties that it seems you might be living in instead.
Like most issues in society, there isn't any clear dividing line and no guarantees. That's why we have the legal system we have after all, so nuances can be taking into consideration.
>Worth looking up the difference between trespassing on property someone actively lives in, and "okupas" occupying otherwise empty buildings.
Once you understand the difference, you'd understand that you can continue living your life like normal :)
I dont see how the duration between my visits means there is not impact on my life if someone steals my 2nd house. Im still out my savings, or retirement funds, or years of work it took to build the house.
Is your car sitting in your driveway right now? Someone else could be driving it, it's immoral that you don't leave the keys sitting on the roof.
Is your bed or couch empty right now? Someone else could be sleeping there right now.
Do you have money in your checking account? Someone else could be buying the things they need with that money, you should put the cash outside for them to take.
A house sitting empty while the owners renovate, look for tenants, try to sell, etc is a normal and necessary part of a functioning society.
The solution to housing shortages is to build more housing. That's it, that's the whole solution.
To take this further, everyone here has a computer. Obviously you don't use 100% of the cycles all the time, so it is immoral if you do not install a program that allows anyone else to use your unused cycles.
Yes there are power costs with 100% usage vs idle time but there are also cost of upkeep on a house.
It's not absurd. Yes, it's immoral that I am as wealthy as I am (relatively, on a global scale), and it's immoral that I get to eat so much better than others in the same society as I am in. It doesn't mean I'm going to do anything about it, it just means on that axis, I am not a particularly moral person.
I mean, the massive infrastructure waste that exists to accomodate unproductive cars is a real point that degrades where we live.
So much space in towns dedicated to storing cars while they're not being used, taking space away from where housing can be built. As a non-american, I believe that parking lots are immoral as well :)
Buying a car and purposefully not using it 24 hours a day as an Uber is immoral. I'll take yours when you leave it parked, okay? You can have it back when I'm done with it, probably when it needs major repairs because I'm not putting any money into it. As the owner of record, that's your problem.
Media reports have been instrumental in shaping the narrative around squatting, with stories of 'okupas' sometimes being sensationalised to highlight conflicts and drama.
This is the approach of the class privileged enough to own the media (literally or figuratively): shape, to their favor, the public's opinion & perspective of an issue that affects most people relatively little, if at all, via sensational media.
In the US, people call CPS or the police on ten year olds playing unsupervised in a park or walking home from school in perfectly safe suburbs and towns because they believe the children will be kidnapped, raped and murdered. So yes, it is possible to worry too much about rape and murder as well.
Homelessness is a problem, even having to pay rent to another person to have a place to live is a problem. Squatting is just a strategy to fight an inherently oppressive private property norm.
I'm curious how would you expect housing to stock to grow or even stay stable if nobody had to pay rent?
Would all housing be used owned by the state and assigned to individuals based on certain criteria (with huge amounts of inefficiency and corruption that such a system creates)?
It could grow either by people making their own houses on their own, or by them finding others who would help with this process, or by paying someone for the labor required for the house to get build.
I think that private property should not get nationalized.
Fortunately, most citizens are not economically illiterate enough to support this ideology. Private ownership of land and natural resources is the foundation of 21st-Century economic prosperity.
No it's not. Private property created a world where 8 persons control as much wealth as the poorest half of humanity. This is not common prosperity, this is exploitation.
I would like to know what the limits of your application of this idea is because if I were to extend your argument that "even having to pay rent to another person to have a place to live is a problem.", this is what I get to:
I am currently buying a house, every month I pay money to the bank, this is very similar to having to pay rent. From my understanding of your logic, this would be a problem.
Further from that, I am building a house. I have to make payments to the builder(s) in order to have a place to live. Is this a problem?
Not endorsing the view, just sharing lines of reasoning I've seen.
Paying money to the bank implies you financed your purchase of a home. This is not necessarily a morally-neutral activity, it's in fact nuanced but we've done a good job of handwaving away the nuance in the last 4-5 generations of Americans.
A small vignette to explain: financing allows people to leverage their credit history and income to make larger purchases than they could otherwise afford. This increases the sticker price of purchasing a home, which prices out people with low credit or income. Anything that increases the price of housing effectively increases the price of rent, which limits peoples' abilities to save to actually purchase a home – it's a nasty cycle. One could argue that by participating in that system of financing, you're perpetuating it, but most people immediately dismiss this idea, ymmv.
Building a house, and paying people to build the house, is not a problem. You're exchanging value for labor and assets. You're de facto increasing the supply of housing.
So, I personally like the idea of someone working with a builder to build your house. I also like the idea of only ever buying something rather than financing it.
I also think that if that was only the option, housing prices would rise rather than fall.
Cash up front, I assume in an escrow so that buyer can't cheat builder and builder can't run away with the money.
This means that a someone who wants to build/buy a home is going to need around 150k saved up.
Assuming that 50k yearly salary and rent is immoral, they have to live at home until saved up. 1/3 put aside is 16.66k per year, 9 years before they can get a house.
In actuality, the cost is probably going to be more expensive as you would no longer have developments going up.
Not necessarily, you just might not build 100% of your eventual home immediately.
It used to be (i.e. prior to the postwar expansion of credit to the American consumer) pretty common to build a "starter home" that was intended to be expanded. You start with the basics (basement, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom) and expand modularly from there as your prosperity and needs allow.
In the midwest, they would start by building the foundation, basement, and a very modest first floor. As the family prospered, had children, and developed roots in the neighborhood, they'd expand the above-ground portion of the home in the summer months. You can find homes frozen at each stage of development from the pre-depression 1900s still around today, although they're of greater archaeological value today than housing stock value. A lot of present-day "colonial" housing stock in the Northeastern U.S. have evidence of this gradual accrual over the decades.
This idea of "build a whole mansion at once" was historically reserved for the truly wealthy, and has only been "practical" for a greater segment of society for the last 50 years (again, with the expansion of consumer credit, not because we can actually afford these things).
You could still choose to build things this older style. Our culture of "obtain everything all at once, immediately up to the limit of your purchasing power" is the main impediment. That, and building codes might frown on some earlier-phase iterations, though YMMV.
My ~150k is for a starter home. That is what a ranch 3 bedroom, 2 bath with kitchen/dining and living room, no basement goes for in my area, based on 1990's code.
Current code is more stringent.
I know that people used to add on, that is however going to be more costly in the long term. Think about heating and A/C system, rather than buy the system once and keep it for 15 years as you expand you need to keep redoing duct work and adding capacity.
You will end up with insulation and vapor barriers between two interior walls.
Plumbing and electrical will become interesting as well.
I grew up in the kinds of homes you are describing, I like them but the building style does have challenges.
I also like the idea of people putting down roots, however this in turn limits people's opportunities.
This also limits the type of housing, what would be required in order to build a duplex or townhouse? A condo/apartment building?
Part of the current green movement talks about getting rid of suburbia and condensing into more urban areas. This would be a direct opposition to that as you would need to buy a lot size that guarantees that you can grow.
I am living under my address, I am occupying that place, so I am not fine with providing my address. But I am fine with people living in abandoned houses.
I think it depends on local customs and local agreements, it can differ. I guess I could consider a house abandoned if no one lives there for a year or 2. While for a mine, I think I would consider it abandoned the moment previous miners left it, such that other can get into the mine and mine some resource.
I'm a little confused. You said you want to get rid of private property but also your residence is occupied so I can't stay there. Who gave you the right to say that? If there is no private property it seems like we should be able to vote who can stay in your residence.
Unoccupied (for x or more months) second homes should be rented out, otherwise squatted in or burned to the ground, period. It doesn't matter if you disagree, Might Makes Right.
Be careful: Meme Magic works in both directions, and it is often difficult to detect its presence.
Which helps who exactly? Even squatting means that those houses will no longer be maintained and fall apart sooner or later which is how you end up having even more expensive housing long-term because of lower supply.
Higher taxation for uninhabited housing seems like an infinitely more sensible option...
> Even squatting means that those houses will no longer be maintained and fall apart sooner or later which is how you end up having even more expensive housing long-term because of lower supply.
I would like for humanity to get together and figure out how to genuinely pursue an optimal experience for all people, but it seems like the most wealthy and powerful among us are "not very (genuinely) interested" in that. Okay then, Plan B it is, I say.
> Higher taxation for uninhabited housing seems like an infinitely more sensible option...
Agreed. That's a bit slow for my liking though, we've been kicking that can down the road for generations. I believe fear to be one of the most substantial motivators in existence, and there are a lot more of us then there are of them.
Occupation of bank-owned homes also causes a lot of trouble. I hope you never have to experience living next to squatters, as among other things, you might end up paying for their exaggeratedly high utilities.
> That is to say: it is a problem (the 500 - 1000 cases per year nationwide of occupation of people's homes is clearly problematic) but it's not a really widespread problem for most middle-class people (the vast majority of people even in the middle classes do not own totally unused property).
I don’t understand the point of trying to downplay or diminish this problem.
Is dividing the victims along arbitrary class lines and arguing that most victims are not “middle class” supposed to make it better? It’s a problem regardless of who owns the property.
> Is dividing the victims along arbitrary class lines and arguing that most victims are not “middle class” supposed to make it better?
That was in reply to the parent comment, arguing this is a serious problem primarily for the "not-so-rich middle class" that is being ignored because we falsely imagine it's mainly a problem for banks and rich people.
In fact, the data suggests this really is primarily a problem for commercial landlords and property speculators, and the risks for typical homeowners is very low.
This is in sharp contrast to most media coverage, and the parent comment, which paint a picture of substantial risks that your personal home will be taken over by squatters. That is not true. The real level of risk to the average Spaniard is very roughly 2x the risk that they'll be murdered this year - not absolutely zero, but not very far from something you'd worry about day-to-day in Spain.
Neither huge amount of somewhat legit cases of 'unused', nor media coverage doesn't make it right.
I also wouldn't easily compare the murder count (which are hardly underreported) and occupation count (which most likely are, because legal way is way more expensive and lengthy).
> I also wouldn't easily compare the murder count (which are hardly underreported) and occupation count (which most likely are, because legal way is way more expensive and lengthy).
The legal process is definitely lengthy for actual occupation (usurpación) where the average eviction time is now but for people breaking & entering into your personal residence (allanamiento) it's not at all. If you can demonstrate this (easy enough: show you're the owner & empadronado, ask the neighbours to vouch for you, or show the utility bills all have your name on them) then it's clear allanamiento and that means there's no judicial order or further investigation required and the police can (and do) forcibly remove & arrest people _immediately_. It's a very nice clear-cut crime.
Basically the strong legal protections for personal dwellings cut both ways: they protect okupas who make somebody's empty property their legal residence, but they'll also strongly protect you & your own home if it's your legal residence.
Given all that, I'd be quite surprised if allanamiento is underreported at all.
> Neither huge amount of somewhat legit cases of 'unused', nor media coverage doesn't make it right.
I'm not saying it's right, or that the problem doesn't exist. There are a small number of real cases of individual's homes being invaded. Even in other cases, property ownership does need to function reliably for commercial properties, and although owning empty properties may be problematic this is not a very good solution to that at all. I would be very happy to see usurpación cases resolved much quicker, and to increase property taxes on empty properties to reduce speculation instead.
That said, I do think that:
* The media hype about it is overblown, and for most people who worry about it (and some people worry about this a lot!) it's really not a serious risk.
* Political discussion & action related to it is frequently overblown for political advantage, and that's why some people think losing your home and being unable to recover it is far more common than it is.
* The victims here are generally large business and property speculators. The law should definitely protect those groups too, yes, but the strictness & speed of legal & police procedures should be proportional to the damage to the victims, and an empty shop being used by okupas is clearly less problematic than having somebody take over your actual home.
* Media hype (and political discussion) is overblown from both sides. That's partially what keeps the left in the news because otherwise they don't have much to offer against capitalism unless maybe Hamas puts some show. And carefully calculated policies and solving problems is not rock-n-roll enough.
* The victims here are everyone who okupas can reach, the limit is not some imaginary moral boundary of the trespasser, but a sheer cost/reward balance. And it's not obvious where you should draw the line. Is a small shop worth it less than a relatively well off private citizen? How small a shop should be to be protected?
Arguably in the countries where the banks are protected the private citizens look even more protected, but I'm not going into that.
> Is dividing the victims along arbitrary class lines and arguing that most victims are not “middle class” supposed to make it better?
The class lines aren't arbitrary: a squatter in someone's unused third vacation property or whatever is causing much less harm than a squatter claiming someone's only residence while they're out of town.
So yes, the dynamics of who it happens to can make it better or worse. The only reason that wouldn't be the case is if what you consider bad about it is a violation of abstract property owner rights, rather than the potential material harms.
Thanks for the info. It's not that widespread, yes, but due to its gravity it's intoxicating and polarizing the public.
From what I observe, the amount of cases could have dropped down because many people choose to not buy or somehow shield their property (sometimes just filling windows with bricks, for example, which looks weird). So I'm not sure it's because the okupas/govt/police somehow changed the direction, it's just like the people get better at protecting themselves.
Btw, bying an apartment in Barcelona costs you 10% tax already, that probably discourages most speculation (and the prices have been stagnant for a couple of years).
> Btw, bying an apartment in Barcelona costs you 10% tax already, that probably discourages most speculation (and the prices have been stagnant for a couple of years).
I'm not too sure those measures deter those who are filthy-rich. Would you agree that it can be viewed as the cost of doing business... and, worst — that it could price out small competitors (allowing for the formation of cartels of big landlords)?
Maldita is a joke. Sometimes they don't know how to read data, other times they actively engage into twisting numbers. Every time they debunk something, you can be sure that they debunked is actually true. I remember a case where the claim was something like "there's 300.000 cases of <something>" and they debunked it with "FALSE, bla bla bla bla bla"... and when you read the fine print, it was not 300.000 cases but 298.000 cases. They are 1000% unreliable.
In the Mediterranean like in any resort area a lot of people live from housing, which requires not only owning, but also keeping it attractive, complying with local regulations, looks and the culture. It's nothing like rental company in NYC owning a garage full of rats, and charging a arm and a leg.
Middle class is a family from Zaragoza having a vacation house in Maresme or some extra property in Alicante which were sold for like 20-30K a few years ago, and then occupied, which took them a few months to evict.
The collaboration between scary deoccupying folks and okupas should be common, even if hard to prove, and it's mostly directed on people like this. Many people don't go to police and prefer to pay off just not to see their property ruined.
Not arguing that owning property in a tourist area requires work (unless you're paying a property manager to do it for you), but I could never imagine owning a vacation property to be squarely middle class. Upper-middle class, at the very least.
I know a lot of people who inherited some small place from a relative and they rent it out to supplement their income and aren't anywhere near upper middle class.
What is you definition of upper middle class?
All I know is a lot of people owning property here and there without being some upper middle class. You don't seem to understand that a lot of people even if they have low income have the desire and time and are hard working to slowly build something, which in 30 years of time becomes what you call a vacation home. I guess you are not used to manual work and think is impossible to do large things by yourself.
Is the worst you could say about anarchists is that they smoke weed? That's somewhat funny, please consider that for anarchists implementing their property norm of usufruct is a part of the social revolution through direct action, it's not really meant to me nice to the "middle class" because anarchists are revolutionaries who want to abolish the class society :)
Anarchist Catalonia had an economic growth during it's short existence during the Spanish Civil War and it operated on those types of property norms, so this falsifies your argument.
Not really. Also could we please stick to the Hackernews guidelines?
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
...
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Most anarchists are feminists and they are against anti-semitism. Historically a few theoreticians were anti-Semites, but most were not. You seem to just be dehumanizing other people who have different views than you, which is disgusting and not something you should be proud of.
> There's clearly a gap between imaginary noble okupas addressing housing crisis via occupation of unused bank property and reality of weed smoking anarchists and their collaborating deoccupying mafia harassing mostly not-so-rich middle class, who can't afford the security measures the rich can.
Ah yes, the not-so-rich middle class who can afford to own houses they leave vacant.
Is it your opinion that smoking weed makes someone's political opinions disingenuous or that smoking weed means they deserve to be homeless?
What's your solution to the lack of housing? Anarcho-capitalist HN is always worried about the unintended consequences of laws but never seems to be concerned about the intended consequences of the law, or have any other ways to solve that problem. It begins to sound like you just don't care about homelessness.
Smoking weed is neutral. Smoking weed anarchist is a demographic which tends to justify its modus vivendi pretending they have views. They aren't against private property. They're against other people's private property.
My solution to the lack of housing is to build more housing or having fewer people, it's that trivial and obvious.
> Smoking weed anarchist is a demographic which tends to justify its modus vivendi pretending they have views. They aren't against private property. They're against other people's private property.
Or, maybe they're just homeless and using politics to feel better about what they have to do to get homes.
Let's face it, smoking weed has nothing to do with this conversation, it's just a way to discredit people.
> My solution to the lack of housing is to build more housing or having fewer people, it's that trivial and obvious.
"Having fewer people"? I have to say I'm pretty concerned about what policy decisions you think that entails.
Sadly, building more housing doesn't solve the problem. You have to build more housing and prevent it from being removed in the same way housing is currently removed from the market by landlords and speculators. And... where are you going to build it? Property rights apply to land too, right? And you're going to fund this... how? Progressive taxation?
Well, it turns out that when you start talking details, a lot of the people who are really concerned about property rights just happen to think all the things that would be necessarily to actually provide homes for the homeless are too expensive, too restrictive, etc. So when it comes down to it, they're for getting rid of the bad solution for homelessness (squatting) and providing no better solution, because their concern was never homelessness.
Ultimately, you're right: the solution to homelessness is homes. But, I'm frankly pretty cynical given decades of homeless policy which solves how homelessness affects rich people and doesn't solve homelessness. If your main concern about homeless people is that they're squatting, then I just don't trust that you're actually concerned with solving homelessness.
That's why I'd like to see homelessness solved first. Once that's solved, we can solve the squatting problem, if it even still exists. Because doing otherwise starts to sound like yet another attempt to sideline the issue of homelessness.
> There's clearly a gap between imaginary noble okupas addressing housing crisis via occupation of unused bank property and reality of weed smoking anarchists and their collaborating deoccupying mafia harassing mostly not-so-rich middle class, who can't afford the security measures the rich can.
Both of those groups serve the purpose of forcing the real estate owners to actually use their real estate instead of letting them rot to benefit from value appreciation like in the US - one of the main reasons of the housing crisis in the US.
> use their real estate instead of letting them rot
Or not to invest into it in the first places which results in even lower supply of housing long-term.
> value appreciation
House prices in Spain haven't yet recovered to their pre 2009 levels. If adjusted by inflation they are still 35% lower so I'm not sure if its necessarily the soundest long-term investment.
> Or not to invest into it in the first places which results in even lower supply of housing long-term
Even better - the state can easily construct subsidized housing and make housing even more available. No need to rely on private profiteers for housing.
> House prices in Spain haven't yet recovered to their pre 2009 levels
A lot of things in the world have not recovered to their pre 2008 levels. That doesn't mean that profiteering is not going on.
> I'm not sure if its necessarily the soundest long-term investment.
Hopefully its not, and there will be even less investors. Housing should not be something for profiteering.
> Even better - the state can easily construct subsidized housing and make housing even more available.
You don't even need the glorious state for that. Most normally gifted people can construct their own house by themselves with some help from friends and a some hired professionals for certain things.
> Real estate is expensive to maintain. You don’t let real estate appreciate in value by letting it “rot”.
In my neighborhood, there are at least 3 unoccupied homes within a 3 minute walk. We live in an area with accelerated entropy (the forest) and the homes are, by any useful metric, rotting. I will let you guess if in the past 10 years the value of the homes has gone up or down.
I would love if someone, squatters or not, lived in those properties. I understand things are different in different places, but where I live we have unoccupied homes that could house people. As it is, some private owner swings by once a year to throw another tarp on the roof and then fucks off, leaving an empty home to rot during a housing crisis. Yay, property rights.
