Live data from Hacker News

Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem

idealista.com

241–250 of 930 posts

Re: Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem

#241
post #165

Idealista and all the real estate companies are the morons feeding the problem by putting the country for rent. They’re the reason people can’t afford a house and we have to talk about okupas in the first place.

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,…

> 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.

Re: Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem

#242
post #221

Can we establish that the squatters are doing this out of economic necessity and not to "profit" (e.g can't afford to rent or own someplace else)? I imagine so as living with no security in an abandoned building with no utilities seems pretty desperate, sub-optimal and sad. If we can then realistically the root cause to this is lack of housing supply. "Just build more f**ing houses" would fix this no?

Spanish here. I've been to many homes occupied by squatters due to the nature of my voluntary service for quite some years.

The people you seem to be describing just applies for a tiny proportion of the actual landscape of squatting in Spain. So your sentence is partly true, but nowadays as the situation becomes chronic, most people just do it because it is convenient for them

Believe me when I say that I've been tasked to helping "homeless" people and once I got closer, some of them were begging in the streets, making +300€ on a good day. I was speechless the first day that I heard about it.

Re: Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem

#243
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But again, you talk about usurpation or trespassing? And even in that case, the data is the data: the rest is speculation.

The data you have is the data you have but not necessarily the ground truth. See, for example, San Francisco shoplifting statistics.

I agree that it may not be 100% accurate, but probably correlated with the truth and directionally accurate. If you discard it, what do you have? Anecdotes? The media narratives?

Re: Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem

#244
post #235
post #232

I have a very simple way to avoid squatters to squat in Spain, or any country in the world: stop making housing a market. If it's a market, then supply and demand applies. So, for your house to gain value, you need to have a supply inferior to the demand.

Even making it a proper market would help! The problem is that people in general are very averse to changes, and cities are stuck in a very bad policy pit. (Building is hard, but even when finally a project is greenlit it barely moves the needle, adding supply is not happening fast enough because there's this fear of high buildings. And, on the other hand, there's no quota or lottery for moving, which means prices go…

I don't see how the housing market could ever be less exploitative than the healthcare market given that you literally need a place to live the same way you need to not die and that there's more money in building extremely expensive housing and hoping it sells than building affordable housing and just about breaking even.

Re: Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem

#245
post #84

Squatters cannot break into your home and take residence. They can only enter if you leave a window or door open for them to enter. If they break-in that is a criminal offence and the police will treat it as a buglary and arrest those in the property. I used to squat here on Airstrip One in my twenties when I was homeless. We did not squat in homes where people lived, We squatted in empty properties. The utilities co…

[flagged]

> I bet you'd see something wrong if I went into your wallet and took some cash, after all you're not using it right now

Sure, but that doesn't demonstrate inconsistency, that only demonstrates that different things are different and we can feel differently about them. The interesting response would not be the implied accusation of hypocrisy in the way you posed your question but rather simply "Why do you feel differently about this scenario?".

Re: Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem

#246
post #33

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…

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.

This reply is very true and should be higher up.

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'.

Re: Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem

#247
post #165

Idealista and all the real estate companies are the morons feeding the problem by putting the country for rent. They’re the reason people can’t afford a house and we have to talk about okupas in the first place.

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,…

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.

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)

Re: Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem

#248
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like this yes. But the devil will be in the details. "pay 1% of the buildings value as property tax each year" A old rotten building might be worth just 10000€. And 100 € a year ain't that much. One would have to tax the property - and who will set up the rates in a fair way in a process that is not vulnerable to corruption?

And old rotten building sitting anywhere in a city is worth way more than 10.000€. Even if the building is not in good shape, the land is still valuable.

Right, and then the 80yo people living in a centenary house in a gentrified neighborhood suddenly get a 10x tax increase because the next door building got sold to be remodeled as a luxury condo, and drove property values through the roof.

That's good, because if they can't pay, their house is up for remodelling too. /sarcasm

Re: Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem

#249
post #141

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 priva…

"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" So, there is an 'okupas problem'. You could have saved the whole first paragraph.

Is a feature, not a bug.

Re: Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem

#250
post #221

Can we establish that the squatters are doing this out of economic necessity and not to "profit" (e.g can't afford to rent or own someplace else)? I imagine so as living with no security in an abandoned building with no utilities seems pretty desperate, sub-optimal and sad. If we can then realistically the root cause to this is lack of housing supply. "Just build more f**ing houses" would fix this no?

No, we can’t explicitly establish that. It is of course true that many squatters do so out of financial necessity, but others do so for other reasons: a lifestyle choice, a political choice, or plain freeloading and financial gain - in a squat in my village there were people living there with full time jobs and driving brand new Audis! I would add further that the responsibility of paying the utilities and tax falls…

I wonder what the split is here? Lets say 1000 squatters how many can afford housing but choose not to?

Of those who can afford to rent how many have jobs and cars but do this so they can save for a house deposit rather than all 60% of thier income going to housing?

I'm not "pro squatter" or anything I just think you could solve 90% of this problem if you built much more housing.

Post reply on HN