How do they prevent the obvious abuses this could lead to?
Oh man, can you even imagine?
Every home being occupied and the people who live there keeping their own money instead of giving it to a wealthy guy who keeps several homes unoccupied year-round just so he can live in each one a few days a year?
Don’t be silly, this is not about unoccupied homes. This is about two things:
corporations buying out properties with tenants and kicking them out to turn them into AirBnB or demolish and build more expensive apartments
people that stop paying rent
First case is a somewhat valid reason for eviction ban. Second is abuse oce is talking about.
In both cases it will lead to lowering the number of properties on the market because investors will back out and less homes will be built and home owners will simply remove their properties from market not to risk paying the bills of someone living in their property for free. This already happened in Catalonia and Pais Vasco - they put limits on rents and people removed their apartments from the market.
There are some reasonable things in the those bills but the eviction ban is not one of them.
Yep, they could. AFAIK there’s already a law in Spain that allows municipal governments to increase property tax on owner that have more than 5 apartments by up to 100% or something. I have no idea if it’s actually used.
The problem is that many villages and small towns are depopulating and you have plenty of empty properties there that simply no one wants to buy. There are no jobs in those towns so people are migrating to bigger cities and the apartments in those cities are not built fast enough to absorb the increase.
So the central government lets local governments to decide if they want to implement those policies or not (because they should know best if it’s needed) and a lot of local governments in bigger cities are right wing so they choose not to. The other issue is that the current governments needs Catalans to pass any laws and Catalan parties traditionally protect the rights of property owners. It was clear from day 1 that this coalition is too fragmented to govern effectively. They basically spent the last couple of years fighting for survival instead of governing.
Indeed, there needs to be something to motivate investing in homes to build. There are solutions of course, like the state guaranteeing the rent or the state funding the homes. But it’s not guaranteed that heavy state intervention is better for the average people than a correctly regulated market, despite what our far left comrades believe here.
I would love to see a big push for public housing and coops. I think nice thing to do would be to give coops priority over commercial projects on every step of the approval process and create platforms to make it easier for people to organize and execute such projects. There should also be a big push for social housing. Nothing like that was done. Some of the measures they are proposing would be great in a healthy housing market (automatic renewals and protections for long term renters) but in a crisis they will only help short term and make things even worse later. The left in Spain shows again they are just a placeholder government occupying the spot so that the right can’t govern. They are not able to implement anything useful, even if they had a valid plan.
Sometimes people own 1-2 houses. They rent when on work contract expecting to come home to live in that place 1yr later.
Or they inherited, the kid is only 16, so they’re renting for 2-4 yrs until the kid is old enough to take possession.
Or, they’re like, maybe I can make a dent in my monthlies with this new house, rents being $500-$1k over mortgage for a $400k house back when interest rates were good.
You act like everyone who chooses to rent space to someone needing a place to live is an asshole. You don’t know that. Many are just working class who lucked into an extra house. Life isn’t charity. That house could be inheritance money in the shape of a house.
You are in no way entitled to someone else’s inheritance money.
Saying stuff like this is punching your neighbors instead of punching up. Which is easier, but not cool to do. People just trying to get by here, maybe get ahead by half a step, and lack of houses isn’t a working class responsibility, that responsibility rests at a higher level.
I drive through the same two intersections every day. When I was a kid, I lived in a different neighborhood, and my family would drive through those same intersections. I never saw a homeless person in those intersections, not once.
Now, I see not just one, but four people at those two intersections. Not the same people every day. DIFFERENT people every day. AT LEAST four. Sometimes couples(making it five or six). Sometimes people I think might be young enough to be kids.
And if I drive about half a mile north, there’s another intersection. And there will be a different four there. And if I drive a half a mile east, there will be another four there. And if I drive about a mile south, there will be a whole neighborhood of people living on the street. When I drive through that neighborhood, the streets will CONSTANTLY have at a minimum 20-30 different homeless people on the streets throughout the day. And that breaks my heart already, but that USED TO be my neigborhood.
So I can see the buildings that I used to see every day, but they look VERY different now. When I was growing up there, I knew there were homeless people, but I never saw any unless my family would drive down by a charity on the other side of town, and at that point, I never seemed to see more than one.
But now, whole areas of town are literally full of them. I live in a fairly upscale neigborhood now, but the one I lived in as a child is full of homeless people, and there is rotting furniture and piles of clothes on the street. There are large camps full of more people than I can count as I go by.
I can’t even count how often I feel the need to bring them food and leftovers.
There are two people I see very often. They’re separate, not together, and they’re not in the same place. But they have really distinct looks. Both of them are white, and both of them have skin which looks charred to a crisp. The man doesn’t even have clothes. He walks around in nothing but shorts, and is among the huge groups of homeless people I see. I don’t mean I see many people. I see literally hordes.
And I used to be someone involved with landlords. I helped around properties, and helped build homes with Habitat For Humanity.
I actually reached this conclusion when one of the landlords I worked with told me that he was selling his properties because he realized he no longer thought it was ethical to own multiple properties when so many people were starving.
Personally, I have never lived in a home that I owned. Not one day in my life. And I am in my 40s. And I grew up in a family that was deeply poor. One of my strongest memories is asking my mom for food and saying I’m hungry, and having her respond “I know, but find something around the house. We can’t go shopping until next Friday.” I can’t tell you how often it was bread and butter. Or a single potato. Or nothing. Very often, it was nothing.
So it’s very hard for me to have sympathy for anyone who has multiple homes when there are so many people who don’t even have the ability to go inside to get away from the sun, or to get a glass of water if they’re thirsty.
Oh man, can you even imagine?
