Doesn’t Spain already have a problem with people invading a home and not leaving?
Not really, no. It’s a minor issue overblown by the far-right to protect interests of landlords.
Why are they sitting empty in the first place?
I’m sure the problem is overblown unless someone else has hard numbers.
You don’t need for it to happen a lot for it to be a problem. It just needs to be common enough.
It only needs to happen once in a town, the next day of the news breaking, the home security guys make bank by selling home alarms. Because once they’re in for a relatively short period of time, it’s basically impossible to throw them out. So it’s worth it to pay a subscription in order to go on vacation and have the assurance that you’ll have a home when you come back.
A single instance of a break in generates millions of economic damage on just alarm subscriptions.
That being said. It’s a different problem.
It’s not the same kicking a person from a home they’ve been legally living in for years, and kicking someone that illegally broke into another person’s house for a few days.
Different problems can have different solutions
Saw a report on TV. There are even specialized companies now who remove the occupiers. If there’s a business, it’s probably a big enough problem for the Spaniards.
I had one neighbour that refused to stop playing music until 4-7am. He was evicted after months of complaints. He probably would’ve disappeared if evictions were banned.
In Holland we have government workers (not police thank fuck) who will handle noise complaints and issue warnings and then fines.
Pretty awesome to see that many people stand up for one. Good on them 🙌
yeah the things that are possible when society isn’t rotten to its core. At least I assume that’s the reason, one can only dream
As someone who is not planning to be a landlord ever really, I say yay, fuck those guys. Mostly the big corpos.
But, I wonder if this isn’t going to backfire in some way. If those companies have no way to throw you out, and there can be valid reasons for that still, I would assume they are going to be much more of a pain in the ass when you apply for an apartment. Can you at that time show them that you are not going to cause unreasonable trouble? No? Well you are not getting that apartment then, they’ll find someone else.
I understand a ban on eviction for the most vulnerable people like the elderly and better regulation predatory practices, but a total ban is hard to understand. How do they prevent the obvious abuses this could lead to? What do small owners do when they can’t repay their loan because the renter stopped paying and can’t be evicted?
Owning a property just to rent it shouldn’t be the most popular aspiration to move up in the world. It creates a divided society of renters who can’t make ends meet and landlords who constantly need to worry about their investment backfiring.
The problem is greed not owning a house you don’t live in.
I can go to my country’s capital, point to a window and guess, with a fair degree of confidence, that, if rented, the property has an exploitative rent value. And next I can guess if the property is privately owned or is property of a company.
My grandparents, like many people of their generation, owned their house and another flat in the same building, which they rented for decades to the same family. The rent was updated, yearly, and in accordance to legal impositions. It allowed for my parents to slightly supplement their meager retirement and the other couple to live in decent conditions until they both passed away.
In the exact same building, another person bought an empty flat, renovated it and put it up for rent by nearly six times the value my grandparents charged, needlessly. Needlessly to say, the house had a very high turn rate, with the average tennant being there less than one year. And often leaving the property less than well maintained.
The problem is taxation. Who owns has to be adequately taxed by their income and property. That money needs to be syphoned back into social services, like healthcare, public transportation, education and, yes, even public housing. It must not be allowed to pile and be used to amass assets to further enrich those who already have more than enough.
There will always be people who are uninterested in owning. Like students away from home, people and professionals that move constantly or tjose who can’t be bothered by having to deal with property taxes and other expenses related to owning and maintaning a house. And those houses have to be maintained by someone. The state is not and should not be expected to maintain all that property because that property is a source of income for the state itself. What the state should and must do is curb the unchecked amassing of wealth.
That’s a fine sentiment about people not wanting to own, but for some reason I know that students would prefer to own a place to live in, if they could afford one. Same with the rest of groups, if it didn’t cost that much people would buy, maintain, and sell for about the same price when moving
You have to introduce me to a student wanting to buy. It’s not an age where the large majority is thinking to settle down. I won’t go into the having the means for it.