Yes, maintenance costs can be a pain, but you can mitigate them by hiring a property manager or budgeting for repairs. And if you invest in the right areas, property values can appreciate over time. It's all about being a responsible investor and taking care of your properties. I know it's not the same everywhere, but in many places, real estate is a solid way to build wealth. Just think about it: you can earn rental income, get tax benefits, and potentially sell the property for a profit down the line. It's worth considering, even with the challenges you mentioned.
> This is such an obviously false premise that I don’t understand how you even arrived at it
I didn't arrive at anything. Its the actual reality of what happens here on the ground. You not being able to imagine something like that because of your cultural bias does not make it any less real.
> Real estate is expensive to maintain
Not as much as the value appreciation.
> If you think the US housing crisis is due to investors letting houses “rot” then you clearly don’t understand the situation at all.
This is pure madness. So you have 48 hours after squatting started to report it and potentially get a fast eviction (why is it not an automatic criminal case for breaking into the property is beyond me). But after 48 hours it seems like it becomes a nightmare. So if you are on a business trip for 3 days or visiting parents in a different city or vacationing for a few days and somebody enters your home, you are out of luck and the squatters now have more rights than you?!
I live in Spain (Valencia) and see lots of okupas around the city. In reality they occupy buildings that aren't being occupied. Property taxes are incredibly low here and many people who own empty buildings are fine with letting them sit, fall apart, and eat the property tax than do anything with them. These are the buildings that are prone to Okupas. I've never seen nor heard of it happening to actively used buildings.
That said, I do think there are better solutions to allowing this to happen. It's a complicated issue here as housing is definitely viewed more as a right than in the USA, and honestly I'm really glad that the streets aren't full of homeless camps like they were when I lived in Oakland and SF.
What's madness is the state allowing property owners to leave vacant, dilapidated buildings to blight the neighborhood. Owners should be required to maintain their structures and keep them occupied, or forfeit the property.
In germany, if you see such a abandoned property, you cannot even ask the authority who owns it, if you have the plans to buy it (you would have to rely on local people knowing and telling you).
There are quite some neglected properties around here and the owners are away, do not care anymore and the authorities do not care as long as the low property taxes are paid. There was a case close by, where a buisness wanted to get rid of the old rotting building next to them, but could not. It went on for years. Only after the building burned down (no idea if someone helped with that), the space could be finally cleared.
So yeah, exproptiation should only ever be the last resort, but in some cases it really makes sense.
The solution is actually simpler, set a property tax that would hurt if the buildings became vacant. For example if you pay 1% of the buildings value as property tax each year, it would make enough incentive to rent it out or sell if you don't need it. The proceeds can be used for building public housing projects or helping the homeless. Property tax was invented for this very reason.
Something like this yes. But the devil will be in the details.
"pay 1% of the buildings value as property tax each year"
A old rotten building might be worth just 10000€. And 100 € a year ain't that much. One would have to tax the property - and who will set up the rates in a fair way in a process that is not vulnerable to corruption?
And old rotten building sitting anywhere in a city is worth way more than 10.000€. Even if the building is not in good shape, the land is still valuable.
Right, and then the 80yo people living in a centenary house in a gentrified neighborhood suddenly get a 10x tax increase because the next door building got sold to be remodeled as a luxury condo, and drove property values through the roof.
That's good, because if they can't pay, their house is up for remodelling too. /sarcasm
I'm open to being wrong but I believe the data shows, old people in the UK are living in houses that are too large and receiving pensions that rise with inflation whilst "young people" are paying huge rents, can't afford to buy and are stuck with huge student debt. Why shouldn't the old couple move to let 10x apartments be built? Or does the data show differently?
"Why shouldn't the old couple move to let 10x apartments be built?"
Imagine you worked all your life and now you just want to enjoy your peace in your home for your last years. You really would not want to move and I am very against driving old people out of their homes, even though I am one of those young people with a small apartment also seeing empty and unused space everywhere.
If the property tax goes up by 10x, then that 80 year old couple has seen a 10x return on their real estate investment. They can easily take out a reverse mortgage to pay the property tax for the rest of their lives.
"They can easily take out a reverse mortgage to pay the property tax for the rest of their lives."
Not everyone can do that easily. I would not know how that works and where are the downsides. I can learn it, sure, but for an 80 year old this would be real stress, having to figure unknown contracts out - and not getting cheated. Old people are a prime target for frauds for a reason.
The reality is that the same thing, in effect, happens if you stop paying property taxes. The tax builds up and then when the house is sold after passing the government collects the tax before the descendants receive the sale proceeds.
This is why complaining about rising property taxes is almost never about the elderly people who actually live in the house. It's about their children that want to inherit the house without paying off their parents' property taxes.
Not really. By definition if your property value rises by 10x you have enough money to pay the property taxes by leveraging your home. Sure, it means you'll have to sell when you die and won't be able to pass on the house to your heirs. But the meme, "elderly homeowner becomes homeless because his home became super value" is just a fiction. It's not that the homeowner can't pay the property taxes - he's got plenty of value in his home. It's really the children that want to inherit a valuable home but don't want to cover the tax back payment.
Yes, we are discussing a hypothetical, from a few parents up: "set a property tax that would hurt if the buildings became vacant"
The definition of vacant is something that would have to be figured out, but it's not impossible. For example, you could do a generous 6-12 months of the year occupation without taxation, and then a sliding scale from there. (So you pay 0% of the new tax at 12 months yearly occupation, 0% at 6 months, 50% at 3 months, and 100% at 0 months.)
It seems to me that we could start with a conservative approach and adjust from there. For example, define a property as vacant if it isn't occupied for 1 continuous month or a total of three months out of the year.
That is the very problem we are facing in Turkey :). The municipality determines the value of housing in a neighborhood each year. That is taken as a basis for property taxes and transaction taxes. The municipality assessed value is somewhere near 1/20th of the value of an average flat. So, almost no tax gets collected :(.
Having a building vacant is already incredibly expensive; costs and interest add up and the building can get severely damaged (a building has to be heated in winter, ventilated properly and issues like broken pipes have to be found quickly by tenants etc.). Common reasons for vacancies are probate disputes, owners that are house rich but cash poor and can't handle maintenance, issues with building code and permits and similar. Apart from some truly dysfunct situations a scheme that involves vacancy doesn't make much sense. Why not take even a modest rent for a bit?
In general, everything you could propose that puts pressure on landlords leads to transfer of ownership from your (maybe friendly) landlord with 2-3 units, to larger, more professional companies who can handle the paperwork and regulations, with a tendency to tear down and rebuild something that is more expensive to rent or buy.
In countries with high inflation purchasing real-estate and keeping it vacant is an inflation hedge. Plus, you also benefit from low interest rates and get free money if your government allows it.
I live in Turkey. We had 80% p.a. inflation, where the government decided to lower the interest rates even further. Our president said Interest rates are the cause of inflation and if we lowered interest rates inflation would go down. State banks gave out house loans with 12% p.a. interest where the inflation rate was above 80% p.a.
A lot of Turkish people got their free money from the bank and invested in real estate. In Turkey, everyone evades tax and property taxes are not really collected. This in turn fueled inflation even more, sky-rocketed inequality and caused the worst housing crisis.
That is why I am convinced that property taxes are a must.
I live somewhere with ~3% property taxes on properties, including the one you reside in. Not so long ago mortgages were cheaper than that, and mortgages at least end someday. At the same time, short term rentals like airbnb are illegal. Combined, this leads to most landlords either being companies large enough to keep extremely high occupancy rates, or families that flout the law to rent a second property owned due to marriage or inheritance and become vulnerable the whims of neighbors.
I think allowing short term rentals, and giving owners strong eviction rights for damage, illegal activity or non-payment (which we have) need to be paired with property taxes to prevent all landlords becoming large inhuman entities.
It should also be noted that if you tax everything at the value it could make, you distort the usage of valuable locations to exclude housing.
Its probsbly hard to reliably enforce it since hard to figure out if bulding is occupied or not. You can have someone registered at the residency but still not live there.
You could maybe try to figure out based on water usage but then someone could just leave water tap slightly leaking since water cost is not that expensive
Probsbly squatters are those cheap solution that can enforce it in the most efficient way
You don't need to know if people live there, just raise tax enough so that the owner feels like renting or selling the building is better than paying the taxes out of pocket.
This also forcess poorer people (including retired people) to sell off the house they are actually living in. This is especially true if the tax is based on the current estimated value which may be much higher than what the house was bought for.
There are ways around this. For example set a property tax from second home on. Do not tax the primary residence. Or set income brackets. If poorer people live in their own homes they don't pay property tax.
This is not true. You can query the Grondbuch and it will give you all the necessary information of the owner.
Edit: sorry, havent been living in Germany for long. Thought it was the same as the Dutch kadaster. Turns out, it's not and my dealings with it have been unusually easy until now.
The reason why expropriation isn't used a lot is because it costs a lot of resources.
Surely, before considering expropriation, we should tell people who owns a property so that they can offer to buy it. If that's too much a privacy concern, the government could simply relay the offer.
Oh for sure. In the specific case I meant, the owner was known, but lived somewhere else around the globe and did not care, but it was his property. (where stones were falling off from the roof to the street)
Those are cases where I think expropriation would be warranted.
And if it would be easier to buy obviously unused land, less properties would end up in that rotten final state, so less need to even discuss forcing something.
Yes it is. You can request information, but I was told "wanting to buy" is explicitely excluded as a valid reason. (The usual solution is knowing someone inside the office, or paying someone who knows)
The government should tell property owners that they are required to keep their property occupied otherwise the government should seize their property? This is an extremist view.
Who defines what “maintained” means? Beyond safety concerns about the structure (and even then, they shouldn’t be able to tell me anything as long as I post a danger unsafe structure keep out sign and lock the doors), why would the government have any right to tell me what to do with my building?
>> What's madness is the state allowing property owners to leave vacant, dilapidated buildings to blight the neighborhood. Owners should be required to maintain their structures and keep them occupied, or forfeit the property.
> The government should tell property owners that they are required to keep their property occupied otherwise the government should seize their property? This is an extremist view.
It is not an extremist view. It's a public policy failure for land to sit vacant like that. Squatters rights can be a solution to that (e.g. in the US, squatters can actually get title to the land in cases of long-term abandonment).
> Who defines what “maintained” means? Beyond safety concerns about the structure (and even then, they shouldn’t be able to tell me anything as long as I post a danger unsafe structure keep out sign and lock the doors), why would the government have any right to tell me what to do with my building?
This is actually the extremist view, private property rights do not trump all other considerations.
For a very clear example: if you're surrounded by starving people, and you own a warehouse full of food that you plan to let rot because you can't be bothered, the government absolutely does have the right to tell you what to do with that food.
>> It's a public policy failure for land to sit vacant like that.
Then the government should buy the land.
>> For a very clear example: if you're surrounded by starving people, and you own a warehouse full of food that you plan to let rot because you can't be bothered, the government absolutely does have the right to tell you what to do with that food.
Let’s not use other examples and argumentation by analogy when we already have a very clear fact pattern. You own a building and the building is not currently occupied. The building is unsightly but structurally sound. Does/should the government have the right to make you surrender that building without compensation (because that’s what forfeit means) simply due to it being unoccupied? Why?
>> It's a public policy failure for land to sit vacant like that.
> Then the government should buy the land.
No, I don't think so.
> You own a building and the building is not currently occupied. The building is unsightly but structurally sound. Does/should the government have the right to make you surrender that building without compensation (because that’s what forfeit means) simply due to it being unoccupied? Why?
Yes. The legal principle has a long, long history across many different legal systems.
And I think you're thinking about it wrong: the government didn't "make you surrender that building," you chose to surrender it by leaving it unoccupied and unused to the point someone else could occupy and use it without a timely challenge.
In the US, adverse possession is a takings by a third party, not the government. And it’s not permitted when a land is unoccupied since one of the central tenets of adverse possession is open and notorious occupation. And, as you know based on your prior replies, adverse possession has a time component. The GP’s post is about merely leaving a property unoccupied. They don’t list a timeframe but we can pretty easily assume that if one exists in their mind it is less than the >5 years required for adverse possession based on the context.
I am not a commonwealth lawyer, but my understanding is that they have a similar modern rule in the UK and other commonwealth countries. I am not a continental lawyer, but my understanding is that civil law is similar with respect to government takings.
I will give you credit here because you may have interpreted the GP’s statement of “or forfeit the property” to mean generally lose possession of the property (including to a third party) rather than in the context of the prior sentence that references “the state allowing.” So, some backwards ancient legal principles that have been rejected or severely limited in modern times MIGHT support the contention that a third party can take someone’s land due to it being unoccupied and no modern legal principles support the contention that the government can make someone forfeit their land to the state merely for it being unoccupied.
The answer to my question (Does/should the government have the right to make you surrender that building without compensation (because that’s what forfeit means) simply due to it being unoccupied? Why?) is then “Maybe to someone that is occupying the unoccupied building (however that works) but not to the government.” Got it.
And it’s clear we both know that I have been talking about GOVERNMENT takings (“The government should tell property owners that they are required to keep their property occupied otherwise the government should seize their property?”).
> Does/should the government have the right to make you surrender that building without compensation (because that’s what forfeit means) simply due to it being unoccupied? Why?
Because homelessness caused by artificial scarcity is violation of a basic human right, and a public order nightmare. Putting private property above other human rights is the root cause of so much problems in today's societies.
(Disclaimer: I don't own a house, and I'm not even earning minimum wage with my freelance work.)
Question. If I owned a house, and went on a long vacation outside the country (e.g. because maybe I like travelling or something), how long would I be able to stay on vacation before the government yoinked my house due to it being empty?
Even if you're not in it, the house is full of your possessions. I'm not seeing how this is comparable to properties that have been actually empty for decades.
If a property is fully decorated (photos of my family, toothbrush I've used, etc), is that still considered empty?
If the answer is "yes", then based on your post, the answer to my question of how long can I take a vacation for, is "decades".
But if that is indeed considered empty, then what if in addition to that, every month I email someone my travel expenses and tell them to print them and to put them in some drawer in that property (maybe locked with a key or something), and also mail some cheap souvenirs and tell them to put them as decoration somewhere, is that still considered empty? (Since it has my stuff, and is continuously storing more stuff I'm purchasing.)
If that is allowed, then the next question is what if my vacation is in the same country.
So yeah, what kind of activity, and with what frequency, does that property have to have in order for it to not be considered empty, without leaving some kind of loophole?
It's funny because most of your argument assumes setting some kind of threshold would be a problem, as if it was not exactly how fiscal rules worked already.
For instance, you are paying income taxes in your “country of residence” and not in your country of vacations (unless you are an American citizen living abroad, in which case you pay it to both your country of residence and to the US), and there is a threshold that makes one country qualify as “country of residence” versus your countries of vacations.
> It's funny because most of your argument assumes setting some kind of threshold would be a problem, as if it was not exactly how fiscal rules worked already.
But it is the crux of the problem.
When establishing things like "country of residence" (or, here in the US, to which state(s) you owe taxes), the second order effects aren't the same. It's the difference between "you owe a few extra percent of your income for one year" versus "you lose your home permanently".
As public policy, it is important not to expropriate someone's home simply because they had to be away for extenuating life circumstances like caring for an ailing relative for a few months. Because otherwise, you will disincentivize that behavior (and create a greater burden for the state).
It's easy for you to come back with "Oh, well the competent bureaucrats in my government will simply write an exception for those who leave for a few months of eldercare because that is clearly a legitimate reason to leave your house vacant for a few months." But that is just a bandaid on an artery which creates an explosion of exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions.
What happens if I need to care for my grandmother, and then something else comes up? Do I get to have two exemptions to expropriation? Can they be consecutive? What sort of documentation do I need? What if the exemption allows n days, but I need n+3? What if I had planned an m-1 days vacation (for the m vacation days exception) right before I need n days to care for my grandmother?
Very quickly you will have 10,000 pages of rules that nobody understands. And you will get perverse outcomes when someone hits an edge case that wasn't quite accounted for.
Or maybe you will say "put the case in front of a judge and let them exercise discretion". But now we have the problem that it is no longer really rule of law, and people with connections will always get exceptions while people without don't. So that increases the class divide because people with connections are usually rich, and middle-class people usually don't have connections.
First of all, there's no need for a complete expropriation all at once. Having a significant property tax that scales with time would do the trick too. Start with 5%, next year the tax is 10% of its original price, then 15%, etc. After 4 years you lost half of your property, so I'm happy with that, and since it's all about percentage like other taxes you should be happy too.
And then, all this argument is basically a straw man, because there no need for the state to guess anything or to set threshold, at all: all you need to do is mandate people to declare their primary residence, and in fact it is the case in many fiscal system already! If it is your primary residence, then fine, you can leave it empty for as long you want, as long as you are not lying on the fact that this is in fact your primary residence (and if you're lying, then the state must gather the evidence and win against you in court, which is what the rule of law is).
Yeah I'm dumb when it comes to legal stuff, but my guess is that defining a threshold with a good balance while also not inconveniencing the common citizen wouldn't be as easy as it might first appear, at least without causing some unintended consequences that people might not think about when proposing "'just' do X".
But like I said, I'm dumb when it comes to this topic.
If it's your main place of residence [1], I don't have issues with making it protected against the kind of mechanism we're talking about.
Because you know the problem doesn't come from people going for long vacations, but from landlords hoarding houses and holding in order to never let the price go down.
«Owning a house» can mean two very different things. It's either:
- I'm living in a place and I don't depend on anyone for hosting me.
- I hold some piece of paper that says that this particular place in the country belongs to me and if the people living there don't pay me I can call the police to get them evicted.
The first one is basic human right and should be protected as such, the second one is just something enforced by the power of the state in favor of the upper class against the working class.
[1] which, in many countries you need to declare to the government already, so that they know where to get you should they send the police to arrest you.
> tell property owners that they are required to keep their property occupied otherwise the government should seize their property?
I suspect it would make more sense to do so via tax policy, i.e. high property taxes (or LVT) with a deduction for each occupant.
> why would the government have any right to tell me what to do with my building?
For one thing, governments have a vested interest in not being overthrown. If a sufficiently large percentage of the population believes that their living standards are declining (including not having a place to live) then an increasing number of people will arrive at the conclusion that revolution or terrorism has a positive risk/reward ratio.
I've worked in a country where the previous government had allowed this to occur; apparently it happened gradually and then suddenly. Beyond a certain point you can only consider something "my building" if you have the means to defend it against anyone who might wish to make it their building. In that case, the possession of a piece of paper which you once used to outsource the enforcement of your property rights to the previous government isn't very useful.
(Edit: To be clear, I think allowing squatting is a poor solution to the problem of reducing homelessness and better tax and housing policies are more sustainable and equitable, I'm just explaining why the government has a substantial interest in what private landowners do with their properties.)
>> I suspect it would make more sense to do so via tax policy, i.e. high property taxes (or LVT) with a deduction for each occupant.
Vacant land use taxes do make sense to me. That is not what GP advocated for: “Owners should be required to maintain their structures and keep them occupied, or forfeit the property.” Increased taxation is not forfeiture, and being forced to sell because taxes are prohibitive is different from the government taking your building.
>> governments have a vested interest in not being overthrown
This is a tortuous chain of logic to go from unoccupied buildings to overthrown government concerns.
> Increased taxation is not forfeiture, and being forced to sell because taxes are prohibitive is different from the government taking your building.
That's a distinction without a difference, at least not a difference in the area we're talking about. Both mechanisms cause title to be lost if certain obligations are not met (in one case, an obligation to occupy, in the other, an obligation to pay taxes).
Well if we zoom out to the moon so that everything looks the same “in the area we are talking about” then I guess there are no distinctions between anything, are there? A person that gets robbed is the same as a person that forgets their wallet on a train, they both just failed to meet their obligations (in one case an obligation to not let someone have their wallet and in the other their obligation to remember where they put their wallet).
Maybe government won't be overthrown, but you can easily loose the election.
