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

idealista.com

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

#231

Post by spaniard89277 »

misja111 wrote: post #158
diggan wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 "t…

Really that won't help. These kind of regulations have been tried in so many countries before and the result is always the same: cap the rents => landlords will take houses from the markets and sell them instead => there will be a shortage of properties for rent so finding them will be very hard, and the few landlords left will be extremely selective when choosing from the many candidates. What does help: increase th…

Increasing supply won't work with places where the demand is virtually infinite. You have to cut the demand somehow, and in the case of Spain it means preventing foreigners to access such stock. That means public housing, or some law that creates a lot of friction.

Cheaper housing in Spain will lead to induced demand, because there's just too many people willing to move here.

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

#233

Post by veeti »

reify wrote: 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…

> They can only enter if you leave a window or door open for them to enter.

How is this not victim blaming? Next you'll tell me that a victim of sexual assault shouldn't have left their window open by wearing such a short dress, and they were asking for it anyway.

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

#234

Post by hnbad »

_jplc wrote: 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.

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.

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

#235

Post by pas »

xzjis wrote: 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 going up ... so the system is completely neglecting to care about pricing out incumbents.)

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/market-rate-housing-will-make-...

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

#236

Post by abyssin »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #172
alexpc201 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not what happened a few meters from my home in a completely closed apartment. The "squatters" broke the first-floor window to enter, the Mossos took 15 minutes to arrive and did absolutely nothing. They have been there for six months, they already changed the front door, and the owner cannot get them out.

Can the owner hire thugs to show up with baseball bats? I would do that, or do it myself with a ski mask.

In theory I bet it's an efficient option. But I'm curious about the risks and costs involved in dealing with such "services", and how easy it is to find reputable thugs.

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

#237

Post by AlunAlun »

matt-p wrote: 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 on the building owner even if it is occupied by squatters.

None of this diminishes the fact that housing is increasingly expensive in Spain, particularly in Madrid and Barcelona, and this is causing real problems.

But the situation is definitely more complicated than just ‘build more houses’.

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

#238

Post by pas »

matt-p wrote: 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?

Yes, building more housing would fix it.

Speeding up evictions would be important to unlock old buildings (people have quite some money sitting in them) and to improve them.

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

#239

Post by xzjis »

matt-p wrote: 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?

Yes, but housing market is a market, so for owners to have a ROI on their houses, the supply needs to be lower than the demand.

Usually the way governments "patch" this is by building social houses and apartments, but if you were building enough of them then people would rent or buy them instead of the other private ones. So, again, it would make home owners unhappy to not have their investment go up.

I don't know if it's the same in all countries, but in France, 3.5% of households own 50% of the homes rented by individuals. So it's not even a problem for people buying a home for themselves, or a second home as a passive income, but it's a problem because it's highly concentrated. And they're the ones who want to have their investment to go up, at any cost.

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

#240

Post by pas »

AlunAlun wrote: post #237
matt-p wrote: 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…

Ah, the squatters with Audis sounds newsworthy, is it something like this https://www.elmundo.es/madrid/2023/02/23/63f66cacfdddffa0b48... ?
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