Buying a house implies putting down roots. The groups I’ve mentioned are the closest there are today to nomads. Makes no sense for a person that knows they will be spending from a few months to perhaps a year or two in a place to buy.
I guess it does come as a surprise that some people go to study in a place they want to live in?
It truly does. I was of college age once and the main objective, after getting in college, was to go to a college far enough to be free of the family shadow. Whatever came after, was to be thought about later on.
I lived in the capital then and a good portion of the students going to college there came from the rest of the country. The locals, unless they were aiming for a specific degree in a specific college, would go away if possible. The start of the college year had an unofficial nickname: The Great Migration. Small towns and villages inland would be devoided of young people and the smaller urban areas with campus got flooded with new faces.
But college was a chance to go or get away. Not a plan for life.
It shouldn’t be but it’s a reality that is not offered better solutions as far as this article explains.
Presumably they’ll lose the home they can’t afford on their own. The banks will learn not to grant mortgage loans based on theoretical future income without an employment contract.
The options I see are as follows: 1) all residents are responsible for paying rent/mortgage and can be evicted for nonpayment 2) only vulnerable residents are protected from eviction 3) property owners are responsible for paying their mortgages and can have their property repossessed for nonpayment 4) mortgage issuers have to eat it if owners can’t get rent from tenants.
Worst case in 1: people end up homeless. Worst case in 2: landlords stop renting to vulnerable people or charge them extra as insurance against future nonpayment. Worst case in 3: landlords who took out loans for properties they don’t live in based on future rent income they now can’t collect have those properties repossessed. Worst case in 4: I guess the banks could fail, but more likely they suffer some proportionally minor losses and then get more selective about granting mortgage loans dependent on rental income.
Of these, it looks like numbers three and four have consequences much less damaging to the most vulnerable people in society.
I’ve been told by friends from Spain that this was already like this?
Let’s say foreigners buy a house or a flat and they use it as a summer home. Someone breaks in while you are away and then you can’t kick them out.
Anyone from Spain can confirm if this is true?
Quick summary: of you live legally, you have papers that say under what conditions you must leave. If you enter illegally, there’s nothing so you need to go to court, which is slow. And during that time, you can’t do anything (not even stop the electricity contract) as the ones living there are “innocent until proven guilty of living there without permission”
wow
but isn’t the lack of legal papers already illegal? at least for the tax reasons
I mean I get that the courts take time, I’m just wondering how can this work.
does this work with someones car?
Not an expert, please search in case of doubt. However, three way I understand is that police can’t remove somebody from “their home”, and they can’t decide who is the rightful owner of the house. Hence, you need a lawsuit.
Wouldn’t work with a stolen car because even on similar circumstances it’s not the same to tell somebody to step out of a car and to leave their home. Also there’s some sort of constitutional right that establish that if you live somewhere long enough, it’s your home. So of you go to the store and somebody gets into your home, it’s easy, but if it’s a holiday home or you are out in vacation, then it becomes harder.
Reiterating: not a lawyer, this is what I’ve learnt just living here.
Yes but this is incredibly rare issue and it’s just talked about because it sounds bad. Most cases are simply people unable to pay the rent for whatever reason. Some people take advantage of the eviction bans and simply stop paying but I don’t know that the % is. Probably also tiny.
I don’t know about Spain, but this is 100% true for France, it’s even worse in there, if someone squats your only house and you don’t fill a complaint before 48h from the breaking in. The squatter got to stay in it.
It’s nuts.
Serves them right using a utility as speculation then exploiting the housing shortage they cause by increasing the BTL market
How do they prevent the obvious abuses this could lead to?
Oh man, can you even imagine?
Every home being occupied and the people who live there keeping their own money instead of giving it to a wealthy guy who keeps several homes unoccupied year-round just so he can live in each one a few days a year?
That would be awful.
Don’t be silly, this is not about unoccupied homes. This is about two things:
- corporations buying out properties with tenants and kicking them out to turn them into AirBnB or demolish and build more expensive apartments
- people that stop paying rent
First case is a somewhat valid reason for eviction ban. Second is abuse oce is talking about.
