[kaskakokos]

Living in Spain, I have friends from both ends of the spectrum: those speculating with houses and those who cannot afford to buy one.

We can blame the okupas, calling them lazy if that suits you. But we are missing half the story if we don't consider the other end of the spectrum: people buying property purely for speculative investment. For example, consider the housing crisis in Majorca [1].

Since we have enough money to buy a house, it's easy to blame the okupas. However, you should ask yourself: How much would housing prices need to increase before I can no longer afford a home? What would I do with my kids in that situation?

Justice should be defended with a veil of ignorance about your personal situation. It's easy to talk about what is fair regarding housing if you own two or three properties. Talk to people, and you will understand how lucky you may have been.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/mallorca-property-boom-stirs-sellout-f...

[chipdart]

> We can blame the okupas, calling them lazy if that suits you. But (...)

I think you are completely missing one of the main origins of okupas in Spain: organized crime involved in extortion schemes.

I personally witnessed a case where individuals took over a store lot previously occupied by a restaurant. As the story goes, the restaurant operator tried to negotiate lowering rent to no success, followed by spending many months not paying rent until they were evicted. As yet another retaliation tactic, the restaurant operator managed to find a kind of service where he arranged for a lawyer team supporting a group of indigents to take over the store space, report it as their home address, and declare squatter's rights. The indigents were day in day out involved in disturbs, all sorts of vandalism, assaulting passer-bys and patrons in neighboring stores, etc. Nasty bunch, they were even caught on film shitting in a sandbox of a kids playground nearby for absolutely no reason. The police came in every single time, but every single time their lawyers were a moment's away. It took a couple of years of due process and multiple court cases exhausting with the lawyer team exploiting all possible legal recourses until the okupas were kicked out. The landlord had to hire a round-the-clock security because the exact same indigents, once kicked out, repeatedly tried to invade the same space.

[zxspectrum1982]

Housing is expensive because: 1. Progressive governments making incredibly difficult and expensive to build houses, apartments, etc. - E. g. I'm trying to build a house since SEVEN YEARS ago. Do you know what's the financial cost of having the land sitting there for 7 years? Who do you think is going to pay for that? Not me: it will be whoever buys that house. - E. g. the 2023 Housing Law making mandatory to offer 40% of the housing a lower prices. Since construction costs are fixed and very well-known by now, who do you think is going to subsidize that 40%? Correct: the other 60%.

2. Rental prices are up, and will be even higher, because landlords have no protection against quatters and default tenants. I have suffered the problem myself: I put out for rent the apartment were I used to live until a few years ago and the tenants only paid for the first month. Then it took me 18 months to kick them out. That apartment will not for rent until the law changes. There's MILLIONS of apartments in Spain like that. Protecting the landlords (eg kicking squatters and defaulters in 2 weeks instead of 2 years) would make one million apartments available immediately, bringing prices down.

[solids]

Maybe the housing crisis is related to the lack of legal security that owners have, which severely reduced the offer and obviously increased the prices.

The housing law that the current government passed wasn’t very clever…

[kerkeslager]

Wait so lack of legal security reduced supply... by what mechanism? How do you think this works?

[misja111]

You were downvoted but you're hitting the nail on the head.

The housing problem is an issue of supply and demand. Currently demand is bigger than supply and that leads to problems, no matter what you do. Either renting prices go up until many people can't afford to rent anymore, or if some law is put into place such as restricting rents or reducing owners' rights, supply will become even smaller and demand even bigger.

To solve the housing crisis the government has to either decrease demand or increase supply, or both.

[pier25]

I'm from Mallorca but I don't own property there.

Yes the situation is bad but nothing justifies squatting. And the okupas have been an issue for decades now, way before Airbnb existed.

[Aurornis]

> We can blame the okupas, calling them lazy if that suits you. But we are missing half the story if we don't consider the other end of the spectrum:

I disagree. Two wrongs don’t make a right. You don’t have to put different people’s situations on to a spectrum and allow only one of them to be wrong and therefore anything the other person does is right.

It’s also disingenuous to pretend like all of the okupas are from desperate people who have no other choice, when there’s plenty of evidence that the okupas is being abused for extortion, crime, or just for fun.

[kjkjadksj]

If you can’t afford a home its still not justifying squatting. Just rent like everyone else in that situation the world over. At the end of the day homes aren’t priced to be impossible to afford for everyone or else they wouldn’t sell at all. You just might need a better job than the first one you can find. Afaik Spain seems to do better with producing housing to meet demand than the US or a lot of other places too.

[jjav]

> But we are missing half the story if we don't consider the other end of the spectrum

No, not really. Theft is not the answer.

Consider laws restricting how many houses a person can own, or maybe an increasing property tax on each unit. These are good solutions.

Condoning theft has no other side to the story, it's always wrong.

[petre]

> Consider laws restricting how many houses a person can own, or maybe an increasing property tax on each unit. These are good solutions.

So they set up a company and buy the property using the company. Pressure is always the answer, whichever tactics are used.

I understand the issue in Mallorca after visiting Mabella. Also the locals don't have to live on a holiday island, but they can elect pressure the speculators and their clients. Somehow this doesn't happen in Greece.

[maeil]

Until such laws are instated -if they ever are - then "theft" is very much an answer .

I'm sure smarter people than me here can come up with a good number of examples where you would agree that "condoning theft" is a good thing. Such ethical problems are never black and white.

[m000]

> Consider laws restricting how many houses a person can own, or maybe an increasing property tax on each unit. These are good solutions.

Won't somebody please think of the investors? /s

[burnished]

Theft is a violation of property laws. If you recognize that property laws are in some senses arbitrary/designed to fit a purpose (which you seem to, since you are proposing changes to them) then I think you should also recognize that treating theft as a purely black and white topic does not make sense.

Not advocating for the burglary higher up the thread, still a shit thing to do so someone

[kerkeslager]

> No, not really. Theft is not the answer.

Well HN's favored solution seems to be not caring that people are homeless until they start scaring rich people, at which point you lock them up in "mental health" institutions that are less about helping them and more about keeping them away from rich people.

My solution is not letting people own homes they don't live in, but that's going to crash a lot of rich people's investments, so we can't have that. Making sure the rich get richer is apparently more important than meeting citizens' basic needs.

So frankly, theft is the best answer currently available. I'd prefer they stole from the people actually causing the problem, the rich who buy up housing and make it unaffordable. But when they don't, maybe the middle class being stolen from shouldn't be so confused about why that's happening.

Ultimately I'm not sure why you don't have the same moral outrage about rich people buying up people's basic needs and holding them for ransom so they can get richer, as you do about poor people stealing to meet their basic needs.