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?
in some cases yes
but in some cases it's also clearly not the case
and there are likely many ideologically driven cases too
> with no security in an abandoned building with no utilities seems pretty desperate, sub-optimal and sad.
you would think so but I have seen enough cases of people willingly abandon such things in context of ideologically driven life styles (not in Spain, but anyway)
> realistically the root cause to this is lack of housing supply. "Just build more f*ing houses" would fix this no?
no if anything the root cause is the lack of affordable housing, and that is much harder to fix as building housing is expensive so providing affordable housing is much harder then just increasing housing
worse the problem also often isn't affordable housing in general, but affordable housing in the right place e.g. where you can reach your workplace with public transportation or even just something as simple as housing where you can reach a supermarket with the means available to you
and a problem for that is affordable land to build on houses, which is sparse due to two reasons 1. most land is already in use 2. a lot of shitty money economy leading to stuff like land banks and similar, basically a small number of very wealthy entities (not necessary people) have bought a lot of the land and housing (directly or through proxy) and have absolutely no reason or insensitive to provide reasonable affordable housing. In some cases they don't even have the insensitive to use the land housing at all, i.e. they would prefer to not rent the apartments they own and just keep them around as monetary investment.
In general this isn't a Spanish problem it's a problem in most (all?) countries which have a banking/investment/money market roughly similar to the US when it comes to property. Sure each country has their own country specific problems on top of it (e.g. zoning laws in the US) but the problem by itself is much more deep rooted. And if you want to starkly oversimplify it the problem points back to a few siphoning of the wealth of the many in increasingly sophisticated ways. As long as the many generate enough new wealth this can work (like during economic boom times) but that hasn't been the case for a long time with especially "small family cooperation becoming increasingly economically impossible" playing a big role. At the same time we where for a long time able through technologically advancement (or producing in china) to still keep a high living standard and most of the basic needs for many people covered. So the consequences where limited. But that doesn't help with apartments especially given of property ownership has become a really nice and desired way to keep money somewhat save during turbulent times which combined with speculative investment in housing has driving prices up beyond what would normally have happened in many regions in the world.