In both cases it will lead to lowering the number of properties on the market because investors will back out and less homes will be built and home owners will simply remove their properties from market not to risk paying the bills of someone living in their property for free. This already happened in Catalonia and Pais Vasco - they put limits on rents and people removed their apartments from the market.
There are some reasonable things in the those bills but the eviction ban is not one of them.
You could tax vacant units and have the tax increase exponentially the longer the unit is held vacant.
Yep, they could. AFAIK there’s already a law in Spain that allows municipal governments to increase property tax on owner that have more than 5 apartments by up to 100% or something. I have no idea if it’s actually used.
The problem is that many villages and small towns are depopulating and you have plenty of empty properties there that simply no one wants to buy. There are no jobs in those towns so people are migrating to bigger cities and the apartments in those cities are not built fast enough to absorb the increase.
So the central government lets local governments to decide if they want to implement those policies or not (because they should know best if it’s needed) and a lot of local governments in bigger cities are right wing so they choose not to. The other issue is that the current governments needs Catalans to pass any laws and Catalan parties traditionally protect the rights of property owners. It was clear from day 1 that this coalition is too fragmented to govern effectively. They basically spent the last couple of years fighting for survival instead of governing.
They basically spent the last couple of years fighting for survival instead of governing.
I’m a bit afraid this will cause a rise in popularity of the [far] right, and an even worse situation in the future :(
It already did.
Indeed, there needs to be something to motivate investing in homes to build. There are solutions of course, like the state guaranteeing the rent or the state funding the homes. But it’s not guaranteed that heavy state intervention is better for the average people than a correctly regulated market, despite what our far left comrades believe here.
I would love to see a big push for public housing and coops. I think nice thing to do would be to give coops priority over commercial projects on every step of the approval process and create platforms to make it easier for people to organize and execute such projects. There should also be a big push for social housing. Nothing like that was done. Some of the measures they are proposing would be great in a healthy housing market (automatic renewals and protections for long term renters) but in a crisis they will only help short term and make things even worse later. The left in Spain shows again they are just a placeholder government occupying the spot so that the right can’t govern. They are not able to implement anything useful, even if they had a valid plan.
Sometimes people own 1-2 houses. They rent when on work contract expecting to come home to live in that place 1yr later.
Or they inherited, the kid is only 16, so they’re renting for 2-4 yrs until the kid is old enough to take possession.
Or, they’re like, maybe I can make a dent in my monthlies with this new house, rents being $500-$1k over mortgage for a $400k house back when interest rates were good.
You act like everyone who chooses to rent space to someone needing a place to live is an asshole. You don’t know that. Many are just working class who lucked into an extra house. Life isn’t charity. That house could be inheritance money in the shape of a house.
You are in no way entitled to someone else’s inheritance money.
Saying stuff like this is punching your neighbors instead of punching up. Which is easier, but not cool to do. People just trying to get by here, maybe get ahead by half a step, and lack of houses isn’t a working class responsibility, that responsibility rests at a higher level.
I act like nothing.
I drive through the same two intersections every day. When I was a kid, I lived in a different neighborhood, and my family would drive through those same intersections. I never saw a homeless person in those intersections, not once.
Now, I see not just one, but four people at those two intersections. Not the same people every day. DIFFERENT people every day. AT LEAST four. Sometimes couples(making it five or six). Sometimes people I think might be young enough to be kids.
And if I drive about half a mile north, there’s another intersection. And there will be a different four there. And if I drive a half a mile east, there will be another four there. And if I drive about a mile south, there will be a whole neighborhood of people living on the street. When I drive through that neighborhood, the streets will CONSTANTLY have at a minimum 20-30 different homeless people on the streets throughout the day. And that breaks my heart already, but that USED TO be my neigborhood.
So I can see the buildings that I used to see every day, but they look VERY different now. When I was growing up there, I knew there were homeless people, but I never saw any unless my family would drive down by a charity on the other side of town, and at that point, I never seemed to see more than one.
