9 ms·

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,

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. [1] https://www.dw.com/en/mallorca-property-boom-stirs-sellout-fears-among-islanders/a-64344807 https://www.dw.com/en/mallorca-property-boom-stirs-sellout-f...

solids 2y ago
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…
- misja111 2y ago
  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.
  - ghostDancer 2y ago
    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.
    - misja111 2y ago
      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.
      - kerkeslager 2y ago
        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.
        roca 2y ago
        A tax on empty properties can't be passed onto renters.
        kjkjadksj 2y ago
        It is when its passed onto their landlord when a new landlord buys it to rent it out.
        dragonwriter 2y ago
        No, its not. And if you think about the effect of the tax on supply and demand you’ll see why pretty quickly, I would think.
      - winterismute 2y ago
        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...
- kerkeslager 2y ago
  Wait so lack of legal security reduced supply... by what mechanism? How do you think this works?
  - HDThoreaun 2y ago
    Why would you build new housing when someone can waltz in and change the locks and youre shit out of luck?
    - kerkeslager 2y ago
      That logic also applies to demand. Why would you buy a house if someone can waltz in and... It's very much not in evidence that this is affecting supply more than demand.
      - RestlessMind 2y ago
        > 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).
        kerkeslager 2y ago
        > Why would you build new housing when someone can waltz in and change the locks and youre shit out of luck? The clear answer is you'd build one when you know how to handle squatters. > If so, let's pull that ladder away from everyone including the rich Yes! > not everyone can be a homeowner Why?
jjav 2y ago
> But we are missing half the story if we don't consider the other end of the spectrum No, not really. Theft is not the answer. Consider laws restricting how many houses a person can own, or maybe an increasing property tax on each unit. These are good solutions. Condoning theft has no other side to the story, it's always wrong.
- kerkeslager 2y ago
  > No, not really. Theft is not the answer. 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.
  - jjav 2y ago
    > I'd prefer they stole from the people actually causing the problem, the rich who buy up housing and make it unaffordable. If you actually want to protest the system this is what you should do. Go occupy the vacant summer homes of rich politicians and CEOs.
    - kerkeslager 2y ago
      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.
chipdart 2y ago
> 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.
- southerntofu 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - chipdart 2y ago
    > It's about a landlord who's too greedy (...) You're letting your antisocial bias show. 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.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    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).
Aurornis 2y ago
> 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.
kjkjadksj 2y ago
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.
pier25 2y ago
I'm from Mallorca but I don't own property there. Yes the situation is bad but nothing justifies squatting. And the okupas have been an issue for decades now, way before Airbnb existed.
zxspectrum1982 2y ago
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.

solids 2y ago

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…

misja111 2y ago
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.
- ghostDancer 2y ago
  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.
  - misja111 2y ago
    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.
    - kerkeslager 2y ago
      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.
      - roca 2y ago
        A tax on empty properties can't be passed onto renters.
        kjkjadksj 2y ago
        It is when its passed onto their landlord when a new landlord buys it to rent it out.
        dragonwriter 2y ago
        No, its not. And if you think about the effect of the tax on supply and demand you’ll see why pretty quickly, I would think.
    - winterismute 2y ago
      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...
kerkeslager 2y ago
Wait so lack of legal security reduced supply... by what mechanism? How do you think this works?
- HDThoreaun 2y ago
  Why would you build new housing when someone can waltz in and change the locks and youre shit out of luck?
  - kerkeslager 2y ago
    That logic also applies to demand. Why would you buy a house if someone can waltz in and... It's very much not in evidence that this is affecting supply more than demand.
    - RestlessMind 2y ago
      > 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).
      - kerkeslager 2y ago
        > Why would you build new housing when someone can waltz in and change the locks and youre shit out of luck? The clear answer is you'd build one when you know how to handle squatters. > If so, let's pull that ladder away from everyone including the rich Yes! > not everyone can be a homeowner Why?

jjav 2y ago

> But we are missing half the story if we don't consider the other end of the spectrum No, not really. Theft is not the answer. Consider laws restricting how many houses a person can own, or maybe an increasing property tax on each unit. These are good solutions. Condoning theft has no other side to the story, it's always wrong.

kerkeslager 2y ago
> No, not really. Theft is not the answer. 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.
- jjav 2y ago
  > I'd prefer they stole from the people actually causing the problem, the rich who buy up housing and make it unaffordable. If you actually want to protest the system this is what you should do. Go occupy the vacant summer homes of rich politicians and CEOs.
  - kerkeslager 2y ago
    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.

chipdart 2y ago

> 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.

southerntofu 2y ago
[flagged]
- chipdart 2y ago
  > It's about a landlord who's too greedy (...) You're letting your antisocial bias show. 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.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  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).

Aurornis 2y ago

> 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.

kjkjadksj 2y ago

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.

pier25 2y ago

I'm from Mallorca but I don't own property there. Yes the situation is bad but nothing justifies squatting. And the okupas have been an issue for decades now, way before Airbnb existed.

zxspectrum1982 2y ago

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.