European cities are dense, and there is limit to their growth, as they are often surrounded by tight circles of villages. Sure, you can build a few buildings there, but those villages are often fighting against high buildings, and residents often fight against urbanisation of the area. So you can't build suburbs like in USA and this makes the already problematic situation (high prices, big funds buying whole apartment complexes to rent them, many people buying apartments as assets and being afraid of renting due to protections towards tenants) even worse. So every building is worth it's weight in gold. And whole abandoned buying is going to be a daily reminder for many people that cannot afford to buy 1 room apartment about how unfair current situation is.
I don't want to argue about what to do with situation, just adding a perspective.
Right, that's why before I responded to your question ("why would the government have any right to tell me what to do with my building?") I tried to make it clear that I think there are better approaches than what the GP was advocating for i.e. directly seizing vacant properties.
> This is a tortuous chain of logic to get from building with squatters to government overthrown.
Can you be more specific about what part you disagree with?
To be clear, I'm not arguing that squatting results in overthrown governments, but that the acceptance of widespread squatting is sometimes a (shortsighted) policy response to a housing crisis. Squatting is a symptom but what can actually topple governments is sufficiently high levels of homelessness. Any government that allows a sufficiently large percentage of residents (especially young people) to become homeless will eventually be replaced by anarchy or a new government.
To reiterate, I'm just trying to answer your question of what right the government has to tell you what to do with your property -- I'm not specifically defending the GP's suggestion.
Land is a scarce resource, and society agrees to enforce artificial restrictions on access and use because in many instances it is beneficial, but that does not mean society should automatically be required to extend unlimited support for property claims when an owner behaves in ways detrimental to society as a whole. No jurisdiction on earth grants property rights without limitations.
Even if I am the owner of an apartment, I don't have the right to do a metal concert in my living room some Saturdays at 1 am... or don't have the right to paint my frontage the way I want... cause it creates negative consequences for other people.
Having vacant apartments and houses for long time in places where there is an housing shortage create much bigger negative consequences than few metal concerts...
You do have a right to do a metal concert in your living room on Saturday at 1AM. You don’t have a right to violate the local noise ordinance or, because your example has you as an apartment owner and not a building owner, the condo association rules.
You do have the right to paint your frontage the way you want with respect to the GOVERNMENT.
But more importantly, the GP wanted the government to TAKE VIA FORFEITURE any building that is merely vacant. Your examples are limits on use, not relinquishment of property. They are not the same.
There isn't a government on the planet which doesn't place limits on how you can paint your property. Try painting a death threat against a government official on it for example.
The notion that property rights is unlimited is an extremist view that doesn't match the legal situation in any jurisdiction on the planet with a government.
> The government should tell property owners that they are required to keep their property occupied otherwise the government should seize their property?
No, but they have to keep it in good condition, which includes keeping it secure.
The government literally tells you what to eat and wear. And thank god... since without those laws we would eat the worst and toxic foods and wear toxic and low quality clothes.
uhm...that might be a bad example. winks towards shein, temu, fast fashion in general
and thinking for a bit longer - corn syrup/sugar in general is not toxic but it certainly is not that healthy either, and it's got big lobbies and large amounts of money behind it to influence the government.
Heck, some streets in industrial areas in Silicon Valley and the street my local Costco in Mountain View down Rengstorff across 101 from Google HQ are lined with people living in cars and vans and RVs.
Ah, so the real problem here is for people who are "squatting" on an a large number of empty investment properties and don't want the hassle of dealing with any actual tenants.
This problem will only grow because there's an increasingly large number of people in Spain unable to rent.
At this very moment the profile of squatters is diverse, but with such large pockets of spaniards staying just above of the poverty line, many people will be forced between squatting or just become homeless.
Just for reference, I live in a flat in a building from the 50s. Very poor insulation, 5º with no elevator, etc. I pay 475€ for it (small sized city), I've been living here for +5 years.
The guys in the 3rd floor came in recently. They pay 1100€ for basically the same flat.
The modal income in this city is 16k. I work on IT and I'm barely above 20k (well, was, as I'm now unemployed).
I go for the listings and there's almost nothing listed and everything is > 800€/month. If I increase the range to 1h from any potential job location it goes down to ~500 for shitty places. Also, not precisely a lot to choose from, so probably wouldn't be able to rent neither.
Can anyone tell me how is exactly this going to work out? Not to mention all the "expats" and "digital nomads" that are willing to pay whatever the landlord says because they really really want to live here without thinking about the consequences, but that's another story.
Of course buying is totally out of the question with the current prices, and that's me that I got lucky, with the new prices no one will be able to save anymore.
You are in IT earning only 20K EUR per year? That is unbelievable! Why is the housing crisis happening? What changed? Did you have a population boom?
> Not to mention all the "expats" and "digital nomads" that are willing to pay whatever the landlord says because they really really want to live here without thinking about the consequences, but that's another story.
Hmmm. Do you have any stats on this matter? It seems easy to lash out against this group because they are outsiders. The "expats" will pay tax, and plenty of it, because they are higher income. "Digital nomads" are another issue -- I am not a big fan because they usually pay no income, nor residence, tax.
It is a pretty normal salary here in Spain. The housing crisis is happening because of several factors, but mostly because there's a huge increase in demand due to immigration (millions of people coming) from all profiles (richer and poorer) so we're getting squeezed hard.
The regulations around housing are so bad that almost nothing is getting built. What's getting built is for wealthy people, and no public housing in sight.
And yes, of course rich foreigners play a role here. You maybe don't like to hear it because you're likely richer than the average spaniard, but they are plenty, and we can see what they do once they arrive here.
This is no second-hand information. Because the housing situation is so bad they go on sprees trying to convince landlords to rent to them by offering more money.
Also, getting out of cities is problematic because we can't save money nor have disposable income, so owning and maintaining a car is quite an effort, and that in a city where I don't need a "B" stick to enter the city, in other cities it's worse because you're only allowed a subset of cars which are more expensive. There aren't cheap cars anymore, even shitty Dacias are +20k and anything under 10k second hand is close to junk.
We're fucked honestly. I'm willing to move, but I don't know where...
I can suggest Romania. Depending on your IT skills, 2000 euro in IT is considered minimum and country is still very cheap to live in. There is a great shortage in IT there..
Climate also similar to Spain in sommer , you will get used to winters as well. Seaside and mountains are available.
Anecdote but I visited Barcelona just pre-Covid, one of my California friends met another California friend who had bought a condo for the bargain price of 500,000 for a vacation home (and they spent time and money to renovate it) right next to the most popular touristy section of town and only lived there about a month a year, and airbnb'ed it the rest of the time. There were already things on the news that I could follow about hostility to short term rentals to tourists in the city.
Do you realize most people working in IT are paid minimum wage or close to that? Most sysadmins and developers i've met here in France are under 2000€/month and it's only on places like HN that i read about huge salaries in IT.
(sorry i don't have stats this is just anecdata)
The Spanish population in general ain't that good when it comes to English and the quality of living in Spain is, in general, quite good. Weather and food are hard to replace.
Which begs the question: "Well why don't they work remotely from Spain then?" and the answer to that is that the Spanish IT sector does a whole lot of that to begin with, so a business in the market for it can just hire one of the many consulting business there.
Where would you move, and how? Wages are not better in surrounding countries, unless you work in specific companies it's not easy to get in. You also need the opportunity. Most people living paycheck-to-paycheck have little time and mental space to radically change their situation...
These sound like numbers from Seville or somewhere deep South. Just for reference I mention that in Munich you could also rent something for 475€ and your salary would probably triple overnight. https://www.immobilienscout24.de/Suche/radius/wohnung-mieten...
> Can anyone tell me how is exactly this going to work out? Not to mention all the "expats" and "digital nomads" that are willing to pay whatever the landlord says because they really really want to live here without thinking about the consequences, but that's another story.
Slowly, more regulation is added to get the problem somewhat under control. Rents capped by index, annual rent increases cap, introduction of "tense housing markets", new upkeep for vacant properties, bonuses for renting out to younger people and more are being introduced, at least here in Catalunya. Unsure exactly what of those things are on the national level but guessing something similar is being introduced elsewhere in the country if it isn't already.
Really that won't help. These kind of regulations have been tried in so many countries before and the result is always the same: cap the rents => landlords will take houses from the markets and sell them instead => there will be a shortage of properties for rent so finding them will be very hard, and the few landlords left will be extremely selective when choosing from the many candidates.
What does help: increase the supply. Make it easier to build or let houses by reducing bureaucracy, invest in housing projects etc.
Increasing supply won't work with places where the demand is virtually infinite. You have to cut the demand somehow, and in the case of Spain it means preventing foreigners to access such stock. That means public housing, or some law that creates a lot of friction.
Cheaper housing in Spain will lead to induced demand, because there's just too many people willing to move here.
> Really that won't help. These kind of regulations have been tried in so many countries before and the result is always the same: cap the rents => landlords will take houses from the markets and sell them instead
Good. Too many people are forced into renting due to insane property prices as is.
I don't think that helps honestly. What would help IMO is a lot of new housing close to jobs where foreigners can't apply. Because no matter how much you build, if someone from overseas is going to say "I pay double of whatever you've been offered" I can't compete.
And I know that's happening because my Gf has to work with this sort of people, sadly.
> I don't think that helps honestly. What would help IMO is a lot of new housing close to jobs where foreigners can't apply. Because no matter how much you build, if someone from overseas is going to say "I pay double of whatever you've been offered" I can't compete.
But if the law blocks "I pay double of whatever you've been offered" from happening (which is true today, they cannot increase the rent to whatever they want), then you'd have a chance to compete because the competition is no longer about who can pay the most.
No, because the landlord would either get the rest under the table or the competition would move onto risk profiles, where someone earning 4/5k month would beat any spaniard with our unstable and poorly paid jobs.
In the end, we either do it like in Vienna or Singapore, or we're not going to solve it.
Singapore, I know about: A huge amount of decent public housing. Is Vienna similar? Is there no political pressure in Spain to build more decent public housing?
You're correct, the competition wouldn't be on rent prices anymore. But since the shortage of houses is not solved, competition would just move to some other area.
E.g: which candidate does the landlord like the best, or who was on some waiting list for the most years, etc.
No. If someone enters your home, as in, you live there, the city has you registered into that address, and/or your ID card states that's your address, it's not squatting. That's trespassing, and the police will happily assist.
Squatting occurs almost exclusively in second residences, abandoned properties, and places reclaimed by the banks, etc.
If you can prove that the house is your primary residence, the police will oust the squatters promptly. As a result, squatters will not target a house that is clearly 'lived in'.
As always, there are always multiple sides to any issue. Another commentator put it better than I could:
> The reasoning behind this is that some shady landlords might try to claim that genuine tenants are squatters in order to get rid of them. There are plenty of desperate people who'd accept a verbal contract and payment in cash, after all. Not that hard of a choice when the alternative is being homeless. Oh, but you paid your rent a day late? Sorry, you're now a "squatter", so we're cooking you alive until you leave.
> Making it too easy to get rid of squatters would expose the most vulnerable people in society to even more abuse, and making it trickier for absentee landlords to get rid of real squatters is considered a fair price to prevent this.
"Making it too easy to get rid of squatters would expose the most vulnerable people in society to even more abuse, and making it trickier for absentee landlords to get rid of real squatters is considered a fair price to prevent this."
Except this is poorly thought out and not really true.
You can provide better protection for both sides by requiring written and recorded contracts for real property use/rental, just as we do for real property sales today.
"It's not a black & white issue where one side is obviously right and the other one is obviously wrong."
That's because the system is broke and allows abuses by both sides.
> You can provide better protection for both sides by requiring written and recorded contracts for real property use/rental, just as we do for real property sales today.
In england there is the "Assured shorthold tenancy agreement" which basically provides a set of rights to tenants and landlords. On the one hand its great as it sets out a clear set of expectations for tenants (24 hours notice of landlord visiting, cant be evicted without notice, deposits must be in third party)
However there is still no fault evictions, which means you can be kicked out for no reason with only 1 months notice.
For the landlord it allows them to reclaim the property at the end of the contract.
However its still the most vulnerable that get evicted.
Just to be clear, a tenant cannot be kicked out after a month. A section 21 notice requires a tenant to hand back possesion in 2 months, if a tenant does not the landlord may make an application to court for a possession order (which WILL be granted if all process followed correctly),the order is served and then if a tenant still doesn't relinquish possession a landlord may apply for an eviction warrant, this gives them the right to employ the bailiff to forcibly kick a tenant out. Depending on the courts and bailiff availability this process may take anywhere between 6 weeks and several months on top of the initial 2 months. The costs are often a loss for the landlord. 'Kicked out' was just a turn of phrase but I thought it should be clear in this context.
As for the most vulnerable, ime it is common for social tenants, that is councils and housing associations (who are compelled by law to offer affordable rents) to have assured tenancies, which do not allow no fault evictions. And if not then there is an extra notice period of 6 months plus 2 months for the section 21.
It's an illegal operation. Under that sort of restriction, any building occupied would either need to be occupied by the registered owner or have a registered lease. If those aren't found, the people are evicted. The point is to ensure that everyone knows that you need to have a registered document to stay somewhere so nobody takes those deals. Then on the landlord side, you need to enforce substantial fines for any that have offered unofficial leases and surveillance for property owners that have repeat offenses - both to protect the owner from repeated squating and also to catch any owner bypassing the law.
I am volunteering in an housing rights organization in France, and I am and have been tenant in a city with high price and housing shortage.
There will always be many people taking "illegal deal" as sometime you have no other other solution, or other solution are even worse. And many many landlords are doing illegal things, including public housing.
Tenant don't have the same bargaining power / freedom / agency than landlord. Fighting illegal stuff that do landlord is long (usually longer than kicking out a squatter) and difficult. And you have little incentive to do it as a tenant : being in a fight with your landlord = being sure to have problem down the line
My feeling is that your comment ignores this asymmetry.
"My feeling is that your comment ignores this asymmetry."
These are enforcement problems, not squatter problems. As you've said, the things the landlords are doing are already illegal. In the US we have Attorney General offices that will handle housing cases on behalf of tenants.
Both parties can benefit from better enforcement and written and recorded leases. Penalties for landlords leasing without recorded agreements may be more easily enforced that under the current system.
This asymmetry makes enforcement easier when it profits the landlord, and make enforcement more difficult when it benefits the tenant... Your reflection seems based on the idea that there is a symmetry on the enforcement
I appreciate your response. I feel the same as the other commenter: the asymmetry between "a steep fine" and "losing your home" is enormous. But "what happens if the fine is enormous" (say, the landlord also stands to lose their home) is an interesting thought experiment - how big does the punishment need to be to "fix" the power imbalance?
That's not really a functional asymmetry. All you need is to pass a minimal threshold to disincentivize the behavior. A fine that outweighs potential illegal rent performs that task.
It also depends on what you mean by losing one's home. That's not an issue for people who would sign the written agreements. Afain, we want a disincentive to informal agreements, including from renters and squatters. I'm not sure how you can equate loss of ownership with loss of temporary use.
In England, if no contract exists but rent is being paid a tenant has quite alot of implied rights in law. Though enforcement of these rights would normally fall to larger organisations such as charities or councils rather than individual tenants. I remember a news story where a landlord was accepting casual rent for beds in sheds in the garden of a rented property who was brought to justice because the sheds were not habitable buildings.
In reality most cases of squatting are financial assets that property owners have no plan to rent to anyone. In an area where housing space that people can afford are very few and far between, nbuying properties for the sole purpose of speculation can be seen on a similar level of unethicality as occupying a space you don't own.
Many countries especially in continental Europe have strong pro-tenant rights. Often the rent contract cannot be terminated by the landlord, only by the tenant, which can make it more profitable to leave property empty vs renting it out. (When a tenant-occupied property is sold, the new owner in some countries cannot terminate an existing rent contract, which makes the property less valuable on the market vs empty properties.)
Yes, I understand that selling a rented property can be less profitable than selling a property without a rent contract. But holding on to a property that generates no income is even less profitable.
On an abandoned property, the land may appreciate faster than the improvements depreciate. As long as that pace exceeds the mortgage interest (if any) and property tax (ibid), it's profitable. There are other possible complications too which might swing it, like income tax deductions.
Sometimes seemingly abandoned buildings are used for one-off occasions which generate income: downtown LA is full of "historic" buildings which the owners allow to dilapidate outside of a few areas they can rent out once or twice a year to a film crew.
edit: another thing -- rich people procrastinate too, in fact many of them can afford to procrastinate on matters like this, and they may rather take a loss than confront the anxiety and work of selling or renting out the property
Sorry, but I fail to see how owning an abandoned building is MORE profitable than having people living there and collecting rent on it, even if that means that you have to spend part of that income on maintenance costs.
To be able to sell it in the future a higher price without worrying about people living there, or having to pay money to mantain a building that is not in condition to be rented.
You're just making the bet that real estate value increases faster than the building deteriorates with minimal maintenance. That's often a really good bet.
I don't think that this is the bet. The bet is that the market will not discount the extra repair/maintenance costs that the buyer will have to incur, which is a ridiculous proposition. Speculators gain nothing from letting the property they own rot away.
Real estate is baby boomers and older millennials (as they inherited from their parents) "cryptocurrency" (as speculative asset). They HODL it to manufacture scarcity.
Just for reference, in a small city (40K people, 8 sq. km.) you can find 2K empty properties out of the market because it's more profitable to wait prices to raise.
From a legal standpoint, assaulting people is illegal. Assaulting them in their residence (trespassing) could be even more illegal. They definitely could take you to court.
From a moral standpoint, do you realize you're advocating for the mafia here? That's exactly what private mafia companies have been doing for years. Rightful owners enjoying their property are already well protected by the law and the police (too much actually), at least in western Europe, as explained by other commenters.
The okupas are the ones running the extortion racket. If anyone is acting like the Mafia, it's the people illegally occupying the house and demanding money to leave.
What happens in the US is that the land owner hires people to squat in the house. They don't lay a finger on the real squatters. They just take up all the rooms and generally make it annoying to live there until they leave. Then they get paid by the landowner and move out.
This has resulted in lots of funny videos where squatters get angry at other squatters for squatting. The hypocrisy is astounding.
> If anyone is acting like the Mafia, it's the people illegally occupying the house and demanding money to leave.
People demand housing, not money. It's not a racket that people are homeless and need a place to live. It's funny how you go into conspirational thinking that quick. It's more concerning that you think it's better to pay the anti-squat mafia tons of cash, rather than give the same amount to the squatters to leave the place so they can find another home.
> This has resulted in lots of funny videos where squatters get angry at other squatters for squatting.
Just because you live in a squat doesn't mean anyone can come and live there. It's your residence, not a public space. There's enough empty dwellings to house everyone decently. That doesn't make it a moral obligation if you are struggling and squat a home to house every single homeless person that comes by. I mean, you don't have a greater moral obligation for that than someone who rents or owns their home.
It's not hypocrisy to get angry at assholes trying to ruin your life when you're already low on cash and living in precarious housing. It's cruel that you would find human misery "funny".
> Just because you live in a squat doesn't mean anyone can come and live there. It's your residence, not a public space
Do you really not see the hypocrisy of this statement?
"It doesn't mean anyone can come and live there. It's your residence, not a public space."
Then how on earth do you defend squatters moving into another person's residence illegally? This is the kind of laughable hypocrisy typically displayed when squatters come back to house they've illegally occupied and meet some new housemates. It's amazing how they can rationalize that it's acceptable for them to move into people's homes without permission, but not acceptable for other people to do the same.
It is not their residence. They broke in and just moved in.
Kicking out people who are trespassing is how you have a safe and lawful society. Allowing private citizens to do whatever they feel like to innocent people is mafia like behavior.
It is their residence. That's the semantic difference between residence and ownership. You may reside somewhere without owning it, and vice-versa.
Now, breaking into people's residence is a different matter, and is already highly criminalized. Laws about squatting and tenants rights don't exist in the void without a reason: they are supposed to be a balance between ownership rights and housing rights. Allowing the real estate mafia to make its own law is not exactly a balance...
Madness is the story I just saw of a woman who bought land in Hawaii and someone else built a house on it. Then squatters arrived. Then the developer sued her. What a mess.
tenants with a signed lease, a record of rent payments, correspondence with the shady landlord, etc. can simply show them in court and prove otherwise?