But now, whole areas of town are literally full of them. I live in a fairly upscale neigborhood now, but the one I lived in as a child is full of homeless people, and there is rotting furniture and piles of clothes on the street. There are large camps full of more people than I can count as I go by.
I can’t even count how often I feel the need to bring them food and leftovers.
There are two people I see very often. They’re separate, not together, and they’re not in the same place. But they have really distinct looks. Both of them are white, and both of them have skin which looks charred to a crisp. The man doesn’t even have clothes. He walks around in nothing but shorts, and is among the huge groups of homeless people I see. I don’t mean I see many people. I see literally hordes.
And I used to be someone involved with landlords. I helped around properties, and helped build homes with Habitat For Humanity.
I actually reached this conclusion when one of the landlords I worked with told me that he was selling his properties because he realized he no longer thought it was ethical to own multiple properties when so many people were starving.
Personally, I have never lived in a home that I owned. Not one day in my life. And I am in my 40s. And I grew up in a family that was deeply poor. One of my strongest memories is asking my mom for food and saying I’m hungry, and having her respond “I know, but find something around the house. We can’t go shopping until next Friday.” I can’t tell you how often it was bread and butter. Or a single potato. Or nothing. Very often, it was nothing.
So it’s very hard for me to have sympathy for anyone who has multiple homes when there are so many people who don’t even have the ability to go inside to get away from the sun, or to get a glass of water if they’re thirsty.
Dont let perfect be the enemy of good. Im sure they will keep amending these laws over time.
They should bring those amendments at the same time if they have ideas to prevent a collapse of offer.
If evictions are banned, why would they care? You can’t get evicted from your own home if there’s no evictions so… 🤷♀️
If there is no guarantee that they can recover their investment, people will not invest to build homes anymore and their will be less or worse homes to live in.
I don’t see that as a bad thing. The thing you get for building a house is a house to live in. Even in our nightmarish housing paradigm, people volunteer for things like habitat for humanity to help their neighbors have a place to live. In a world where housing is not a financial investment and people can’t be unwillingly displaced, I would expect only more desire to build homes that people actually want to live in.
My primary financial security lies in my home equity and I would happily end evictions even if it cost me all of it.
Some people don’t have the capital or don’t want to spend the capital to build a house and need places to rent. How do we get those houses built? Massive state intervention? Not sure it will do better than a regulated market, but why not. Now where is the law for it that should be accompanying this potential collapse of private offering?
Won’t somebody think of the poor small owners who are exploiting other people’s work and extracting their money without doing anything, just because they were there first to buy the place so nobody else could own it?
Small owners worked to save enough so they could make an investment that gives them a bit of a safety net for their future, and maybe take some freedom to rent another place if they need to live somewhere else for a while. I’m not talking about the ones who inherit enough wealth to do that without working.
Ah, yes, their investiment is harvesting a poorer person’s salary, while killing their chance at ownership. Totally fair.
So I assume you never had to rent a property. You left your parents’ home and bought your apartment straight away? Well, I didn’t. I rented apartments for many years before I was able to buy something. And all the apartments I rented were simply a second property someone had. Yes, you can design a better system but it would take decades to change. For now, we need people to rent out their spare properties and this bill will make it harder.
Wish this could happen in the united states
A roughly 10% yearly increase in both house prices and rental prices is insane… can someone explain why? The article only talks about a housing shortage but what drives it? It’s not like Spain’s population has been increasing
What do you mean it hasn’t been increasing? According to wikipedia https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demografía_de_España
It has been at 46.X million from 2009 to 2019. Now it is at 49M
So in 6 years it has increased 3x of what it did last decade.
Spain population in general is probably not increasing, but people move from less popular areas to more popular areas, where it’s easier to find a job or study
The problem starts and ends on rich people.
G-r-e-e-d.
Living cost are rising faster than wages. We are nearing the „you will own nothing and be happy“-paradig aka. end-stage captialism.
Come to Czechia, esp., Prague.
