151–160 of 282 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not saying it has zero effect. I'm saying it's a misdirected effort that would cause them more harm than good. Spain isn't exactly in the fittest economic position. It needs to attract foreigners to cultivate its growth - hence their Beckham law and other benefits for foreigners. You can deter people from coming and see the country stagnate/go down, or you can actually match the demand and foreign dynamism, and u…
How does allowing *non-residents* to buy real estate help in attracting foreigners and cultivate growth?
Say they instead keep values artificially low so an EU resident can buy a property for cheap, and it stays cheap. What's the benefit?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So would you say it's fair game to blame "migrants" for crimes? After all, you can't steal something if you're not in a country, so letting someone into a country strictly increases the crime rate. Even if migrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the local population, unless it's exactly zero, it'll still increase the crime rate. edit: downvoters, I'm not actually endorsing blaming migrants. It's only used as an e…
Do crimes have a liquid market with supply and demand mechanics? If so, then sure, you can blame every criminal for x% of every crime, I guess.
>Even if the bureaucracy is the worst offender, every foreigner buying a house still results in 1 less house for Spaniards.
It's pretty clear that supply and demand isn't a consideration here, and the commenter is strictly focusing on the aspect that one house is being removed from the housing supply.
Blaming foreigners for housing prices is misdirected. The real culprit is slow bureaucracy & zoning laws making it impossibly slow to get a permit to build anything in both Spain and Portugal. Both of these countries for example have so many abandoned houses needing to be renovated, and so many foreigners coming in with money to do it - but they can never do it because you can't get a permit in literally forever... I…
No, that argument assumes you can only blame 1 thing at a time. Even if the bureaucracy is the worst offender, every foreigner buying a house still results in 1 less house for Spaniards. Sure, fix bureaucracy, but don't pretend foreign purchases have zero effect.
Even if it's just short term rentals, that means more affordable vacations and temporary housing for the domestic population.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
BC has already implemented actions to limit foreign ownership without them actively living in the residence. Probably more to be done though, but one needs to be careful about unintended consequences.
>without them actively living in the residence This seems like it would be a bit of a difficult thing to police as far as foreigners goes.
Anything to stop a non-EU resident owning an EU company that owns a Spanish home?
It's illegal according to European Union law so this is just one more lie by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. https://www.vozpopuli.com/economia/el-castigo-fiscal-a-los-c...
Is this firmly established or contended?
Article 63 of the Treaty of Lisbon [1] bans "all restrictions on the movement of capital between Member States and between Member States and third countries" [2].
To define "movement of capital," we must look to Annex I to Council Directive 88/361/EEC of 24 June 1988 [3]. It says "purchases of buildings and land and the construction of buildings by private persons for gain or personal use," including explicitly "investments in real estate on national territory by non-residents" counts. Looks clear cut!
That said, there appears to be a long history of challenging what constitutes a "restriction," because EU.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Functioning_of_t...
[2] https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/kslreuropeanlawblog/?tag=article-63-...
[3] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that argument assumes you can only blame 1 thing at a time. Even if the bureaucracy is the worst offender, every foreigner buying a house still results in 1 less house for Spaniards. Sure, fix bureaucracy, but don't pretend foreign purchases have zero effect.
So would you say it's fair game to blame "migrants" for crimes? After all, you can't steal something if you're not in a country, so letting someone into a country strictly increases the crime rate. Even if migrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the local population, unless it's exactly zero, it'll still increase the crime rate. edit: downvoters, I'm not actually endorsing blaming migrants. It's only used as an e…
But that assumes you do not count the person who commit the crime as part of the population count.
In this example, “crime per capita” goes down if they commit crime below the average crime rate of population before they joined that population.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not saying it has zero effect. I'm saying it's a misdirected effort that would cause them more harm than good. Spain isn't exactly in the fittest economic position. It needs to attract foreigners to cultivate its growth - hence their Beckham law and other benefits for foreigners. You can deter people from coming and see the country stagnate/go down, or you can actually match the demand and foreign dynamism, and u…
How does allowing *non-residents* to buy real estate help in attracting foreigners and cultivate growth?
Besides, if foreigners are investing solely to speculate - if they did fix the supply constraints, the opportunity for speculation would greatly decrease. It's only an attractive investment because the supply is so finite.
Blaming foreigners for housing prices is misdirected. The real culprit is slow bureaucracy & zoning laws making it impossibly slow to get a permit to build anything in both Spain and Portugal. Both of these countries for example have so many abandoned houses needing to be renovated, and so many foreigners coming in with money to do it - but they can never do it because you can't get a permit in literally forever... I…
No, that argument assumes you can only blame 1 thing at a time. Even if the bureaucracy is the worst offender, every foreigner buying a house still results in 1 less house for Spaniards. Sure, fix bureaucracy, but don't pretend foreign purchases have zero effect.
In a very limited scope, sure. What that foreign capital also does is lower risk and thus capital costs for development and improvement. (In the event of a limited crisis, for lenders as well.) Whether the net effect goes one way or another is more complicated than what you describe.
Put another way, if foreigners could only buy unbuilt units, would you still say they're resulting in fewer houses for Spaniards? Do the countries shunned by foreign investors have affordable housing?
Blaming foreigners for housing prices is misdirected. The real culprit is slow bureaucracy & zoning laws making it impossibly slow to get a permit to build anything in both Spain and Portugal. Both of these countries for example have so many abandoned houses needing to be renovated, and so many foreigners coming in with money to do it - but they can never do it because you can't get a permit in literally forever... I…
I imagine that if a bunch of rich people decided to treat Spanish homes like stocks (holding and flipping) it would be pretty easy to get high prices and bubbles. Doesn't it follow from suppy and demand?
>Increase the supply, and the prices will go down.
what's wrong with tackling both demand and supply. Why shouldn't spain do both - build more homes to tackle supply while also curbing foreign home ownership to tackle infalted demand