"The rise of okupation"... but they make no references to data. Here is the data (in Spanish) [1].
The difference between trespassing (that somebody enters in the house you live) and usurpation (the house is yours but is not where you live) is very important. Both problems are way less prevalent than what appears on the media (see [1]), but trespassing is waaay lower (and as the owner you have better mechanisms to recover your house).
However, there is a huge propaganda campaign here in Spain, where TV shows talk constantly about trespassing, and one can only imagine what they get from that (swaying votes to conservative political groups, selling alarms, less rights to people that live on rented apartments...)
Not everyone who gets this problem sues the okupas, since as it says this is a many-year complex legal process. I personally know multiple people who have had this problem, which suggest that it is probably MORE widespread than the data shows.
In the end there are two other big ways of dealing with it: paying the okupas to leave, or paying desokupados to get them out, where both of those ways would not be registered in those statistics.
The cases I know of are usurpation, not trespassing.
Oh sure, I'm not saying the number of lawsuits are wrong, I'm saying something different:
• The lawsuits, by their nature, represent a lower bound of the number of okupations, since one would assume that there's many cases where there's an okupa but the owner doesn't go the legal way. One can hardly assume the opposite since that's a lost lawsuit for sure. So the number of lawsuits is the lower bound for the number of okupas, and NOT a representation. I do not know nor claim to know where the upper bound or actual number of okupas is, but equating lawsuits with occurences is a weak correlation at best.
• There's clearly a big one-sided abuse of the system, which affects both homeowners AND honest renters.
• I'd also agree to add punitive measures to banks or companies that hoard a large number of houses for especulation. This is slightly difficult to arrange legally without also punishing someone who buys a second house, but I'm sure possible and I believe both sides of the aisle would benefit from some regulation like this.
I agree that it may not be 100% accurate, but probably correlated with the truth and directionally accurate. If you discard it, what do you have? Anecdotes? The media narratives?
If data is not representative it's just a metric. Its worse than anecdotes because an anecdote has a lot of information and nuance that can be obtained from it.
But you'd need other data to prove (or at least strongly suggest) that the data isn't representative.
You can't just say "the data COULD be unrepresentative", then just use some random guys anecdotes on the internet as more valid than national statistics.
If you make it financially risky to own a rental property you're also making it more risky and thus less profitable to buy and rent out apartments. This hurts both renters and the potential landlords. It would be much better to just increase property taxes.. Speaking as a Dane, this kind kind of economically illiterate leftist lawlessness is an important reason why Spain is poorer both poorer and has a worse welfare state than Denmark.
> you're also making it more risky and thus less profitable to buy and rent out apartments
You would be surprised about the sheer number of spaniards that would welcome this second-order effect.
In the last ~10 years, renting has skyrocketed, due to the discovery of the spanish renting market by international money, and renting laws relaxation (demand side). Meanwhile, this has not increased the supply of homes, as it is felt that there is oversupply, the demand is very concentrated on selected cities, and the turnaround of building to rent or sell is long. This double-whammy has made renting quite onerous, and buying directly out of reach, for a lot of people.
Some extra tidbits:
- Buying: Upwards of 40% of home purchase is without mortgage (not a pattern of someone buying for the first time)
I think you misunderstood what the above commenter meant when they wrote that risk of squatters makes it "less profitable to buy and rent out apartments".
Because of the additional risks of squatters, landowner will either have to take additional security measures (and make up the costs with higher rent) or accept the risk of squatters (and make up that risk with higher rent). In either case, the rent getsor expensive.
No, I got it. I just think that would mainly mean investors exit the market.
If it is less profitable, they either further raise the prices or they get out of the market; the ratio of those two options depends on price elasticity. And prices don't have a lot of room to grow further in my opinion... unless of course the wages grow quickly (and minimum wage indeed has done it in the last 5 years). But then the country needs to be more productive or people get poor (fired!), which is also not good for the renting business, etc.
At the end of the day you're betting on the spanish market either squeezing people further, or gaining productivity real quick. And real estate is not very liquid, yet is typically long-term, and those investors are risk averse. So... there will be some that will exit the market.
And what happens when people leave the rental market? Fewer apartments for rent. And what happens to rental prices when there's a scarcity of apartments to rent? Prices go up.
Well, no one can pack the apartment and leave the country. At worst they are left unoccupied, but that's a lot of money to have it parked, and can be discouraged with taxes; so alternatively people sell them... so buy and rent eventually go down.
And what will the buyers do with the apartments? Rent them? Well, then they'll either have to spend money on security or price the risk of okupas into the rent. In either case rent goes up.
This is as nonsensical as the proposals in San Francisco to prohibit the construction of apartments to try and reduce rent. Dissuading people from renting out apartments reduces the supply apartments. There is zero possibility this results in better rental prices.
Again, the comment you responded to explains how this makes it more risky and less profitable to rent out apartments. It's dissuading people from renting:
> you're also making it more risky and thus less profitable to buy and rent out apartments
When something becomes riskier, fewer people do it unless there's some other incentive.
A vacancy tax could incentivize renting, buy enabling squatters does nothing but making rentals more risky. The only thing that can solve a shortage is increased supply or reduced demand. The latter is not feasible since people need housing. The former requires that land owners take the risk on renting out apartments, and anything that increases the risk means less people will do it.
> Find a good tenant
That's easier said than done. The better way to convince prospective renters to rent out their property is to make it easier to kick out bad tenants. If evictions are backlogged, then a landlord risks being stuck with a non paying tenant for a long time.
This kind of thing baffles me. Im telling what is happening here. A guy on the internet refers to another on the internet who 'explains' to me that what is happening where I am in the actual reality is not real.
That's literally crazy. It feels like you people are preaching. Against the reality.
When a renter buys an apartment or house to live in, that means the place they rented becomes vacant. It is the most basic math, addition and subtraction. Lower real estate prices means less renters and thus lower rents. Unless you conjure people into the country by immigration.
Making renting riskier doesn't inherently make property less expensive. If a shortage of rental properties makes more people want to buy condos and houses, then there's more demand for condos and houses. Making renting riskier also means that apartment buildings are less profitable and less likely to be built.
A more likely outcome is that condos and houses get more expensive because of the shortage of apartments. And fewer apartments get built because investors know that they will not be able to kick out squatters.
If letting becomes a bad return on money, leaving the house empty is an even worse return of money. So you sell, and thereby get money for better investments, while at the same time the house gets an owner tenant. Real estate is fixed and cannot be physically transferred.
As for apartments, they will still be financed by people who intend to live in them. Removing the landlord removes a huge margin, because you're nourishing a stranger.
> Making renting riskier doesn't inherently make property less expensive
It did that here.
> A more likely outcome
You are literally making up stuff and preaching a false reality as you go. No wonder how the US housing market got shafted - seeing what kind of mentality you people subscribe to.
> Because of the additional risks of squatters, landowner will either have to take additional security measures (and make up the costs with higher rent) or accept the risk of squatters (and make up that risk with higher rent). In either case, the rent getsor expensive.
When renting becomes less profitable, real estate prices fall as landlords want to get rid off their bad investments. That means people can buy instead of rent, which means more rentals become vacant as renters become owners, which means that rents go down.
> and make up the costs with higher rent
This is not how it works. Landlords will always extract maximum rent possible from tenants.
> Landlords will always extract maximum rent possible from tenants
Landlords are competing in a market. The maximum possible rent has to do with how much the rest of the market is charging. That in turn is capped from above by how much a would be landlord would pay to buy a unit and start renting it out. If that price goes up, then landlords can charge more.
There is also a maximum amount that people can pay, but they have little choice but to pay whatever the market is charging, or else live on the street.
Renters are already paying the maximum they can. No landlord would let that juicy money go unmolested.
If landlords prefer to let their investments sit empty instead of selling, because their profits from renting aren't enough, then that is a foolish decision. But you shouldn't annihilate a whole nation because of such folly.
Even worse, now the digital nomad phenomenon is increasing rents - ~19% of the demand in the rent market in Madrid in 2023 is from foreigners. As a result, the locals learned the phrase 'digital nomad' and they are now fighting back.
People dont like to be the gentrifier. In digital nomad forums or 'investment' forums the reaction to any news about gentrification is the same - downvoting, denial, blaming someone else. Most blame the locals for letting it happen. Some more educated try to blame 'the corrupt politicians' (whatever the f that means, they plug it everywhere as if its applicable), others blame the 'real estate sellers'. They want to blame anybody but the ones who are doing the actual gentrifying, themselves. This is especially prominent among those from Angloamerican countries where being rich amongst the poverty is something admirable and respectable and you should definitely not hate them and the poor should keep their voice down. Or some variant of that mentality. They are dumbfounded when they find locals openly cursing them and calling them derogatory names and publicly doing politics against them. There's so much cultural difference.
I read through your other comments and don't exactly agree with many of your points, which appear to be pro-squatting? But you certainly seem to have a good handle on the problems. Is there a way we can connect outside of HN? Not really sure how to PM somebody here or if it's even possible.
As the constitutional right to housing is being basically circumvented through just not protecting that right, yeah, squatting seems to be the best way to protect that right.
I have a good handle of problems regarding this, and a lot of other things, however I unfortunately don't have the time to take action on any of them. So, sorry, I wouldn't be able to get in contact or do anything else.
Ok, but first: is it financially risky right now to own properties? No, based on the data we have.
Second: can renters be hurt even more? Are landlords the most vulnerable people right now? The situation is pretty awful right now, while at the same time there are people whose sole contribution to society is "owning flats".
And I agree on increasing property taxes (any progressive taxes over capital would do).
I think these are understandable and well intended questions! But they also makes it seem like you're not very familiar with standard economic analysis. I would encourage you to read The Rent is Too Damn High by Yglesias which is by an american (leftist) who I think has a much better set of ideas for improving the lives of renters than "occupation friendly" housing regulations and other "zero sum" ideas. And yes, buying and administering rental properties is societally valueable just like running a bakery, restaurant or software consultancy is.
Can you give any information on what he advocates?
I wonder if the difference could be that the policies that he advocate would require bought and paid for politicians to act while squatting is something that an individual can do?
The difference is that those occupation friendly laws work and force real estate owners to actually rent out their properties rather than let them sit empty to appreciate value. Whereas the ideas of a person that only exist in a book are just ideas that exist in a book.
Allowing occupation of vacant properties by squatters because there isn't enough housing supply is like allowing stealing food from farms because there isn’t enough food supply. It’s demoralizing to the producers and maintainers of the resource and does not encourage further investment in the activity.
> Allowing occupation of vacant properties by squatters because there isn't enough housing supply is like allowing stealing food from farms because there isn’t enough food supply
Love these religious-sounding sermons. Im telling what is happening here, a lot of 'free market' types are preaching to me that what is happening here is not happening and something else should be happening per the magic of 'free market' or capitalism or whatever. Hearing these, one understands who the US ended up with housing being unaffordable for 99% of Americans...
Certainly, owners sometimes leave properties vacant, and sometimes do so for long periods, for various reasons. The housing market, however, should be big enough and robust enough to allow for some of that occurring.
Personally, I'd like there to be so much more housing that landlords have to compete with each other for who can provide the best apartment for the lowest price rather than potential tenants competing with each other for who can pay the most for the only apartment that is available.
> The housing market, however, should be big enough and robust enough to allow for some of that occurring.
All of these are just wishful thinking based on non-scientific economic hullabaloo that was developed in the past 200 years. They never worked anywhere. They never will.
In the end, it comes down to the concept "Housing should be for living in, not for profit". Its a fundamental necessity/infrastructure. And privatizing it makes as much sense as privatizing the military or the police. The moment you allow it, those with bigger pockets will f*ck everything up.
> Are landlords the most vulnerable people right now?
Increasing risk will eliminate a lot of the "mom and pop" landlords (widows, former small-business owners, retirees, etc.). If it is too risky to own only a few extra condo units or a single small apartment building, then those properties will go to large corporate landlords.
> there are people whose sole contribution to society is "owning flats".
Landlords make sure the utilities (water, electricity, heat, etc.) work, that the roof doesn't leak, fix plumbing issues when they arise, take care of pest infestations, etc. Even landlords who don't personally fix things are employing managers and tradespeople. And with big corporate owners, the shareholders are usually pension funds which effectively are the retirement savings of people who have already "contributed to society".
Is it worth the major part of a full time worker's income to have somebody take care of those things in the rare occasion they happen? Most normal people can easily fix their plumbing issues, a leaky roof, termites and such in a couple of days with a few hundreds of dollars in budget.
Landlords generally spend much less than 5% of their yearly rent income on maintenance. If they actually do something to improve an apartment, that is just an investment in their own real estate, that they own 100% even after having other people pay for it several times over during decades.
Edit: Or look at it this way: Would you hire and pay somebody a good salary for working maybe 5 or 10 days per year for you?
You might be surprised to learn that many small rental properties are heavily mortgaged. Along with insurance and property taxes, the biggest cost is usually mortgage interest. Some owners even lose money for a few years until the rents rise to meet the costs so that they can break even. (These owners are playing the long game, believing that rent and property values will go up over time and eventually their investment will be a good one compared to their other investment options.)
I'm very aware of that, which just makes it worse. You now have multiple levels of strangers that are living on your back. Landlord, banker, insurance seller.
> the biggest cost is usually mortgage interest.
The tenant is paying for that.
The situation is absurd. The tenant is paying the entire mortgage and interest for the property and can be kicked out at any time, while the landlord does basically nothing, pays nothing, and the bank can not kick him out just because they please.
BTW, I'd love to recommend a book that explains all this much better than I would do. Unfortunately, I think it's only in Spanish: "La España de las piscinas" (The Spain of Swimming Pools).
100%. We have the stupidest housing laws. "economically illiterate leftist lawlessness" is the exact way to put this, and I myself usually tend towards the left.
Currently there is a hard limit on how many properties per year can be built due to lack of construction workers + training positions for new workers + being sure of work in the next decade(s) due to economic cycles.
Since the factor limiting supply is not cost or demand, prices keep ever-increasing with no gains for society; just filling the coffers of the haves.
You should really watch out with insults of economic illiteracy :)
I stand by my characterization, this comment is symptomatic of the same problem. That a country with high unemployment has the nr of workers in the construction sector as the major limitation in construction of new housing seems very implausible. What about zoning laws? To the extent a country with high unemployment can’t find enough construction workers it’s likely to be some kind of government/regulatory failure. Read Matthew Yglesias, he’s great
Boomers retiring will create a permanent labor shortage for the foreseeable future. People just don’t want to be construction workers, and who can blame them? Especially with how construction workers got screwed over after 2008. That nuked the construction sector so hard that employement in construction has just barely recovered to 2008 levels.
It would be beautiful if housing was the pure demand-supply curve that many claim it is- but currently it isn’t. Letting the market solve the housing problem doesn’t create additional future housing as that is blocked by house construction output, all it does is allow maximizing profit on existing real estate.
With the extreme anger and complete societal gridlock that the first world housing crisis is fomenting, if the fix was “just unregulate lol” politicians would have done that by now.
> That a country with high unemployment has the nr of workers in the construction sector as the major limitation in construction of new housing seems very implausible
The rest of the world is not the US, and people don't have to work for dimes in jobs that can go away the next day just because they would starve or cant afford healthcare if they don't. As a result, people prefer stable jobs. If that sounds implausible to you, it is a sign of how perverted the mentality of your society has become that you expect people to be like disposable lemmings that will pour out to whatever pays them some money.
> What about zoning laws? To the extent a country with high unemployment can’t find enough construction workers it’s likely to be some kind of government/regulatory failure. Read Matthew Yglesias, he’s great
You don't know anything about the country that you speak about. You are referring to an American who has his ideas existing only in various books. Dont make holistic statements without knowing enough about what you are talking about. In this case, an entirely different country and society.
> Speaking as a Dane, this kind kind of economically illiterate leftist lawlessness is an important reason why Spain is poorer both poorer and has a worse welfare state than Denmark.
If only Spain could profit from helping murder brown people in 3rd world countries overseas and by speculating on banking, then forcing the bailout of those sunken PRIVATE banks on other countries and then forcing them to privatize their national assets to buy those assets dirt cheap - like how Northern Europe did to Southern Europe, including Spain. Forcing the Spanish taxpayer to bail out sunken private Northern European banks and then forcing austerity on them to have them privatize their society. The biggest bank scam of the century in every way.
And yet, all of you Northern Europeans seem to want to move south to that 'economically illiterate' society and its 'failing' welfare state for some reason. To the extent that you literally filled out some cities and zones. What you say and what you do contradict.
> illiterate
You don't know even the topic that you are talking about, yet you are talking about economic illiteracy. And the one thing that you have that you refer to, is an American author and its book. As if a random American author is the all-determining authority for anything.
> you're also making it more risky and thus less profitable to buy and rent out apartments
Okupas force the property owners to rent their properties to avoid losing them. It increases property available for rent - does not decrease it. Again, you don't know what you are talking about, and no, Matthew Yglesias, the glorious American author that you slapped everywhere in this thread as if he was a prophet, is not a reference that changes this particular phenomenon either.
This is what happens where 'economically illiterate leftist lawlessness' doesn't exist.
If only. Spain declared all Native Americans Spanish subjects with equal rights in 1519. Then they proceeded to hang in public any governor who violated those rights. That's why there are 7 million 'pure blooded' (whatever that means) Native Americans in South America today and there are races like Mexican.
What's more, Spain treated the 'colonies' as parts of Spain and it spent all its money developing them. From the first university in the Americas to all kinds of hospitals, schools, infrastructure was built by the Spanish state with Spanish money. Thats why Spain lost the imperial race: Building up the locals instead of exploiting them - leaving aside not murdering them all to replace them like the Anglosaxons did.
Part of it was, most of it wasn't. And its really not relevant: Tons of gold and economic value that was extracted from the local Spaniards, local French, local English, local Germanics weren't given to their feudal lords voluntarily either. It was the political setup of its time. As a result, proposing something like this based on the standards of today sounds at best hypocrisy, at worst, dumb.
The native Americans became Spanish subjects in 1519. With all the good things and the bad things that being the subject of an average European feudal kingdom brought along with it.
Nobody declared them 'non-human' and started eradicating them like the English did. That's what you should be being cynical and sarcastic about.
> usurpation (the house is yours but is not where you live)
I wonder if you can register that house as the address of a non-profit corporation, and since the corporation always lives there, the okupas become trespassers.
> However, there is a huge propaganda campaign here in Spain, where TV shows talk constantly about trespassing
Yes, the right-wing channels have been screaming about it for 1-2 years now. Interestingly, their tirade started about the time the US investment funds started entering the Spanish 'real estate market' and buying up entire neighborhoods.
> However, there is a huge propaganda campaign here in Spain, where TV shows talk constantly about trespassing, and one can only imagine what they get from that (swaying votes to conservative political groups, selling alarms, less rights to people that live on rented apartments...)
Same in the US, it's all fascist discourse shaping in preparation for things getting much worse.
A friend of mine acquired an investment property in Spain and after a while okupas moved in, lock changed etc. A woman with two children. They were clearly helped with an organized team to get into that place.
The sad resolution after lots of headache and thinking was to pay the invaders the 5000EUR they demanded to move out.
There was some followup information about what happened after this. She was picked up by a car and taken to the next place to occupy.
On the other hand of issues like this, is the people forced to move away from their neighborhoods because outsiders keep acquiring "investment properties" and price out the current tenants. We're finally getting more protections from this, but there been a lot of hurt because of this already. Entire neighborhoods in Barcelona (like Barceloneta) had generational families being forced away because of issues like this.
So on hand, it sucks for your wealthy friend that their investment only made X% amount instead of XX% amount. But on the other hand, I feel for the people who are being forced away from their home as well, because there still isn't enough protections for the people who actually live and work here.
This is a complex problem, I understand that rent is a sensitive issue. But sustaining a system that criminals actively exploit is probably resulting in the worst possible outcome for everyone.
He did not rent the place out, but preferred to keep it to themselves as a pleasant place to spend a few weeks to months as they are getting old now. But after this incident he sold it quickly.