Every home being occupied and the people who live there keeping their own money instead of giving it to a wealthy guy who keeps several homes unoccupied year-round just so he can live in each one a few days a year?
That would be awful.
Don’t be silly, this is not about unoccupied homes. This is about two things:
First case is a somewhat valid reason for eviction ban. Second is abuse oce is talking about.
In both cases it will lead to lowering the number of properties on the market because investors will back out and less homes will be built and home owners will simply remove their properties from market not to risk paying the bills of someone living in their property for free. This already happened in Catalonia and Pais Vasco - they put limits on rents and people removed their apartments from the market.
There are some reasonable things in the those bills but the eviction ban is not one of them.
You could tax vacant units and have the tax increase exponentially the longer the unit is held vacant.
Yep, they could. AFAIK there’s already a law in Spain that allows municipal governments to increase property tax on owner that have more than 5 apartments by up to 100% or something. I have no idea if it’s actually used.
The problem is that many villages and small towns are depopulating and you have plenty of empty properties there that simply no one wants to buy. There are no jobs in those towns so people are migrating to bigger cities and the apartments in those cities are not built fast enough to absorb the increase.
So the central government lets local governments to decide if they want to implement those policies or not (because they should know best if it’s needed) and a lot of local governments in bigger cities are right wing so they choose not to. The other issue is that the current governments needs Catalans to pass any laws and Catalan parties traditionally protect the rights of property owners. It was clear from day 1 that this coalition is too fragmented to govern effectively. They basically spent the last couple of years fighting for survival instead of governing.
I’m a bit afraid this will cause a rise in popularity of the [far] right, and an even worse situation in the future :(
It already did.
Indeed, there needs to be something to motivate investing in homes to build. There are solutions of course, like the state guaranteeing the rent or the state funding the homes. But it’s not guaranteed that heavy state intervention is better for the average people than a correctly regulated market, despite what our far left comrades believe here.
I would love to see a big push for public housing and coops. I think nice thing to do would be to give coops priority over commercial projects on every step of the approval process and create platforms to make it easier for people to organize and execute such projects. There should also be a big push for social housing. Nothing like that was done. Some of the measures they are proposing would be great in a healthy housing market (automatic renewals and protections for long term renters) but in a crisis they will only help short term and make things even worse later. The left in Spain shows again they are just a placeholder government occupying the spot so that the right can’t govern. They are not able to implement anything useful, even if they had a valid plan.
Sometimes people own 1-2 houses. They rent when on work contract expecting to come home to live in that place 1yr later.
Or they inherited, the kid is only 16, so they’re renting for 2-4 yrs until the kid is old enough to take possession.
Or, they’re like, maybe I can make a dent in my monthlies with this new house, rents being $500-$1k over mortgage for a $400k house back when interest rates were good.
You act like everyone who chooses to rent space to someone needing a place to live is an asshole. You don’t know that. Many are just working class who lucked into an extra house. Life isn’t charity. That house could be inheritance money in the shape of a house.
You are in no way entitled to someone else’s inheritance money.
Saying stuff like this is punching your neighbors instead of punching up. Which is easier, but not cool to do. People just trying to get by here, maybe get ahead by half a step, and lack of houses isn’t a working class responsibility, that responsibility rests at a higher level.
I act like nothing.
I drive through the same two intersections every day. When I was a kid, I lived in a different neighborhood, and my family would drive through those same intersections. I never saw a homeless person in those intersections, not once.
Now, I see not just one, but four people at those two intersections. Not the same people every day. DIFFERENT people every day. AT LEAST four. Sometimes couples(making it five or six). Sometimes people I think might be young enough to be kids.
And if I drive about half a mile north, there’s another intersection. And there will be a different four there. And if I drive a half a mile east, there will be another four there. And if I drive about a mile south, there will be a whole neighborhood of people living on the street. When I drive through that neighborhood, the streets will CONSTANTLY have at a minimum 20-30 different homeless people on the streets throughout the day. And that breaks my heart already, but that USED TO be my neigborhood.
So I can see the buildings that I used to see every day, but they look VERY different now. When I was growing up there, I knew there were homeless people, but I never saw any unless my family would drive down by a charity on the other side of town, and at that point, I never seemed to see more than one.
But now, whole areas of town are literally full of them. I live in a fairly upscale neigborhood now, but the one I lived in as a child is full of homeless people, and there is rotting furniture and piles of clothes on the street. There are large camps full of more people than I can count as I go by.
I can’t even count how often I feel the need to bring them food and leftovers.
There are two people I see very often. They’re separate, not together, and they’re not in the same place. But they have really distinct looks. Both of them are white, and both of them have skin which looks charred to a crisp. The man doesn’t even have clothes. He walks around in nothing but shorts, and is among the huge groups of homeless people I see. I don’t mean I see many people. I see literally hordes.
And I used to be someone involved with landlords. I helped around properties, and helped build homes with Habitat For Humanity.
I actually reached this conclusion when one of the landlords I worked with told me that he was selling his properties because he realized he no longer thought it was ethical to own multiple properties when so many people were starving.
Personally, I have never lived in a home that I owned. Not one day in my life. And I am in my 40s. And I grew up in a family that was deeply poor. One of my strongest memories is asking my mom for food and saying I’m hungry, and having her respond “I know, but find something around the house. We can’t go shopping until next Friday.” I can’t tell you how often it was bread and butter. Or a single potato. Or nothing. Very often, it was nothing.
So it’s very hard for me to have sympathy for anyone who has multiple homes when there are so many people who don’t even have the ability to go inside to get away from the sun, or to get a glass of water if they’re thirsty.