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

I understand moderating discussion is extremely hard. I understand that it seems fair at face value for you to just enforce politeness and not enforce ideologies, but that's not actually possible. You are taking a side here, if you decide to censor me, and not the ideologies I'm arguing against.

I am not perfect and I should have been a bit more polite in some of the posts you link.

People post absolutely reprehensible opinions on this site, and a rational, reasonable response to those opinions is not politeness. The startup community is supportive of and participates in a lot of extremely harmful practices, and believes a lot of harmful ideologies. If espousing ideologies that are literally killing people is allowed by the guidelines, but pointing out how horrific those ideologies are isn't allowed by the guidelines, then the guidelines are effectively supporting those ideologies.

Take for example this post which you linked (I'm linking the post it was responding to):

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135978

The above post I 100% stand by. I think I said that about as politely as I think is possible; any more polite would be miscommunication.

If you consider that post a problem, I understand, but I'm not going to comply with that. If that's the case, please just delete my account and all my posts, and I won't attempt to create another account. I'd rather not be associated with a site that's protects reprehensible ideologies in the name of politeness.

> Criminals who were behind the bars for 20 years, just came out and have nothing to buy a house with.

Criminals who were behind bars for 20 years, just came out and have nothing to pay rent with either. This isn't logic.

We shouldn't be releasing people from prison with no way to house themselves because that's practically guaranteed to push them back into crime. Solutions to that unavoidably involve giving them housing in some way: if your solution gives them rent, all your solution does is add landlords as middlemen and ensure that criminals never become homeowners. Giving them housing that they can work to buy is a much better solution.

> Families moving to another city for 1-2 years because one of the parents found a lucrative job assignment (I literally have some extended family members in this situation).

Why can't they buy a house for 1-2 years? Why are you assuming that housing liquidity would remain just as bad as it is now, when rentals and speculation removing liquidity from the market?

> People who declared bankruptcy recently and cannot have any assets in their name by definition.

That's... not how bankruptcy works. Many bankruptcies do not result in homeowners losing their residences, because that's obviously bad, so there are options to not do that. You may not be able to buy a new one... but maybe that should change, i.e. if you're selling your house to buy a newer one, that should be allowed, even encouraged if you're downsizing.

> Grad students who are in a university town only for 1-2 years (I was one and I know dozens of my classmates who were in the similar situation).

See previous.

> and on and on. Society is just too complex to make everyone a homeowner. Lot of people need to rent.

Well, right now your examples just sound like lots of people are forced to rent by current systems which are designed to maintain rental properties as investments.

> > The reality is that while squatters might hold political beliefs, few people would choose to squat if they had other housing options

> Here in Seattle, time and time again, studies are done which show the majority of homeless, when offered shelter, turn it down and prefer to live on the streets. Which seems to completely contradict your claim that they would make use of housing options.

Shelters aren't homes.

Can they store their things there and reasonably expect they won't be stolen? Can they have pets? Can they have privacy?

Would you stay in a homeless shelter? I mean, come on. The fact that anyone at all says yes to staying in these places shows just how bad staying on the streets is.

> Sure, but does it not occur to them that property owners might be performing an important function such that a policy that causes most of them to leave landlording might worsen the situation of homeless people and other poor people?

Yes, actually, that did occur to me, and when I put any thought into it at all I realized it made no sense whatsoever.

Owning things is not performing any function whatsoever. Landlords are leeches on society who remove much-needed resources and provide nothing.

Before you make the tired "but they provide homes" argument: no, builders provide homes.

Before you make the tired "but they make repairs" argument: that's a handyman, and a handyman generally does a better job and is not paid anywhere near as much as a landlord.

Before you make the tired "but not everyone can own homes" argument: the reason not everyone can buy homes is that our entire housing structure is based around making short-term home ownership and home ownership for cheaper than rent impossible. If you remove landlords from the equation, those incentives go away.

> Suppose the government instituted a rule that applies to any game developer and in particular to the developer's office or whatever structure he likes to be inside when he is developing games or meeting with the other developers working on the same game. The rule says that if the game developer leaves his office and fails to hire a security guard to watch the property, then 72 hours after the game developer's departure, anyone (including career criminals) have a legal right to take over the office (even if the developer's office is his home). Wouldn't that curtail -- possibly severely -- the quantity and the quality of new games developed in whatever jurisdiction the rule applies to? Or at least raise the price of games (to cover the cost of the security guards and to compensate developers for the hassle) with the result that some of the consumers who used to be able to afford to buy video games are now priced out of the market?

We have an actual reality we can talk about, we don't need bizarre hypothetical scenarios.

Nobody is saying that squatting is the solution we want. What I am saying is that if you refuse to address the actual problem, i.e. you refuse to get rid of landlords, then you can't be surprised when people whose disfranchisement you support decide to find solutions you don't like.

> 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.

Or, maybe they're just homeless and using politics to feel better about what they have to do to get homes.

Let's face it, smoking weed has nothing to do with this conversation, it's just a way to discredit people.

> My solution to the lack of housing is to build more housing or having fewer people, it's that trivial and obvious.

"Having fewer people"? I have to say I'm pretty concerned about what policy decisions you think that entails.

Sadly, building more housing doesn't solve the problem. You have to build more housing and prevent it from being removed in the same way housing is currently removed from the market by landlords and speculators. And... where are you going to build it? Property rights apply to land too, right? And you're going to fund this... how? Progressive taxation?

Well, it turns out that when you start talking details, a lot of the people who are really concerned about property rights just happen to think all the things that would be necessarily to actually provide homes for the homeless are too expensive, too restrictive, etc. So when it comes down to it, they're for getting rid of the bad solution for homelessness (squatting) and providing no better solution, because their concern was never homelessness.

Ultimately, you're right: the solution to homelessness is homes. But, I'm frankly pretty cynical given decades of homeless policy which solves how homelessness affects rich people and doesn't solve homelessness. If your main concern about homeless people is that they're squatting, then I just don't trust that you're actually concerned with solving homelessness.

That's why I'd like to see homelessness solved first. Once that's solved, we can solve the squatting problem, if it even still exists. Because doing otherwise starts to sound like yet another attempt to sideline the issue of homelessness.