Without making judgement myself, this is exactly what squatters, and those who support them, would consider a success story:
1. The house has wealthy owners who treat it as an investment
2. The house remains empty almost all of the time
3. Squatters occupy the residence and get more utility out of it than the owners
4. As a result, the owners sell the residence, maybe to someone who will live in it or rent it (but maybe not). The lives of the previous owners are largely unchanged.
I'm not exactly pro-squatting, but this isn't a very sympathetic story.
Frankly, I think jumping straight to comparing me to rape apologists is a terrible way to respond to this. Don't do that if you want to have constructive discussions.
> He did not rent the place out, but preferred to keep it to themselves as a pleasant place to spend a few weeks to months as they are getting old now. But after this incident he sold it quickly.
If it's their primary residence, then it's not considered "occupation" but rather "breaking and entering", and contacting the local police would get the criminals removed quickly, without much fuss.
It sounds more like it was a vacation house, and potentially for people who don't actually live in the country. In that case, it gets harder to claim they're in a morally superior position, especially considering the housing crisis we face here, that gets worse and worse every day.
I'm just curious because I have a only very limited understanding of the situation there but surely it must have been considerably worse back in 2007-2008 compared to now? Since housing prices seem to still be ~30% lower inflation adjusted currently than they were before the GFC.
That's true. The buyers of real estate on a large scale are often transnational investment funds. And they sometimes sit on empty properties for decades, waiting for them to accrue value. Some kind of regulation is certainly required. Or higher taxation of second homes. But squatting contributes nothing to solving this problem. It just promotes anarchy.
For every buyer there is a seller. Are we to understand that the sellers are being forced to sell, and aren’t being paid? Because otherwise it sounds awfully like foreign capital is flowing into the economy, which is hard to describe as a disaster.
You know, sometimes things look good on a macro scale, but not at the personal level. Both perspectives need to be considered.
I live in southern Europe. If I look out of my window, the tall buildings in front are about 80% shuttered all year round. At the same time, there is an acute shortage of housing in this area. Many families who have been here for generations are moving out, because real estate prices are too high, for both renting and buying.
I can't help feeling something is very wrong, despite the abundance of foreign capital. What do you think?
I also live in Southern Europe - around us, there are literally hundreds of perfectly habitable houses for less than €50,000. I’m about two hours away from Porto and Madrid, there’s gigabit fibre in the village, and the quality of life is fantastic. We have a real community, still.
The problem, as ever, is uneven distribution - both of capital and population.
I see this as a problem which will solve itself in fairly short order - as remote work becomes more common, and then as AI devours entire categories of jobs and UBI becomes an inevitability, people will start to want to move out of the ridiculously overpriced magnet cities, and into the villages and towns our parents deserted.
> But squatting contributes nothing to solving this problem.
Hang on, it actually does solve the housing problem by one important metric: an empty house has someone living in it now. I understand there are other metrics (cost to the owner) but it does do something to solve part of the problem, and I'd argue that the more a property is used as an invesment vehicle (sitting there collecting dust) the more it solves the problem. If someone is buying a house to fix it up and live in it as a primary residence, then squatters can fuck right off. But if I bought my sixth home and make my yearly visit to it and notice it has occupants, they aren't the assholes here. I am.
Your metrics are wrong. The measure is not so much how many houses are occupied, as how many houses are occupied by local working people (as opposed to tourists / hippies / anarchists).
> There was some followup information about what happened after this. She was picked up by a car and taken to the next place to occupy.
I'm so sorry to hear that your friend eventually had to sell his vacation home. Fuck that poor woman and her two kids, if they're so poor they should live on the streets in the dirt where they belong !
First, I think okupas are a very small problem, mainly used for propaganda.
But how are real state companies feeding the problem? The problem is that there's no houses available, because politicians create artificial scarcity. In any local government, the stronger department is "Urbanism", decides if you get rich by allowing you to develop on your property, or you stay poor because you don't get the permits.
Come on, this is very public knowledge in Spain, they barely try to hide. Everybody knows how it works, and how close the biggest (and even not so big) developers are to the politicians. Then they politicians blame Idealista or AirBnb like they don't have any power to allow the country to duplicate the available housing starting today.
There is also the problem with the insecurity for the landlord in Spain: right now, is you rent to a family with kids, and the family doesn't pay, you can't do nothing! How is it a mistery that landlords are retiring their properties from the rent market to sell them? That's causing a massive shortage, that causes prices do go up.
It partially boils down to Spain having very little new construction. In a little eastern european country with 10 million people like Hungary there are roughly just as many new developments on the market as in a big country like Spain, with 40M population.
This problem is now so big local governments are now building new houses.
The rental issues are interesting because for example in Germany, the rental protections are very similar, maybe even more protecting than Spain. (Interestingly the prices are also lower in Germany, in Madrid prices start from 650+utilities, in Munich, 500+utilities)
Yes, seriously, blaming a real-estate listing website for listing real-estate is absolutely insane. We all need to build more housing, that's it. That's the solution.
I think you're confusing things slightly – I don't think idealista owns any property. They are however owned by a private equity group that invests among other things directly in real estate, which is tbf extremely common in PE.
> There is also the problem with the insecurity for the landlord in Spain: right now, is you rent to a family with kids, and the family doesn't pay, you can't do nothing! How is it a mistery that landlords are retiring their properties from the rent market to sell them? That's causing a massive shortage, that causes prices do go up.
There's an easy way to fix that: create a tax for unoccupied housing. If real estate sits unused for extensive durations instead of having tenants in them (i.e. having a rent low enough someone can afford it) it will burn a hole in your pocket. If you want to sell instead of letting someone rent, you will be incentivized to sell it ASAP even if you have to lower your price or make a loss.
Preferring to sell rather than renting out doesn't create a shortage. Preferring to keep housing unoccupied (in order to sell it) rather than renting it out or selling it at a price someone can afford does. If the market can't connect buyers/renters and sellers/landlords because the former can't afford the prices set by the latter and there's no economic pressure on the latter to lower their prices, you can just create that pressure.
Of course this would disincentivize private housing construction for people who don't also plan to live in that housing themselves but there's no reason there can't be a publicly funded organization for housing development able to take losses on sales/rent because it is backed by public money. This isn't uncharted territory either.
There's no reason housing has to function as an unregulated commodity. There's especially no reason to believe we can approximate that without further feeding into the housing crisis. There's a reason we have the term "rent-seeking" and why it has negative connotations: landlords only exist because most people can't afford or aren't eligible for the kind of loan that would allow them to build or buy a house. Unlike loan payments which end once you've paid off the loan (plus interest), rent goes on forever and only ever goes up. The entire point of being a landlord is that the rent accumulates to a sum greater than what you paid for the property (plus interest if you had to get a loan). Landlords literally don't add value. They're more like scalpers.
>landlords only exist because most people can't afford or aren't eligible for the kind of loan that would allow them to build or buy a house
I rent. Not because I can't afford to buy, but because I'm not convinced that I will stay where I am forever. Maybe in a few years I move to Tarifa to work remotely, maybe I move to China. Today I live in a flat, I don't know it I want to live in this flat forever or buy a house. Today I have good health, maybe tomorrow I don't so I need to change my housing requirements.
I need landlords to invest their money in houses I can rent. The same I need people buying planes so I don't have to buy one to fly. What is adding value for you? To me a landlord that made the investment so I can rent has value enough that I pay for it. If you don't like it, it's fine, but leave the rest of us live and rent in peace.
If being a landlord was so profitable and risk free, we would be drowning in properties for rent. The fact that it doesn't happen, but we have a massive house shortage speaks by itself.
> I need landlords to invest their money in houses I can rent.
No, you need affordable housing. There's no reason that has to double as a way for someone to make a considerable ROI. Having to rent means that even if you stay in one place long enough to pay for the cost of building/buying the house twice over, you still get to pay an ever increasing rent every month just for the service of not kicking you out of your home.
> If you don't like it, it's fine, but leave the rest of us live and rent in peace.
But that's the problem, isn't it? Everyone needs housing. It's not something you can simply opt out of. You can try being homeless but that precludes you from most ways to make an income. If you're wealthy enough, you can buy a house so you never have to rent again but again that's not a choice most people get to make even if they could afford it (because it hinges on their ability to get a loan, which is up to the bank).
I'm not saying you should have to pay a million bucks to have a place to live. Nothing I said contradicts the idea that you may want to live in different places over time. I'm saying commodity housing (i.e. having housing subject to a housing market) necessarily leads to a housing shortage and there are better options than trusting the benevolence of every single landlord not to charge as much rent as they can get away with.
> If being a landlord was so profitable and risk free, we would be drowning in properties for rent.
This (drowning in properties for rent) doesn't logically follow from that (being a landlord is very profitable) and that isn't what I said. There are other factors involved like how profitable being a landlord is relative to other things you can do (like selling) and how high the initial investment required to run a profitable landlord operation (with multiple properties) is.
> The fact that it doesn't happen, but we have a massive house shortage speaks by itself.
If it's a housing shortage, that's a supply problem. But according to other comments from people claiming to know the situation in Spain, there is no lack of housing supply (i.e. there are plenty of houses for sale and many empty houses for rent) so it seems to be a problem of pricing.
It's more profitable to sell (or rent out) a highly priced property even if it means you'll sit on it for a longer time, as long as you can afford the initial investment and maintenance. In fact, overpricing a property can be beneficial if you own other properties in the same area because it can raise the average and thus justify increasing the prices for other properties in the area. Not to mention that due to population growth over time demand goes up and new development usually happens in the outskirts, meaning supply in the area won't increase.
You can be okay with the status quo. That doesn't mean there aren't good arguments why the status quo is bad in certain ways. And changing the status quo doesn't mean removing one thing and being done with it. As much as some may feel it when rent is due, I don't think the solution is to kill all landlords (or more figuratively: abolish the profit model of being a landlord). De-commodification doesn't mean simply banning the sale of something. It's about replacing one model with another and there can be intermediate steps (e.g. the Red Vienna model of public housing).
If something is profitable, someone would do it in a free market. Even if selling houses is more profitable than renting, according to you renting is still more profitable than, for example, agriculture. How come there is not a flood of land owners selling their low profit land in Badajoz to buy houses in Madrid and Barcelona and double their income? How there are not hundreds of companies buying to rent, a safe and very profitable business, but there are hundreds of companies going bankrupt every year. For example, why start a car workshop when I could just buy three or four houses, rent them and live without working?
I'll tell you why: because renting is not a risk free and safe business, but a tight one. You can have renters that doesn't pay for a couple of years. Your tenants can cause damages to your property. Your property lose value if you don't invest in it. Lots of things can go south that wipe your ROI, and you can't do nothing to fix it. Sure, if you get a long term tenant that pays every 1st day of the month and takes good care of the house, it's a wonderful business, but that is not the norm.
> Everyone needs housing. It's not something you can simply opt out of.
Same thing I need food or clothing. And I have plenty of both, cheaply, on a wide variety and quality, because politicians don't meddle with them causing artificial shortages.
> there are better options than trusting the benevolence of every single landlord not to charge as much rent as they can get away with.
That's a free market. Every single one of us charges as much as we can get away with it. And pay as less as we can get away with it. If I don't have a higher wage is just because I'm selling my work to the best paying company. In turn, they are paying my salary because they couldn't find anyone that charges less than me for the same work.
> If it's a housing shortage, that's a supply problem. But according to other comments from people claiming to know the situation in Spain, there is no lack of housing supply (i.e. there are plenty of houses for sale and many empty houses for rent) so it seems to be a problem of pricing.
That makes no economical sense. There are cities (Madrid or Barcelona, surely others) where you can put a house for rent at any price, and it will get rented in hours. That's a supply problem! A problem of pricing would be hundreds of properties for rent at such prices that nobody rent them for months or years. There is a lack or supply _for rent_, and I don't care what other "informed" comments say unless they come with data.
> It's more profitable to sell (or rent out) a highly priced property even if it means you'll sit on it for a longer time, as long as you can afford the initial investment and maintenance
What? No, it's not. Each year without renting a house that you bought for, say, 300,000€ to rent for 1,000€/month is a loss of 12,000€ (4%). If you put that same 300,000€ in stocks or some kind of safe investment like public or private bonds, you would get at least 2% interest/dividend _and your invested money_ back. Instead you have inmovilized money that is producing zero (pre tax, depretiation and amortization). You should familiarize with this concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
You basically are saying that I can buy stocks without dividend, because I'm just going to sell it at a higher prize in the future _guaranteed_. That might happen or not.
Companies and individuals who buy property to rent have direct negative effect on home prices. It's basic supply and demand, but a as soon a as you start talking to a landlord logic is out and mental gymnastics are in.
I was wondering what kind of website this is given how obviously it is siding with landlords.
Squatting is only a problem that can happen if housing remains unoccupied. And it's more likely to happen if there is no strong communal network in the area (because most people don't want squatters moving in next to them because of the implications). The easiest way to have housing remain unoccupied for long periods of time and to have neighbors be apathetic about squatters moving into it is to destroy the local community through rent hikes and gentrification and to not live in the area yourself (e.g. because you're a real estate company and not a private landlord or because you're an external speculative investor).
As I understand it, Spain has also had massive problems with investors buying properties to put on AirBnB for tourists, often in defiance of zoning laws.
I understand the concern about property damage from squatting but unoccupied housing is wasting public resources (i.e. habitable land) and can often easily be solved by lowering rent - which from the tenant's POV is literally just giving you free money to use something you already built/bought (i.e. a sunk cost), unlike maintenace & utilities which actively contribute to its upkeep. If you want to think of real estate as an investment you need to understand that investment comes with risks and you shouldn't have a right to make a positive ROI (certainly not a moral one).
In a sense, I would argue (and I think some of the resident Georgists would agree) that keeping housing deliberately unoccupied because of inflated rents and real estate speculation is ethically indistinguishable from squatting - if not worse - because you're deliberately preventing society from making use of that land purely in the hopes of a speculative postive ROI. Housing is only valuable to society when it is occupied.
I was talking about the website the article is on, not HN. I'm well aware that HN is run by Y Combinator. It's in the URL.
That said, squatting unused housing is literally "disrupting the housing market" by eliminating the waste of critical resources. It's upsetting the market and breaking established rules, sure, but so are AirBnB, Uber, generative AI and cryptocurrencies.
If you think about the founding mythology of "Hacker culture", squatting fits right in there alongside the stories of defrauding telephone companies with "phreaking" and other "adventures". Except of course for the obvious class difference between hacking your Ivy League university's computer lab and having to squat an empty building because the alternative is being homeless.
There is no such "okupas problem" in Spain. If someone enter your dwelling (don't really know if is the correct term in English. In Spanish the house where you actually live is called "morada"), you can call the police and they will evict whoever is in the house in less than 24 hours.
Other topic is holiday residences; those are not dwelling ("morada") so, in Spain, the right to have a dwelling is on the top of private property so yes, it's quite difficult to evict people who entered the house in this scenario. The ones who really have the problem are the people who buy houses for the summer.
If you own a second property and decide to rent it out and your tenant decides to stop paying rent you're fucked. Until they get an eviction notice from a court, which can take more than a year, you have to keep paying utilities for them. Nor can you change the locks. If the okupa has children you're even more fucked.
Considering how many desokupa services exist I'd say it's a real problem.
It's an investment. Every investment has a risk. It's your responsibility to find ways to mitigate this risk, like renting to someone you know or having a modest price to someone who can pay afford it vastly, no to anyone that looks the cheapest rent.
That's why people sing contracts of X years, and asks for employment contracts and a minimum quantity of money in the bank. In this situations you can still get it wrong, but that's investing, it's always risky.
>Considering how many desokupa services exist I'd say it's a real problem.
None of what you said sounds like a problem. What is the problem? It sounds like a policy to ensure dwellings, which are obviously a scarce resource in those areas have actual people living in them. That is kind of their point. Of course it would be beneficial to have a better legal framework to ensure housing security and building maintenance.
The underlying problem is that it violates the owner's property rights. Whether they rent or or leave unoccupied their property, even if it's scarce, is their business. And not letting the owner manage their property as they see fit causes all sorts of wider problems.
I'm assuming from reading your other comments you're not going to be sympathetic to this argument so let me give you two anecdotal incidents.
The first is about a woman who is 70 years old. She lives off a state pension which is supplemented by a small rental income from a three bedroom apartment she owns. The apartment is quite old, and needs refurbishment, so she can only generally rent it to students or non-professionals who pay a modest rent. After maintenance costs, property tax, and building management fees she doesn't get much but enough so she doesn't have to rely on her children.
One day, one of the tenants stopped paying rent. Rather than asking him to leave immediately she gave him some extra time to get the rent. Rather than do this, he decided he would do an occupation. So first he terrorized the other tenants so they left and then proceeded to occupy the entire apartment, including turning one bedroom into a gym. Police were called quite a few times but they said they couldn't do anything until they received a court order. So for a year and a half, this guy lived there rent free with water and electricity being paid for as well (you can cut off internet as it's not deemed essential).
When the court order finally came through the police didn't even bother showing up and it was the locksmith who chased the guy out. He hasn't faced any consequences and could continue to do this again and again. As for the owner, she had to take out loans (some with 20% interest) cover the costs this guy incurred. She, who is Spanish, will never rent out to Spanish people again.
The second is about a taxi driver in his late 40s. After a long period of saving he managed to save enough for a deposit to get a mortgage on a costal apartment that his family would use in the summers and rent the rest of the time. While he could have just listed it on Airbnb, he decided to rent it out to a woman with children on a long-term basis (non-summer months).
So she moves in and when he comes a few days later to collect the first month's rent he's informed that she won't be paying rent and because of the children it's going to be impossible to kick her out. He tries to negotiate with her over a few months, including talking to the town hall to get some some rent stipend, all to no avail. Eventually, he had to use desokupa services to get her out but not before this woman had caused significant property damage.
He also went into debt and his marriage almost failed because of the stress and financial strain. Once he finishes repairing all the damage (which he has to do himself as he can't afford to pay someone else) he will rent it out again but only through Airbnb to foreigners.
So this policy has ensured that honest people, renters and landlords, get punished by dishonest people who won't see any consequences either.
> Until they get an eviction notice from a court, which can take more than a year, you have to keep paying utilities for them
After the eviction takes place, how badly does an eviction on record hurt the renter's ability to rent in the future? Just trying to understand the asymmetry of costs for the landlord and renter in this situation where the renter "decides" to stop paying rent
Many non-professional landlords don't ask for references nor do background checks, they just give you a contract. So I imagine it's pretty easy to continue to do the same trick over and over unless they somehow manage to get their face in a local paper.
The effect of this is more reluctance to rent out for fear this will happen. Or only rent to rich foreigners who won't pull this scam. Lest the landlord find themselves in debt.
Also, the okupa is very much deciding to do this knowing they can get away with it.
> Considering how many desokupa services exist I'd say it's a real problem.
How many does exists? I've only heard of one (literally called "Desokupa"), but you're saying there are many companies offering this, not just local chapters of the major one?
Tried searching but could only find that one, and I couldn't find any sources on the number of companies existing offering this service either.
As they operate in a gray zone, they are generally not advertised. But even cops will give you numbers or info on how to join WhatsApp groups where you can hire someone.
Despite all the publicity, I've never heard of anyone using the company you referenced. At least not in Andalucía.
This is completely true, so if you work as a real estate investor, you need to check your knowledge and start studying or stop lying.
If you try to squat (okupar) the house where someone lives, you'll be evicted just when the police arrives to your house. And you'll get a criminal sanction (allanamiento de morada). The problem comes when your third house is occupied by someone, since this is not where you live, then you'll have a real problem since they can say they are living there right now, and that's when the time dilatation comes.
This "problem" is just for people with a lot of houses, rentist, that are part of the problem. Or the banks and vulture funds, who had most of the houses and flats in spain.
And the squatting problem in spain is ridiculous small. THe percentage over the poblation is ridiculous. This that, in this article, don't mention at all.
