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.
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.
> 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??
> 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.
> 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.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 :)
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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).
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 :)
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I couldn't agree more. My parents have an "okupa" and they can't even go talk to her or she can sue them. They also have to pay for her electricity or water, otherwise, she has the right to sue them for "endangerment".
And she wasn't even a tenant. She has been there for 4 months now, and the judicial system simply works against home owners, it's crazy!
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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-f...
Regardless of who benefits from Lawlessness, it always ends up destroying the society
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.
wouldnt have happened to me
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.
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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.
https://maldita.es/malditateexplica/20221026/datos-okupacion... has the actual data (in Spanish):
* 10-17k cases of occupation annually (rising until 2021, but down in 2022 and further down in 2023: https://www.cronista.com/espana/actualidad-es/adios-okupas-c...)
* 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.
* Note that a personally used holiday homes are also considered as a person's residence, so any occupation there would also come into that first 5%: https://www.ocu.org/fincas-y-casas/gestion/gestion-patrimoni....
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).
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 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.
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).
Mother of our kid owned a house in Spain. Two houses next to her house was an "okupa" but...
They were gypsies. They broke in and two first thing they did:
They were not nice people.Took six months but they eventually got kicked out.
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.
Someone could be a landlord and only be taking home like $50k per year as "salary". You're saying that person is not middle-class?
Also, apparently the construction of new housing and maintenance of older stock.
So that we would be living in abandoned ruins and huts in a few decades if they got their way...
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.
My solution to the lack of housing is to build more housing or having fewer people, it's that trivial and obvious.
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.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/homes-for-sale-affordable-housi...
So yes, they actually do serve a robin-hood purpose.
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.
This is such an obviously false premise that I don’t understand how you even arrived at it.
Real estate is expensive to maintain. You don’t let real estate appreciate in value by letting it “rot”.
If you think the US housing crisis is due to investors letting houses “rot” then you clearly don’t understand the situation at all.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
> 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40586929
It's not a black & white issue where one side is obviously right and the other one is obviously wrong.
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 have keys to the place. There's no written contract, no money changing hands.
Show up with some muscle, chuck the losers out on the street and change the locks.
What are they going to do, take you to court?
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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.
A shady landlord will just claim the tenants are squatters.
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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...)
[1] https://maldita.es/malditateexplica/20221026/datos-okupacion...
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.
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)
- Renting: In Madrid, on average 62% of salary before taxes goes to renting; 58% in Barcelona (https://www.fotocasa.es/fotocasa-life/alquiler/los-espanoles...) (how is that even feasible? well, young people end up just renting a room)
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).
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 :)
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.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/homes-for-sale-affordable-housi...
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.
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.
https://www.iberian.property/news/residential/blackrock-busc....
Same in the US, it's all fascist discourse shaping in preparation for things getting much worse.
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.
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.
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.
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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 !
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They’re the reason people can’t afford a house and we have to talk about okupas in the first place.
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.
Hungary: more than 2k new houses, and there are more than 5k new apartments to buy. https://ingatlan.com/lista/elado+haz+uj-epitesu
In Madrid province, there are around 700 new houses+apartments to buy https://www.idealista.com/en/venta-obranueva/madrid-provinci...
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)
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.
It's not like politicians and real estate developers are a separate group anyway.
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.
You do know that it's run by a VC company? Not particularly surprising that most most people generally support the protection of property rights
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.
So, there is an 'okupas problem'. You could have saved the whole first paragraph.
Considering how many desokupa services exist I'd say it's a real problem.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I would have thought there is a clear distinction between owner occupied housing and empty property?
What part are you saying is not true and if so what area?
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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.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/homes-for-sale-affordable-housi...
- Holidays lets - Standard lets where there's a changeover - Properties for sale - Your own home when you're on holiday
Your comment is completely disconnected from the reality of the situation facing ordinary middle-class people.
Maybe you could argue that squatters need support but subsidising them is the role of the state, not a job for individual citizens.
I could offer some anecdotal evidence but that seems pointless. Especially when the stats speak for themselves. It's not just media hype.
And she wasn't even a tenant. She has been there for 4 months now, and the judicial system simply works against home owners, it's crazy!
https://tradingeconomics.com/spain/housing-startshttps://www.worldometers.info/world-population/spain-populat...
I expect people to be a bit more curious on Hacker news and drill a bit into shallow facts, everything has underlying reasons.
The biggest issue there is how shitty funds and speculators are screwing the market so normal people cannot buy a house.
There is no shortage of housing. There is a shortage of rentable affordable housing, due to an epidemic of greedy landlord accaparating the market.