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.
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.