You're saying that the "problem" is only for a cert class of people. People who bought their property lawfully and lawfully expect to make use of it when, if and how they desire. You seem to imply that they should not enjoy that right.
You are interpreting that, I never said that they should not enjoy what they earned. I just said that rentist are the only one suffering this "problem" and vulture funds and banks.
Ofcourse someone whos earned a couple of houses has a right to enjoy them and live their lives as they please. But you cannot convince me to empathize with banks, vulture funds or people who has 50 houses (like, for example, well known families in politics).
> This "problem" is just for people with a lot of houses, rentist, that are part of the problem. Or the banks and vulture funds, who had most of the houses and flats in spain.
And the squatting problem in spain is ridiculous small. THe percentage over the poblation is ridiculous. This that, in this article, don't mention at all.
This is a problem that *anyone* with more than 1 property might suffer. FTFY
It's unbelievable the way some people stretch it to defend squatters.
If it's not yours, you should not take it. Full pause.
> This is a problem that anyone with more than 1 property might suffer. FTFY
Yes, "lots" = more than one
Spain is still struggling with higher demand than supply, so people end up homeless. At the same time, Spain struggles with properties in high-demand areas being empty because the owner doesn't want to rent or sell it, so no one uses it at all.
Finally, we're getting "upkeep taxes" added to those places, so they can either be utilized, or the owner "penalized" of sorts.
But up until now, there wasn't anything like that, so the alternative for many is to hole up in a empty building no one cares about, or live on the street. And obviously, many take the first choice. It's hard for me to blame them when the other choice is living on the streets.
there's a slight difference between one, a couple, a few, several and "lots". It's one of the first things you learn in English.
If I ran out of money it shouldn't be okay for me to rob someone's else money. The same way if I can't afford a house house I shouldn't squat a house.
If one can't afford a house, he or she should:
- complain about the government house development policies
- search for social housing if available
- get a better job
- not squat someone's else house
- not have children and use them to justify squatting, which is very common
- etc
They, along with other people in a similar position to them, have all suddenly become experts in smart home tech.
They have video doorbells, motion sensors, door sensors, etc. All so that they can be alerted to any activity immediately, allowing them to act within the exceptionally short eviction window.
The reality on the ground is that these ridiculous policies are widely exploited.
Yep. Those policies that force the real estate owners to use their properties instead of letting them sit empty and appreciate for profit like in the US are ridiculous. The not-ridiculous policy is allowing them to cripple the entire society for profit by doing the opposite. It works very well.
The actual outcome is that the policy does force people to use their houses and increase the available rental houses.
> ordinary middle-class people.
You seem to have meant 'working-class'. Outside the US nobody calls them 'middle class'. Middle class people in Spain would be white collar professionals who own more than one house. You people are literally making up things about a country that you don't know about.
No. It does not cause issues for the 'working class'. Okupas don't target single home owner working class people. They target at least white collar professionals, and actually much richer aristocrats and investment funds.
> subsidising them is the role of the state, not a job for individual citizens.
That's what you think. Your culture thinks. This is a different society. They think differently.
Even if you are not, your philosophy seems to be from there. Works out to the same.
> I spent 2 years living in Spain
Yeah that should have given you the past, present and future knowledge of all things about Spain.
> Are you claiming that the average Spanish citizen believes that a typical person should be responsible for freeloaders rather than the government?
Excellent example of how you have been talking about a country without knowing about it. Spaniards dont call them freeloaders. Even using that word means that you are American in mentality even if not geographically. The attitude is that if those people need it and some well-off person ends up with okupas in his second house, no one bats an eye and many even would say 'the bastards deserve it'. And anyone who has an extra house is 'well-off'.
I'm merely pointing out that you're assuming ignorance simply because I have a different opinion to you. Having lived there myself, I'd like to think I have something of an understanding of the culture.
Freeloaders, admittedly a charged word, is how I'd view someone who helps themselves to something I've worked to pay for. How is that any different to a mugger stealing your phone or your wallet? After all, they're likely in a worse financial position than you. If you can afford to replace it, let them have at it.
> And anyone who has an extra house is 'well-off'.
I don't want to fall into a strawman here but my interpretation is that you're fine with criminals stealing from someone, as long as they're in a better financial position than you are. It's convenient to imagine that the only people falling victim to this are those who can afford to have their property stolen from them.
- Have you met the reality of working class people there?
- Have you stayed on a touristic city or on industrial areas?
- The real criminals are people from Spain, speculative funds and tourists from all over the world buying property here and not using it. They steal to everybody.
Then we can't hire people for our business because people can't find rent. We aren't paying low, the problem is the crazy rent market.
Banks own 80% of not used living places in Spain. Tell me who is the burglar. Real okupas only squat in this places, I know a lot, and surprise! Banks will get you out faster than anyone else but keep their property unused and rotting. Because they don't care about houses, they only care about land.
Spanish constitution states that housing is a human right. That's the difference. If someone enters to your home, people will bust them, if someone enters to your speculative bargain or summer whim, good luck, people want to live.
> - The real criminals are people from Spain, speculative funds and tourists from all over the world buying property here and not using it. They steal to everybody.
So create a tax for leaving property empty and use that to fund programs to address homelessness.
There are plenty of solutions which aren’t permitting theft.
Banning short term rentals for instance would be pretty effective. There could be other side effects but it’d certainly lead to many second homes being sold.
> We aren't paying low, the problem is the crazy rent market.
I sympathise with this. My assumption would be that imposing punitive taxes on unoccupied properties is the most realistic solution.
If that forces people to sell, supply goes up. If people continue as they were, there’s more money available to do something with.
> There are plenty of solutions which aren’t permitting theft.
There are 'plenty of solutions' which arent permitting theft, and NONE of them work ANYWHERE. The only solution is, well, 'theft', apparently.
> My assumption would be that imposing punitive taxes on unoccupied properties is the most realistic solution.
Another case of just shooting from the hip without knowing anything. There is already a tax on unoccupied properties. It didn't fix anything.
> If that forces people to sell, supply goes up. If people continue as they were, there’s more money available to do something with.
Another example of economic 'theorization' based on the reality of... nothing. The tax is there, it doesn't work. The economic theory has little connection with the actual reality in Spain too, just like elsewhere in the world. Its just a modern religion to justify capitalist profiteering based on 'how things should be'. Except things just don't work the way they 'should'...
> I'm merely pointing out that you're assuming ignorance simply because I have a different opinion to you
Yes. You have a different opinion than me and the majority of Spaniards. Despite that you think that you can make statements on behalf of us. There comes the ignorance.
> Freeloaders, admittedly a charged word, is how I'd view someone
Spaniards don't.
> How is that any different to a mugger stealing your phone or your wallet?
Not different, and per Spanish law, theft up to a few hundred euros is not a crime either.
> It's convenient to imagine that the only people falling victim to this are those who can afford to have their property stolen from them.
Its not 'convenient'. Its how this works. Okupa movement stakes out houses, its owners and goes after the well-off. In a lot of cases they get help from within the community, or the occupier is someone from the neighborhood already. That's what 'professional' okupas help with - by helping poor locals occupy empty houses.
Surely occasionally an unhinged persona occupies someone's only house. But that's rare. The majority of occupation happens locally through the help of activist okupas.
...
Long story short, you have no idea about the culture and society you speak of, despite having lived here for 2 years, and you are still handing out statements and interpretations based on, well, American cultural mentality actually. Spanish culture is different. Its as simple as that. The difference between these two cultures can be seen in how things are in the specific countries.
Not that the other countries that imitate the US and the capitalist mentality are any different - even Scandinavian countries started to experience major inequality after adopting 'investment friendly' practices in the last few years. Americans themselves are escaping to other countries, including Spain, to escape the hellhole that it has become and gentrifying the people there in the process. North Europeans are doing it too - which is actually becoming a problem.
So that mentality doesn't work. It f*cks up societies. Stop preaching it.
I live in a country of people with diverse views. I feel it's ignorant to assume that I'm speaking on behalf of the majority of my fellow citizens.
Quoted from the article:
> Public opinion on squatting is polarised, with some viewing it as a necessary response to systemic failures that leave citizens without affordable housing options. Others see it as an infringement on property rights and a challenge to the rule of law.
If you're actually fine with theft, again going back to the mugging example, we simply couldn't be further apart in our views. I would be curious to know if you're a homeowner but honestly, I don't think either of us are going to gain anything from delving any deeper with this discussion.
> I live in a country of people with diverse views. I feel it's ignorant to assume that I'm speaking on behalf of the majority of my fellow citizens.
You are speaking on behalf of the American mentality that you subscribe to. Thats who 'you' are.
> If you're actually fine with theft...we simply couldn't be further apart in our views
Its not you and I who are far apart in our 'views'. Its the American culture that you subscribe to and, well, the rest of the world's culture who are apart. Even more so with the Spanish culture. Getting flabbergasted at the difference and then 'rephrasing and reiterating' it as a bad thing will not change anything. Spaniards will not consider okupas thieves and the Spanish constitution's right to housing clause wont change.
So yes, this discussion is unproductive as you literally live in a world of capitalist philosophy that is quite distanced from the world that still keeps its humanity. Bye.
I don't agree. It's a non-existing problem that the media insists us to convince otherwise, just to force us to pay for useless and absurdly expensive monthly services.
Poor people being afraid of other poor people, a classic.
It may be overblown by media, sure, let's say we agree on that, but I know of at least 3 cases of very close people that have suffered the issue in the last 3 years alone. It may be my social bubble, but I don't think it's a completely fabricated matter.
> It may be overblown by media, sure, let's say we agree on that, but I know of at least 3 cases of very close people that have suffered the issue in the last 3 years alone.
For curiosity's sake, were the affected people owners of multiple properties or was this issue considering their primary residential homes that they were actively living in?
I know no one who had his first home or summer house squatted. No one.
I've lived here all my life.
I know at least 15 okupas who lived +4 years in properties of banks, unused and not finished, which, after eviction, are still unused and unmaintained. What harm did this okupas do? They didn't contributed to rent inflation, so they did some good.
Having property unused and don't having an eye on it is madness. I wouldn't do it. That's common sense. People think that money buy things. Ok, buy a Ferrari and park it outside of a big city and leave it there during a month.
This law is here to protect the right of housing. Some mafias use it? Could be, but this law works to protect real families and the benefits are much greater than the harm that opportunists do abusing it, this organizations doesn't have anything to do with the okupa movement.
The housing construction in Spain dropped flat in 2018. From building 9000 units/month to 700 units. Yet the population increased in 1,000,000 people in the last 10 years. It is not sustainable.
Since its usually pretty lucrative business, what is the reason? Either government is making it too hard, corruption too rampart, people too poor, banks not giving loans (but then why since generally they like doing so) and so on. Everything that has to do with state of economy and government.
I expect people to be a bit more curious on Hacker news and drill a bit into shallow facts, everything has underlying reasons.
What would be more interesting is to have statistics about empty dwellings. The banks have evicted countless people after the 2008 crisis, but are they renting those places now? If so, how cheap is it?
There is no shortage of housing. There is a shortage of rentable affordable housing, due to an epidemic of greedy landlord accaparating the market.
Not exactly related to the article itself, but it seems to me to be heavily AI-edited, with a lot of unnecessary fluff, the kind that ChatGPT adds. Honestly it seems like the article could be shortened in half at least. And probably all those bold highlighted phrases were added by ChatGPT too. I have nothing against LLMs, I use them often, but this isn't a good example of using them.
Interesting point. I looked at the article again and noticed more signs of LLM composition: well-organized paragraphs of about equal length; a lack of specific examples, data, and quotations; and no errors or infelicities that would suggest human-written text.
I got something very similar by prompting ChatGPT-4o with “Write a five-paragraph news article in English about the rise of 'okupación' in Spain. Focus on the legal issues.”
One of those paragraphs: “The legal landscape surrounding ‘okupación’ is complex. Spanish law differentiates between two main types of property occupation: usurpation and trespassing. Usurpation, involving the illegal occupation of a property without violence, is often met with fines rather than immediate eviction, frustrating many property owners. Trespassing, on the other hand, which involves force or threats, is treated more severely but is harder to prove.”
It is not what happened a few meters from my home in a completely closed apartment. The "squatters" broke the first-floor window to enter, the Mossos took 15 minutes to arrive and did absolutely nothing. They have been there for six months, they already changed the front door, and the owner cannot get them out.
In theory I bet it's an efficient option. But I'm curious about the risks and costs involved in dealing with such "services", and how easy it is to find reputable thugs.
I used to know a guy who had an impressive physique and foreign accent and was hired for similar "communication jobs" (debt collection). It was all above board so he didn't carry any weapons and didn't do anything but the mere implication in his presence was often enough to motivate debtors to find ways to pay shortly after his visits. He was actually a nice guy and not much of a fighter.
Sure. Although I guess the occupiers can also hire thugs to beat the owner up with baseball bats. There are reasons why this form of dispute resolution has gone out of fashion in the kind of countries you might want to live in.
This is not like USA were you shoot anyone who enters in your property.
If you harm this people you surely will have to face penal consequences.
Why? Because then, people will do the same with a small family which can not pay rent this month, after you increased the price to the double because you want to rent to tourists.
The solution is simple: use your properties. Would you let your car with the keys inside? No. Don't let your houses unused. It's is an offense to people who want to work and live. Properties shouldn't be a business nor a speculative means.
In that case, was the dwelling abandoned? Of course the squatters are gonna say they didn't break in because that's the only way they'll keep their homes, but is it morally wrong to break into a speculator-owned dwelling that has been empty for 5 years? I've personally done it multiple times in my youth...
> They can only enter if you leave a window or door open for them to enter.
How is this not victim blaming? Next you'll tell me that a victim of sexual assault shouldn't have left their window open by wearing such a short dress, and they were asking for it anyway.
The point is, if you break anything to enter you used force and it's much worse.
But if it's your residence, your house, and at least you used once a year is "morada", and then they are intruders and they are breaking the law.
It doesn't matter if they change the lock or anything like this. If mossos doesn't do anything, which would amaze me, then call the other forces, like civil, local o nacional.
If you let a house unused all year long or during years, it's your problem. I don't know what's the purpose of owning a house and not using it, in this case, I would appreciate that someone breaks in to live there with pacifically, this people exist.
In a lot of cases the analogy should be "you wouldn't even notice if someone stole cash out of your 3rd wallet which you leave on a table in a random place and didn't use for a long time because your first two wallets are enough."
> I bet you'd see something wrong if I went into your wallet and took some cash, after all you're not using it right now
Sure, but that doesn't demonstrate inconsistency, that only demonstrates that different things are different and we can feel differently about them. The interesting response would not be the implied accusation of hypocrisy in the way you posed your question but rather simply "Why do you feel differently about this scenario?".
I was considering buying a house in Spain to spend half a year in. Okupas was one of the reason I am not doing it. Instead I will be paying professional landlords to rent a house to live in for half a year.
A real win for squatters' "ideology". If it continues the only people who own property will be professionals with private armies and organized security systems.
You forgot about people who live there all year round. You know, the ones who work, maintain services, offer food, have children who will keep everything working.
Spain shouldn't be a big hotel, it is also the country of people who live all year round.
Astonishing entitlement man. I was born in a dark country with shitty weather, bad air. Now when I made enough money to change it I want to spend a few months a year in the sun. People who live there are amazingly lucky to be born where the weather is good. Most of those desirable areas would be 3rd world country level if it wasn't for tourism as people there were unable to develop any kind of functioning economy and have to rely on others who spend their money there just because the weather is good during winter.
Spain has vast areas of unused buildable land, especially the South. It's not like land is a scarce resource there. Me buying a house won't cause someone unable to buy another one in the area. They can build it nearby if they want. The problems there are not caused by tourism as there is enough space for everyone and then some. Telling someone who has to actually work to be able to spend a few winter month in the sun that Spain should be for people born there while benefiting from EU (that means free movement of people among other things), trade and first of all tourism money is just the most arrogant entitled attitude I can imagine.
There is plenty of industry and jobs in the north.
If the south keep relying on tourism they will keep this misery going.
I don't care if you are born here. I only care if you work and contribute here. Tourism is killing people.
Look at Barcelona. Before the Olympics it was a amazing place to live. Now it's rotten and prostituted to expats, tourists and poor people who go there to work in inhuman jobs paying unpayable rents.
This is outrageous and now it's a political talking point for the right, because the left uses it as a matter of "activism" from the "grassroot" movements that celebrate their spoils, at the same time they deny the problem exists at all from their ministries.
But let me remind you: from 2011 to 2018 Spain was NOT governed by the left, but by the Partido Popular with this guy as prime minister:
This moron didn't move a finger to solve the problem, that was already a thing. That's how things work over here: unless there's a massive public outrage, politicians do nothing.
When I moved here to Barcelona, it seemed like many "squats" were punk and artist taking over unused or abandoned large spaces. Many we even open to the public and had events, and some were even part of the local community. Nowadays it's more often drug addicts and criminals and mafias taking over uninhibited homes (even when people are on vacation), who terrorize the neighborhoods.
Some people used to say that touristic companies promoted this to lower prices and buy cheap to remodel whole neighborhoods.
Like Raval. Some German companies had bought whole buildings and know they rent their flats, or even worst, rooms in flats with locks. This is crazy.
I've been in such a place, in the heart of Raval, full of drug addicts, and filth enter to a place remodeled inside with small rooms who "expats" pay a lot, A LOT. It's crazy.
I see a lot of people here claiming that the okupas only affect landlords and banks. Here for example is an article in Spanish that tells the account of an 82-year old pensioner who's house was taken from him (occupied) while he was out visiting a friend in hospital.
I myself have also heard from friends in various cities in Spain of neighbour's apartments being taken also. I'm even aware of some apartments even in my small city that have been occupied.
The fact of the matter is that these lax laws harm many ordinary people. This cannot be argued.
There are a few factors causing the housing crisis but I will not comment more on this as to not go off-topic further.
However I don't think the laws allowing okupas help the housing problem at all and are in fact dangerous and just cause more harm to ordinary, hard-working people. They need to be changed.
That particular example shows the difference between what happens when a occupation of a primary residence has happened, and when a occupation happens in other properties.
In the case you put, the guy called the police, and the police threw them out. What more can you want? Seems the system works perfectly fine, in that case, because it was his home, the squatters have no rights, so the police threw them out immediately as soon as he called the local police. How is the laws "lax" in this case, when the police has the authority to get rid of them?
No one is arguing for squatters right for other's primary residence. The division comes when you start talking about properties that are bought/owned for the sole purpose of speculation.
For others who might not know Spanish, here is a translation of the part where the trespassers (not occupiers/"okupas", as that's a different thing than what happened here) gets thrown out:
> He assures that he panicked: “I started to have an anxiety attack, I don't even know how I had the strength to call the local police... on the phone they told me to calm down”.
> The man, 82 years old, tells a team of Antena 3 Noticias that the agents arrived very quickly and tried to negotiate with the “squatters” , without success. “They asked me for permission to break down the door, and I said yes!”, and adds, “The police acted very quickly and I am very grateful to the agents”. Emotionally, he narrates, “That something like that happens to you and they sink your life, I would have stayed outside with my two little dogs.”
Antena3, lol! This is one of most sensationalist TV channel in spain.
The media always look for this situations and portray they because are shocking.
This is not okupation, and has nothing to do with the movement.
This laws primary are there to protect families and people who rent.
I know at least 15 okupas, who lived +4 on bank unused, and still unused, properties. This okupas helped to not saturate the market. They all worked in touristic areas where housing is scarce, and this makes hiring people very difficult because workers doesn't have a place to live and rent is crazy high.
I see a lot of people here justifying the occupation of bank-owned homes as if that is okay. I hope you never have to experience living next to squatters, as among other things, you might end up paying for their exaggeratedly high utilities.
I've lived next to squatters (having them above me, below and sharing a wall), what exactly am I suppose to have hated about it? They were never troublesome, but of course I can understand in some other cases they were, but we have laws for those things already.
If they were being loud, you can call the police and complain. If they're ruining stuff on your side, you can also call the police. I'm not sure in what way they could bother me, and I wouldn't have the law on my side if I chose to act on it.
Isn't it also a strange disconnect to support squatting to that degree (or generally downgrade, explain away, tolerate most crime) and also wonder about the growth of the extreme right in Europe? (Not just in Europe, obviously). Many were mentioning the emotional toll on small property owners. Un-responded crime is necessarily very present on the victims, potential victims, their families. Relations with China are all very nice but constant alertness and lack of recourse has a very present weight.
Same as the impact on construction really. The risk of squatters or other hard to remove tenants is the obvious objection to owning rental property (i.e. supporting construction of new property - both in capital, labor for that construction and then availability on the market.)
European assembly elections this weekend. With many quite worried.
> if a property is not adequately secured and is left unattended, it becomes vulnerable to occupation.
> Spanish law provides for an immediate eviction procedure that can be enacted within 48 hours of illegal occupation
So if I understand properly, if you go away for the weekend and forget to close a window, you might find squatters in your house when you come back, and you can't quickly get them out in a legal way?
This is not true. Your first and second house are protected by the law. If someone enters in your first or second house when you are outside, they will get expelled in the same moment the police arrives, and they will face criminal consecuences.
The problem comes when you have 200 houses and somebody squats one of those where you don't live and you don't use. A problem for the banks, vulture funds and big renters. And to be honest, I cannot care less..
Do not forget to mention that every news tv program is sponsored by Alarms companies. That the banks, the phone companies, are sponsored and sell alarms.
Which potentially, might have something to do, which so much does this situation appears on news in comparison to other problems the country has.
Thank you for acknowledging it. It's crazy to see how there's at least 1 alarm ad whenever there is a news piece about Okupation.
Most of the occupied apartments belong to banks and big renters who would rather see the building fall apart than offering the apartments for a reasonable price/rent.
The problem for citizens isn't that they're losing their apartments/houses to Okupas, since that's a really small minority. The real problem is that some Okupas do it "professionally" for profit and can be quite violent.
It's pretty easy. Where you are registered in your city. There is an obligation to register yourself where do you live and where do you reside. If you live and work in madrid but you have a house in cadiz, then your house in cadiz is not where you live...
It's the same in France so I wouldn't even be surprised.
You can't even cut electricity/heat as it is seen inhumane and in theory you have to renovate/fix the house every time something dangerous needs to be fixed because it's illegal to provide unsafe housing.
Sometimes it takes years for people to get their house back and they often are completely trashed
France, like Spain, has strong residence protection for anyone, including homeowners. So if someone takes your house while you are away it is not legally squatting, but rather homebreaking and they will be evicted without even a trial.
If a house you own gets squatted you may stop paying for electricity/gaz/water. But to be honest apart from big corps abandoned buildings, i've never seen a squat where the electricity/water was already on.
It is illegal to rent dangerous housing. It may not be illegal to give it away in good faith, and it's certainly not your responsibility as an owner if it gets squatted. To my knowledge, and despite hearing about this constantly on homeowners forums, there has never been a case of owners being legally responsible for injuries to squatters.
> So if someone takes your house while you are away it is not legally squatting, but rather homebreaking and they will be evicted without even a trial.
At least in the US there have been cases where the squatter forged a lease and showed that to police that came to evict them. With the scant evidence the police would deem it a civil matter and you have to go to court. I'm not sure what the process is in Spain though.
Forging a lease for an empty dwelling is easy. But forging a lease for the owner's residence is much harder. You'd have to get rid of the owner's stuff, make sure the neighbors don't testify that this is the owner's residence, come up with fake papers to prove the owner lives elsewhere.
All in all, i'd be curious if you have an example because that sounds like opinion manipulation from the owners as that case is very unlikely. At least similar cases i've heard about in France have been 100% debunked. It's much more likely the owners live(d) elsewhere and had an empty dwelling squatted.
You can still get them out relatively quickly if it's your main residence. But otherwise, yeah, that's correct, which is why, instead of contacting the police, many people kick them out the old fashioned way or hire people experienced in doing so tiptoeing the line of legality.
You are right but im certain that the amount of incidents like that is really small. A little more common is the situation where someone renting runs out of money and squats to avoid going homeless.
Both types of squatters above are overrepresented and the most common one by far is the anti-capitalist squatter.
People who are fed up with high rents. Not without motives.
Corps buy entire building blocks, sometimes for renting but a lot of times just for storing capital and playing with the market.
This combined with airbnb raising the prices more for tourists while salaries i. spain stay the same ends up in rents being totally disproportionate.
Most squatters I know don't want trouble, they get inside abandoned buildings and stay unnoticed for a big lenght of time. Getting inside a building in active use is just asking for trouble, as annoying it may be for the owners it's not the best option for the okupas either.
That's precisely what fascist news organizations will have you believe, but the reality could not be further. Here in France BFMTV or CNews regularly have segments about poor people displaced from their homes by squatters (like the Maryvonne case or the Roland case) however when you check for information, you realize they were not protected by the police because they had abandoned the house for years so it was not considered their residence.
People going away for vacations, even months-long vacations are definitely protected by the law. It is illegal to break into people's home. It may not be illegal, depending on your jurisdiction, to enter an abandoned housing unit and claim it as your residence. It may still be illegal to break into it.
(when i say fascist news organizations i do mean they are run by actual fascists like Bollore, it's not a figure of speech)
> This is fueled by a complex blend of socio-economic factors. There are a bunch of poor people, scarce affordable housing, and also a bunch of empty houses owned by banks.
Even making it a proper market would help! The problem is that people in general are very averse to changes, and cities are stuck in a very bad policy pit. (Building is hard, but even when finally a project is greenlit it barely moves the needle, adding supply is not happening fast enough because there's this fear of high buildings. And, on the other hand, there's no quota or lottery for moving, which means prices going up ... so the system is completely neglecting to care about pricing out incumbents.)
I don't see how the housing market could ever be less exploitative than the healthcare market given that you literally need a place to live the same way you need to not die and that there's more money in building extremely expensive housing and hoping it sells than building affordable housing and just about breaking even.
housing is much more transparent, people shop around, there are sites to check prices, there are short term solutions, people can spend a few nights at friends and family.
for most of the US healthcare comes from their employers, which is the direct opposite of an efficient market. getting claims validated and actually getting reimbursed or getting treatment is the problem, and the abysmal quality is ... because there's no incentives to have it better, lack of competition and/or oversight (because lack of funding for authorities, no real consequences for providers if they miss deadlines, etc)
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the big problem is that currently affordable housing is fucking expensive too, because of small volume.
There are all kinds of perverse market opportunities opening. Enforcers who help "convince" squatters to leave are getting rich. But what if there are not enough squatters? Well, they can ask their friends to pretend to be squatters to keep up demand. "Convincing" is not always violent I understand, it be a payment. Yes, people get extorted and you pay them ransom to get your place back.
If the government fixes the laws, now these private "enforcement" companies will be left out on the streets. So, presumably, some will want to convince the government to not change the laws, and may even start supporting PAH!
In some states in the US, you can just shoot home invaders. That is, the use of deadly force is appropriate for protecting one’s self and family from a home invasion, and there is no additional duty to retreat from your own home. It’s a shame that the people of Spain live with such little freedom that these bandits are able to basically force people out of their own house.
"I so feared for my life that I drove to my primary home, retrieved my firearms, returned to my second home, where I then shot the home invaders through the window". Sure.
There is no state in the union where you can shoot people who are simply existing in your otherwise-unoccupied home, because "sleeping in a house you don't have permission to" is not an offense that requires any kind of violent defense. Even in castle-doctrine/stand-your-ground states where you don't have a duty to retreat, you still don't have a blank check to assault. Squatters are not home invaders, literally forcing people out of their own homes at gun point or some such. Otherwise, all a would-be murderer would need to do is plausibly lure their victim to their home, at some point say "I need you to leave", then shoot.
There's a million good arguments around American gun culture vs. European gun culture, but this is emphatically not one of them.
I have seen some apartment being severely reduced because they are under occupation (makes sense since the buyer buys an apartment they cant even go into without a multi-year legal process). I wonder if it ever happens that people occupy an apartment only to get the owner to sell for cheap and then they (or their friend) buys the apartment for cheap?
I've never heard of something like this. It's not exactly like squatters are millionaires trying to save on rent to buy more champagne... I'm not saying this has never existed, there's probably an outlier somewhere.
What does exist for sure and is publicly advertised is companies like the original article trying to make owners desperate about squatters so they will sell their property for cheap. For example here in France, "Squat Solutions" has been doing this for years, buying property for ~10% of market price because of squatters, after convincing the owners they had already lost everything.
Yea I didnt mean real squatters being the buyers. More like A who is a company/or rich person pays person B to go and squat in person Cs house. Then A goes to C and say "Ill buy your house for 10% of market value" and then the sale is done B leaves and C sells it at marketprice for a huge profit. And A and B just start the cycle again
Homelessness is a problem. This looks like an interim and very imperfect solution.
If you have a residential property that's just closed and is not rented out and not used (even seasonally, such as a vacation home), it's not giving any worth towards the society it exists in. It's only fair that the owner pays higher taxes over it to help fund the creation of new housing for the existing demand.
I don't really think just occupying it is a great idea, but I do think it might force the owner to employ the property in a more socially responsible way.
It's kind of dystopian that it would even get to this point, but I wonder if there would be a business model that could sell "squatter insurance" to people, requiring that they follow particular security system procedures, but pay them out if someone successfully squats in their place.
Its not Spain's problem. Its the real estate sector's problem. Both the legitimate okupas and illegitimate 'professional' okupas do serve the purpose of forcing the real estate owners to actually USE their real estate instead of being able to let them sit empty. They either live in them, sell them or rent them - which helps to address the housing demand.
Compare this to the US where such a phenomenon does not exist:
Paraphrasing a prior discussion about why short selling exists in the stock market: it is all about price discovery.
As a property owner you can keep your property empty seeking a better rent value, but this forces you to realize that there is a risk to keeping the place unused and maybe accepting lower price would be better overall.
> Both the legitimate okupas and illegitimate 'professional' okupas do serve the purpose of forcing the real estate owners to actually USE their real estate instead of being able to let them sit empty.
Total nonsense, Spanish new recently reported the case when couple went for 3 months trip only to find their apartment squatted. Spain has no property rights for smaller folks.
Who are these 'Spanish new' people... Like someone else said, its debatable whether these people were the 'small property owner' you speak about - as okupas scout the places and people before occupying and occupying the houses of working-class people who own one home is something not tolerated by the community.
That said, yes, its possible that an actual single-home owner family from working class may end up with okupas in their home occasionally. But that's a negligible price to pay in return for preventing real estate sharks like those in the US from scooping up housing to profit by screwing everyone over.
That's anecdotal though... How many of the current okupas happen in other's primary residence? Would be considered trespassing in those cases and a lot easier to get rid of them, compared to the other cases.
It's literally not. Maybe if you'd actually experience the situation yourself here you'd know about the differences. But alas, hard to understand from the outside I suppose.
Invading a property people actively live in = The police comes quickly to throw the invaders out
Invading a property that been empty for years where the owner refuses to either rent out or sell it = Harder to get them out, for obvious reasons.
A linguistic question - why is this spelled with a "k"? I assume this is derived from "ocupación" - the "k" looks funny to me as someone familiar with but nowhere near fluent in Spanish.
If you okupas you always ocupas.
But you can ocupar without okupar.
The k differences the political movement from the physical act of using a property which is not yours. Okupas don't promote squatting in a small owner property. They promote using unused properties from banks.
In fact in Barcelona there are la Oficina d'okupació:
I don't have an definitive answer, but generally radical movements (like anarchism) sometimes change the expected spellings to appear more non-traditional/anti-establishment. In this case, okupa comes from ocupar, "k" is not used a lot in Spanish so in order to appear even less mainstream, changing the "c" for a "k" makes it stand out more.
That'd be my guess at least. Maybe someone could track down a definitive answer.
This was amusing. I appreciate the spirit of entrepreneurial innovation but one look at the entire group of employees and owner of this business gives a strong indication of how their mediation might go...
Can we establish that the squatters are doing this out of economic necessity and not to "profit" (e.g can't afford to rent or own someplace else)? I imagine so as living with no security in an abandoned building with no utilities seems pretty desperate, sub-optimal and sad.
If we can then realistically the root cause to this is lack of housing supply. "Just build more f**ing houses" would fix this no?
No, we can’t explicitly establish that. It is of course true that many squatters do so out of financial necessity, but others do so for other reasons: a lifestyle choice, a political choice, or plain freeloading and financial gain - in a squat in my village there were people living there with full time jobs and driving brand new Audis!
I would add further that the responsibility of paying the utilities and tax falls on the building owner even if it is occupied by squatters.
None of this diminishes the fact that housing is increasingly expensive in Spain, particularly in Madrid and Barcelona, and this is causing real problems.
But the situation is definitely more complicated than just ‘build more houses’.
I wonder what the split is here? Lets say 1000 squatters how many can afford housing but choose not to?
Of those who can afford to rent how many have jobs and cars but do this so they can save for a house deposit rather than all 60% of thier income going to housing?
I'm not "pro squatter" or anything I just think you could solve 90% of this problem if you built much more housing.
Yes, but housing market is a market, so for owners to have a ROI on their houses, the supply needs to be lower than the demand.
Usually the way governments "patch" this is by building social houses and apartments, but if you were building enough of them then people would rent or buy them instead of the other private ones. So, again, it would make home owners unhappy to not have their investment go up.
I don't know if it's the same in all countries, but in France, 3.5% of households own 50% of the homes rented by individuals. So it's not even a problem for people buying a home for themselves, or a second home as a passive income, but it's a problem because it's highly concentrated. And they're the ones who want to have their investment to go up, at any cost.
Same in the UK. I think we can choose any number of options to maintain this;
We keep building houses until house prices are stagnant and do not grow any more. Honestly even if houses lost ~1% of their value almost no-body would be underwater on their mortgage.
a bunch of specific areas to "build 100K homes" and have the government garentee to buy anyones house in that area at any time in the the next 25 years for the value of it on the scheme announcement date. Existing home owners dont lose.
Spanish here. I've been to many homes occupied by squatters due to the nature of my voluntary service for quite some years.
The people you seem to be describing just applies for a tiny proportion of the actual landscape of squatting in Spain. So your sentence is partly true, but nowadays as the situation becomes chronic, most people just do it because it is convenient for them
Believe me when I say that I've been tasked to helping "homeless" people and once I got closer, some of them were begging in the streets, making +300€ on a good day. I was speechless the first day that I heard about it.
He did the whole electrical installation and had a giant water deposit on the basement that he filled once a month with the waterolympics: getting the water from the next street from a fire hydrant. Such a great guy. With a lot of social conscience, firm to his ideals and he worked!
> an we establish that the squatters are doing this out of economic necessity and not to "profit"
in some cases yes
but in some cases it's also clearly not the case
and there are likely many ideologically driven cases too
> with no security in an abandoned building with no utilities seems pretty desperate, sub-optimal and sad.
you would think so but I have seen enough cases of people willingly abandon such things in context of ideologically driven life styles (not in Spain, but anyway)
> realistically the root cause to this is lack of housing supply. "Just build more f*ing houses" would fix this no?
no if anything the root cause is the lack of affordable housing, and that is much harder to fix as building housing is expensive so providing affordable housing is much harder then just increasing housing
worse the problem also often isn't affordable housing in general, but affordable housing in the right place e.g. where you can reach your workplace with public transportation or even just something as simple as housing where you can reach a supermarket with the means available to you
and a problem for that is affordable land to build on houses, which is sparse due to two reasons 1. most land is already in use 2. a lot of shitty money economy leading to stuff like land banks and similar, basically a small number of very wealthy entities (not necessary people) have bought a lot of the land and housing (directly or through proxy) and have absolutely no reason or insensitive to provide reasonable affordable housing. In some cases they don't even have the insensitive to use the land housing at all, i.e. they would prefer to not rent the apartments they own and just keep them around as monetary investment.
In general this isn't a Spanish problem it's a problem in most (all?) countries which have a banking/investment/money market roughly similar to the US when it comes to property. Sure each country has their own country specific problems on top of it (e.g. zoning laws in the US) but the problem by itself is much more deep rooted. And if you want to starkly oversimplify it the problem points back to a few siphoning of the wealth of the many in increasingly sophisticated ways. As long as the many generate enough new wealth this can work (like during economic boom times) but that hasn't been the case for a long time with especially "small family cooperation becoming increasingly economically impossible" playing a big role. At the same time we where for a long time able through technologically advancement (or producing in china) to still keep a high living standard and most of the basic needs for many people covered. So the consequences where limited. But that doesn't help with apartments especially given of property ownership has become a really nice and desired way to keep money somewhat save during turbulent times which combined with speculative investment in housing has driving prices up beyond what would normally have happened in many regions in the world.
Historically a lot of property was forcefully removed from their owners, and it was such a success that it became one of the foundations of modern societies. Slaves for instance were property until societies decided that human rights take precedent to property rights. Also laws don't govern natural order, just how societies of humans want to function, so if they decide they want to prioritize one over the other it's their right. With all that in mind, I can definitely see the world where people's right to have a roof over their head is more important than someone's right to extract rent from multiple properties. Not sure what's the benefit for the whole society to have people not doing anything productive anyway. As far as I can tell, people living in their homes are protected and anybody trespassing will be promptly evicted, so the "little guy" or "normal people" are covered.
Oh wow I thought only France has squatting problem.
here the squatters can legally occupy your place for 48 hours, and if that's your only place and you went away on vacation tough luck buddy, they can shit on the floor and tear the walls down
This is obviously not accurate. The 48h delay is not 48h after squatters entered the place, but 48h after you DISCOVERED them. And after those 48h you will still get your property back, just much more slowly because it is just not considered an emergency anymore if you discover a problem and don't signal it immediately.
If you go on vacation for 3 weeks, discover squatters when you come back and can prove you are the owner you will get the squatters kicked out in less than 24 hours, plus potentially arrested.
And it makes sense, otherwise everyone would be squatting houses all the time!
It is not what happens in Barcelona. For six months the "okupas" have been inside an apartment that a family left completely closed to go away for a weekend, the Mossos arrived 15 minutes after the occupation, probably alerted by "Securitas" and did absolutely nothing. Saw everything from my window, and now I’m terrified if I have to leave my house for one day.
> It is not what happens in Barcelona. For six months the "okupas" have been inside an apartment that a family left completely closed to go away for a weekend, the Mossos arrived 15 minutes after the occupation
If that was the primary residence of the family, it wouldn't be considered a "occupation" as discussed in this submission, but rather "breaking and entering" ("allanamiento de morada", or similar), and police should definitely get them out ASAP, anything else is a disgrace.
But again, has nothing to do with okupas because it wouldn't be considered an occupation in the first place.
Try go to the local news, because if the police does nothing about this, I'm 100% sure the news are interested in this story.
Well most people aren't criminals so no I don't think "everyone would be squatting houses all the time" is accurate under any realistic scenario.
What happens if the police don't respond? You discover them at the beginning of a long holiday weekend? It's a second residence and you discover them as you open the door to let your family stay there?
The mental gymnastics people will go through to try to justify someone breaking & entering and trespassing on someone else's private property is insane. They are criminals and should be treated as such, regardless of when you find them, regardless of whether you report it immediately or take a few days to try to reason with them or not.
I'd see as both Spain and France has a housing crisis, the squatting is a symptom of that problem.
Guess the difference is that in Spain if you detect them within 48 hours of them entering the property, you can "easily" and legally remove them with the help of the courts and police.
But once you're beyond those 48 hours, things get a lot harder.
1) If it is where you lived they always could be (and were) kicked out quickly (and it was not that simple in other situations)
2) Now the law changed and it is much easier and faster to kick them out. It was always illegal to squat, now sanction are higher
3) Most squatters are not targeting houses. And all the time squats are mainly building not used for years (as it safer and easier for squatters, and sometimes as a way to "minimize" disturbances)
Please note that in Holland some kind of squat were legals for years (only for building not used for years and with obligation to not damage the property and to give it back quickly). Seems interesting to me
Article conveniently omits that Okupas are only of property that has been actually abandoned by their owner, usually for 2 years. The movement doesn't just grab any old property.
To make a bold analogy, claiming that squatters should be allowed to seize unoccupied buildings is like claiming that hackers should be allowed to seize inactive servers.
One thing I don't get -- if the law doesn't help why don't the owners of these properties release fart spray everywhere and turn the heat up to max until it is unlivable?
> why don't the owners of these properties release fart spray everywhere and turn the heat up to max until it is unlivable?
If the okupas have been there for longer than 48 hours without you trying to get rid of them, doing something like that could be considered harassment and/or endangering the occupants' health, so you'd probably face criminal charges for it. You're not allowed to alter the living conditions to force them out, but you need to (within 48 hours of the occupation) legally get them out of the property.
It's not within 48 hours of detecting them. It's within 48 hours of occupation. And they could always fabricate how long they have been there unless the area is under constant surveillance. Fabricating leases is very common.
Yup, lots of cases where the owners stopped paying/turned-off water, gas, electricity and the court made them turned them back on (and pay all the bills).
What if your house already had fart spray releasers in the first place because you "love the smell", and your thermostat was "broken" in the first place?
When you live there you know how to "fix" them but otherwise you are not obligated to fix them.
You are living in pure fantasy. The squatters would simply fix the thermostats and disconnect the sprays.
The buildings are occupied because the owner do not live there. Squatters target housings that are left empty by owners who are just speculating on the market.
You seem to keep spreading this baseless rumor. "Occupation"/"Okupas" is considering properties beyond your primary residential property. I'm sure there are cases where okupas tried to take people's primary residential property, but the police absolutely help you to get rid of them quickly.
I personally know a handful of cases where okupas tried to take people's primary residence that they just purchased and were in the process of reforming before moving, for example. And every single case was solved quickly by local police, as it's breaking and entering, not a occupation.
They wouldn't know how to fix the thermostat if I design the thermostat with huge amounts of obscurity, to the point where the heater doesn't even turn on without a secret key being sent to it, the heater has obscure security screws, and if the screws are breached, fart spray in sugar syrup gets released followed by a huge gust of feathers coated in itching powder. Bitter melon juice would be sprayed into the occupant's mouth via a computer vision controlled system that uses a neural net to track the occupant's mouth. If they attempt to disconnect that system, a 2nd system instantly activates with jalapeno sauce. If the jalapeno sauce is disconnected, a 3rd system activates with habanero sauce.
The sprays could be made very difficult to disconnect. A new one would activate each day in a new location. If day 1 spray is disconnected, day 2 would be twice as much volume.
It has been shown on Youtube that fart spray does work for theft, it's time to deploy it as an actual product everywhere.
The owners can hire contractors that will go to the property in order to help 'determine the conditions' under which the squatters will leave. My understanding is that it's usually a balance of physical intimidation and financial incentive.
I have seen this happen with a building across the street from where I lived. There were 5 large men who could have easily been bouncers in Oakland outside with "FueraOkupa" shirts. The woman left later that day.
I believe when they say the squatters have a "right to housing" it means "right to use a unit of housing that's not theirs as if they paid for it", which essentially means doing what you suggest would be illegal.
The reality of the legal dimensions is probably much more complex though, but it's helpful to have a simplistic mental picture of what's expected to happen.
Well that does happen. It happened around me with a few houses that are empty during the winter (whatever you think of that): the squatters got refused service in the town by the bars, restaurants and super markets. People would accidentally walk into them so they would fall over. Every one drives straight at them when they walk only to correct at the last moment and shout profanities at them. People spit on them and say it’s the wind, throw hot coffee on them saying it’s an accident etc. Until they leave; you think the policia or guardia that has their familia living their all their lives and are probably family of the occupied houses is going to file anything? Didn’t take long two times it happened.
Of course in less close knit communities it would be different; a third time was the house of an english bloke who only came over for the summer; they put all his stuff outside in the rain in the winter, made a weed grow place out of it and until they had proof of the weed, they couldn’t get them out. House was completely fucked when they got it back including the furniture which was outside all winter. Squatting is one thing and you could agree with it, but this shit is insane. And trying to get them doesn’t work as they clearly don’t have money to begin with.
I am not familiar with the specifics in Spain, but in a lot of jurisdictions that would be illegal. Until they are legally evicted they have the exact same rights as regular tenants, and harassing them would be a crime.
The reasoning behind this is that some shady landlords might try to claim that genuine tenants are squatters in order to get rid of them. There are plenty of desperate people who'd accept a verbal contract and payment in cash, after all. Not that hard of a choice when the alternative is being homeless. Oh, but you paid your rent a day late? Sorry, you're now a "squatter", so we're cooking you alive until you leave.
Making it too easy to get rid of squatters would expose the most vulnerable people in society to even more abuse, and making it trickier for absentee landlords to get rid of real squatters is considered a fair price to prevent this.
Not sure how the situation is in Spain, but I think that in Europe in general, if you have a contract saying that you are a tenant, it's quite hard to kick you out, even if you don't pay, at all. If the tenants don't have any papers and they try to game the system, then this is probably a risk that they should take into account?
The easy fix here is to require property contracts in writing and to be filed with the government and educate everyone on that point. We already do this for property sales to avoid these very issues on ownership. The same thing for leasing would provide better protections for both parties.
Thanks for that info! So why is this such a big problem? Is it just that the government doesn't want to trust it's own records? If people are bypassing the law, I would think it reasonable to allow the consequences to transpire - eg evicted if you don't have a written contract.
As mentioned in other comments by Spaniards weighing in, it's not really a big problem as in that's happening all the time.
It is a multi-faceted issue, and for some, a philosophical standpoint stemming from the economic crisis, gentrification and speculation, and related problems.
Take in mind that the post shared here is written by a company that provides listing services.
Housing is more of a right in Spain than in other countries, and at least in Catalonia, there is precedent that it supersedes property rights.
You'll understand the inevitable tension on policing this issue considering that a couple of years ago Spain passed a law that made access to adequate and dignified housing a constitutional right.
You are saying that as if it is never the owner's fault.
If your revenue is not enough to pay for an housing under regular contract but a shaddy owner allows you to pay a rent for the place so that he can bypass a number of regulations by pretending he has no tenants, would you choose living in the street or a car or would you accept it, hoping it is a temporary situation?
Most people would choose the later hence the way the laws are written. Landowners are usually the wealthy ones, so the less at risk of suffering.
There needs to be penalties on the landowner side too. The paper requirement should carry penalties enforced against them if they are violating it. This would be better than just a chance of pain from the eviction process. After all, if they are shady landlords they might push people out in other ways to avoid the eviction process currently anyways.
I saw some of the different factors in the article but none of them seemed to really address the lack of checking a registered source of data for the leases and why they wouldn't be a good idea.
> Oh, but you paid your rent a day late? Sorry, you're now a "squatter", so we're cooking you alive until you leave.
That seems far-fetched as a risk. Why would a company offering rentals push out someone who paid rent (even if late) and lose out on revenue/maintenance costs trying to get another renter?
Because most of their revenue comes from property prices rising, not from rent. The renters are mostly a source of cost / hassle (gotta communicate with them/ fix stuff etc..)
This, exactly. These kinds of slanted articles that only state the issue from the perspective of negligent absentee landlords, whether written by ChatGPT or otherwise, all have the same problem: that's not how property disputes are resolved. The first thing that a court would have to establish is that the person trying to remove another person from a given place would be whether the first person has any right to the place, and to what extent. And the next thing would be the question of whether the second person has a stake in the place, and the nature and extent of that interest. Then they have to balance interests.
I know Spain is not America and doesn't share America's uniquely bad system of estates, but we see this all the time in America where a self-described landlord wants the county sheriff to immediately taser some old lady, but they can't even sufficiently demonstrate that they own the home.
This is bullshit. I'm dev from Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain) and the squatting topic is periodically being pumped up by the same dumb bastards (always the same companies and media). Squatting exists at the city but it is not an issue in the daily lifes of Barcelona and Spain citizens, only for the fucking big owners with more than 10 flats each. Squatting happens because this bastards (big owners) are inflating the flat prices and getting the people of Barcelona out of their neighborhoods and giving the homes for temporal tourists.
Demand of people is the only way of inflating the prices. The people who would like to live in Spain, both Spanish people and non-Spanish, are the people who make your country as rich as it is.
Am I hearing you saying "What rich? we have poor economy". Yeah, prevent people from investing in real estate and you'll be even poorer.
We are getting poorer because people invest in real state to their benefit without adding any social value to our lives. Only to higher our rent and making touristic flats. Which crowds our streets with noise and filth while the benefits are for foreign companies that are prostituting our cities like a thematic park.
Comical. I used to hang around Spain in wintertime in 80's, mostly living in tent, albeit I could afford a month in a pensionnat when I found a good one. People were friendly and sometimes suggested better camping place within their property. European Union and unhindered migration from every direction turned the country into total shithole.
This leads people to hate squatters because the visible ones are the ones who will steal property and then it takes agreed to get rid of them. You never know about the ones who squatt abandoned buildings or the points nobody cares about.
On top of that you have active and noisy associations that help them so this raises the hatred even more.
You must not get rid of them by force because of the law. I have a friend of a friend who decided to come in force, there were 10 of them and just squatted the squatters making their life unbearable (including destroying their property, "by mistake")
They left after a few days and went to the police to complain.
Sometimes a guest that is not paying is considered and treated as a "squatter" (which is not)
Idealista, using fear which liberalism most popular weapon of choice nowadays to sell products and services, produces pretty biased information. Enjoy.
propaganda and lies from a company that profits from this...
1) Squatters squat empty buildings that have been empty for years, not personal homes...
2) If your home is squatted that's an infringement. The police will come and detain the people inside.
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Who profits from this propaganda?
i) Owners with dozens / hundreds or thousands of houses (such funds)
ii) Security and insurance companies
iii) Extreme right. The use this to capture the vote of normal people being afraid
iv) Right wing in general (who are the land owners of Spain) because this might lead to have laws that benefit themselves for continuing speculating with the house market
I lived in Amsterdam for a long time, and the Dutch government initially took a very liberal stance on squatting exactly for the reasons you mentioned. And initially it seemed to work, the squatters were a mix of idealists, artists and others, otoh property owners tried to find creative ways to make sure their properties didn't stay inhabited for too long, e.g. by renting it out temporarily.
However after some years, the situation slowly changed: more and more squatters were drug addicts, who ofc couldn't afford to pay rent; also the word spread outside of NL that it was possible to go to Amsterdam and live there for free, so loads of immigrants came with no intention to rent at all.
Apart from that, squatting exposed another problem: the squatters typically didn't care too much about their home or neighbourhood, after all it was not theirs and sooner or later they'd have to move out again.
So they typically caused a lot of irritation with their neighbours because of garbage of noise.
In the end, squatters in NL lost most of the goodwill they had with the Dutch government, and stricter anti squatting laws are now in place.
A common misconception that people don't seem to get (and that most news outlets conveniently forget to report), it's that if someone enters your primary or even second residence, that isn't considered Okupacion, it's considered "Allanamiento de morada" (breaking and entering). Even if you were on vacation for a month.
If that happens you call the police and they'll kick them out in 24 hours max.
Yes it does. It would be the renters primary residence, so it's "Allanamiento de Morada". (Breaking and entering).
Now if the current renter can't afford to keep paying rent and decides to occupy the property, that's considered Okupación. And that process does take longer.
Secondary residence here doesn't mean your 2nd house as opposed to the 3rd, it means a vacation home (ie a place you own for your own use, even if it's not you main residence. As opposed to a rental property)
What is it with people and their strawmen. Squatting has, historically, predominantly targeted empty buildings like luxury rentals, offices, factories, churches, etc. Please show me a single example of somebodies primary home being squatted and they becoming homeless as a result.
Sticking to Spain, there were about 17,000 squatting incidents (reported to the police) in 2021 [1]. I don't know about big cities in Spain, but e.g. in Berlin there are tens of thousands of squaremeters in unhoused space in form of offices and high-rent appartments. Do you really think people go to the homes people live in first?
If investing in housing is made less profitable, there will be less investing and consequently less supply in the long run, thus making the housing problem worse.
Except in this case, what is less profitable is investing in land/infrastructure that could serve as housing but leaving it vacant.
That is not investment in housing, simply speculation on land and buildings.
Investment in housing (ie actively rented places) are unaffected, so there is no reason there woukd be less investing on that front
These aren't examples of houses kept vacant intentionally by speculators. The first articles literally says in the headline that the houses are empty because "no-one wants to buy them". The second one states that the reason the flats are empty is "unlikely to be property speculation".
Because we have doors and windows closed, so in reality this isn't a huge issue. But historically, we've had huge issues with low employment, poverty and empty houses being all around you, while you cannot afford rent.
Lots of empty houses + no employment + no money for rent = lets take this house and live in since no one lives there and we don't have a house currently.
Basically, if you buy property, make sure to close it and install a security system. If okupas appear, do the "legal fasttrack" and get them out within 48 hours and it won't be an issue.
> Basically, if you buy property, make sure to close it and install a security system. If okupas appear, do the "legal fasttrack" and get them out within 48 hours and it won't be an issue.
And also, if you’re gonna buy property please do so to actually live there yourself or to house a business that you own and actually operate.
Don’t buy houses to rent them out.
Don’t buy houses because you think that letting it sit unused for a few years will let you sell it for more in the future.
Don’t buy houses to “renovate” (read: do unnecessary “improvements” that make the value appear higher) just to turn around and sell it.
In general I wish housing was not seen as an “investment”.
There’s plenty of people still that cannot afford to buy a house. Because other people are using housing as a way to gain more money for themselves.
You've listed all the ways to make sure no new houses are built.
Update:
> And also, if you’re gonna buy property please do so to actually live there yourself or to house a business that you own and actually operate.
This means that I can't rent. But as a person who lives somewhere, or a person who operates a business, I'd rather rent than own — I don't want to have all the headache of owning the property, and I don't want to be committed to one place so much, I want to be able to move easily when my circumstances change. Even if I had enough money to buy a house, I would put that money into a bank or investment fund that buys thousands of different homes and rents it out so I'm not that exposed to risks of owning any single piece of property.
> Even if I had enough money to buy a house, I would put that money into a bank or investment fund that buys thousands of different homes and rents it out so I'm not that exposed to risks of owning any single piece of property.
Well, but imagine that houses cost a fraction of their current price. That’s the point. A home shouldn’t have to be this ginormous investment that you have to slave and save for many years to put down a small part of the total price for and be stuck paying back a mortgage to some bank for the rest of your working life.
Everyone should have the opportunity to own some kind of home, from early age and without going into debt for it.
And for the risk of the remaining low value of homes in that world, that can be covered with insurance.
And then you are still able to save up money and invest those remaining money into actually productive businesses, to diversify risk and earn a bit from your money and so on.
> Well, but imagine that houses cost a fraction of their current price. That’s the point.
That's not how your proposed measures would work in reality. You would just make market less effective and create a lot of problems who want to participate in it.
It would be much harder to find a place to rent, and it would be without any contracts or legal protections, as most landlords would look as if they're actually living in the apartments. A cottage industry of people who serve as fictive "owners" of the apartments will spring up for others who want to invest in real estate. A lot of government officials will be hired to "ensure" that you're buying a house or an apartment for yourself. They will take bribes to look the other way, and they will have a huge backlog of apartments to check.
Apartments and houses that are listed for sale officially (not on the emergent black market) may have their list prices come down, but it would be very hard to get access to them and actually buy one. Probably further government regulation will ensure that some queue system is in place so that people who "need it the most" (bribed the official in charge) would get preferential treatment, and as a result it would take years to actually buy one. Commercial investment in real estate will plummet, so the government will take over. Residential construction will soon balloon in cost and go down in quality.
Your ideas are not new. They, or variations of them, have been tried, a lot. Interventions in the free markets always have a lot of unintended consequences of second and third order, and as more regulations are patched on top in the attempts to fix them, the situation just becomes worse and worse.
Landlords are a convenient scrapegoat — but if you actually dive into how the market works, you have to acknowledge that they provide a very important financial service. Nobody on the real estate has any kind of monopolistic influence (except the government), and nobody is able to artificially inflate the prices. The world is entering a stage of ultra-urbanisation, where small and ordinary towns die down and the biggest centers grow more and more important — so real estate in them balloons, because there's more and more demand for it. If you are just looking for a place to live, there's a lot of it around the world. For example, a very nice 2-bedroom apartment in Nha Trang in a new building costs around $300 a month — it has an underground parking and all the infrastructure of a modern city around it. Especially in the age of remote work, "high costs" of real estate are not about people living on the street — it's about people not being able to live where they used to live before.
You can blame Airbnbs and hotels — but it all comes down to the fact that of other people on the market are ready to pay more than you do and have the cash for it, there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to outbid you. If somebody used to rent an apartment in the neighbourhood for 20 years but now can't afford it — it may be sad for this person, but it's not a reason why someone else who wants and can pay more for renting the same place shouldn't be able to do so. I guess you're an American? Guess what — more and more people come to your country from all around the world, and they (we) just outcompete you.
> Basically, if you buy property, make sure to close it and install a security system. If okupas appear, do the "legal fasttrack" and get them out within 48 hours and it won't be an issue.
Doesn't that make you not want to buy property in the first place? I'd rather buy it someplace where it can't be stolen.
> Doesn't that make you not want to buy property in the first place?
If it was a common problem, then yes. But it's relatively uncommon, and to be honest, I'd rather have the existing system in place where people can legally occupy unused buildings, because there is a lot of them around here. And lots of property owners just keep them empty for years until their "investment" gives them the returns they want, which to me is a bigger problem than okupas.
I think when an entire industry rises, and then continues to exist, for the sole purposes of defending against (or undoing) the problem, it can no longer be said to be uncommon.
Unless you plan on essentially abandoning your investment, it really isn't a big deal in practice.
If you live in the home yourself, someone can't squat in it. If you rent it out, someone can't squat in it. If you install any kind of security system, you'll know someone is trying to squat in time to actually do something about it. Got a long-term investment you're planning to renovate? Rent it out as "anti-squat": way cheaper price, but you provide essentially zero services and can kick them out at any time, so essentially a live-in security guard.
> The battle against squatting in Spain is not only a legal skirmish but also a deeply personal and emotional one for many property owners. The stories of those who have endured the frustration and helplessness of having their properties occupied illicitly are both compelling and heart-wrenching. These narratives underscore the profound impact that squatting can have on individuals, extending far beyond the financial losses to include significant emotional distress and a sense of violation. [...]
> Property owners have shared experiences of feeling powerless as they grapple with the lengthy and often cumbersome legal process to evict squatters.
Those poor landlords! Property owners are truly the most oppressed minority in Spain. It's heart-wrenchingly sad hearing their accounts of legal procedures and having to evict people living in their properties:(
What kind of evidence do you need? It could be summarized in 3 sentences - it's wordy and repetitive. A human could also write such a thing if paid by line but in 2024 I'd rather assume it's a human + LLM.
Touché. I put the first paragraph in GPTZero, and it says 100% AI generated. Unfortunately, AI detectors are notoriously bad, giving all kinds of false positives, which goes to my initial point that it is largely a gut feeling. But if you look at other articles posted on the site by the same author they also come up as 100% AI generated on GPTZero, and they also fail the gut test.
after dealing with LLMs for a while, you just know.
>It is essential for property owners in Spain to be proactive in protecting their assets against potential squatting. This includes ensuring that properties are properly secured, regularly monitored, and that any signs of illegal occupation are promptly addressed with legal action. For squatters, it is important to be aware of the legal risks associated with occupying a property without consent, as well as the potential social and ethical considerations of such actions.
just this paragraph alone is as blatant as misshapen fingers and distorted text in AI-generated images.
I'm 99% sure the article was originally written in Spanish and then (either by human or machine), translated to English, as Idealista is a Spanish company.
Jumping to the conclusion that a LLM has written it, when you don't even seem to understand the context, seems really rash. But then this is HN, so you're forgiven.
