I understand a ban on eviction for the most vulnerable people like the elderly and better regulation predatory practices, but a total ban is hard to understand. How do they prevent the obvious abuses this could lead to? What do small owners do when they can’t repay their loan because the renter stopped paying and can’t be evicted?
Owning a property just to rent it shouldn’t be the most popular aspiration to move up in the world. It creates a divided society of renters who can’t make ends meet and landlords who constantly need to worry about their investment backfiring.
It shouldn’t be but it’s a reality that is not offered better solutions as far as this article explains.
The problem is greed not owning a house you don’t live in.
I can go to my country’s capital, point to a window and guess, with a fair degree of confidence, that, if rented, the property has an exploitative rent value. And next I can guess if the property is privately owned or is property of a company.
My grandparents, like many people of their generation, owned their house and another flat in the same building, which they rented for decades to the same family. The rent was updated, yearly, and in accordance to legal impositions. It allowed for my parents to slightly supplement their meager retirement and the other couple to live in decent conditions until they both passed away.
In the exact same building, another person bought an empty flat, renovated it and put it up for rent by nearly six times the value my grandparents charged, needlessly. Needlessly to say, the house had a very high turn rate, with the average tennant being there less than one year. And often leaving the property less than well maintained.
The problem is taxation. Who owns has to be adequately taxed by their income and property. That money needs to be syphoned back into social services, like healthcare, public transportation, education and, yes, even public housing. It must not be allowed to pile and be used to amass assets to further enrich those who already have more than enough.
There will always be people who are uninterested in owning. Like students away from home, people and professionals that move constantly or tjose who can’t be bothered by having to deal with property taxes and other expenses related to owning and maintaning a house. And those houses have to be maintained by someone. The state is not and should not be expected to maintain all that property because that property is a source of income for the state itself. What the state should and must do is curb the unchecked amassing of wealth.
That’s a fine sentiment about people not wanting to own, but for some reason I know that students would prefer to own a place to live in, if they could afford one. Same with the rest of groups, if it didn’t cost that much people would buy, maintain, and sell for about the same price when moving
You have to introduce me to a student wanting to buy. It’s not an age where the large majority is thinking to settle down. I won’t go into the having the means for it.
Buying a house implies putting down roots. The groups I’ve mentioned are the closest there are today to nomads. Makes no sense for a person that knows they will be spending from a few months to perhaps a year or two in a place to buy.
I guess it does come as a surprise that some people go to study in a place they want to live in?
It truly does. I was of college age once and the main objective, after getting in college, was to go to a college far enough to be free of the family shadow. Whatever came after, was to be thought about later on.
I lived in the capital then and a good portion of the students going to college there came from the rest of the country. The locals, unless they were aiming for a specific degree in a specific college, would go away if possible. The start of the college year had an unofficial nickname: The Great Migration. Small towns and villages inland would be devoided of young people and the smaller urban areas with campus got flooded with new faces.
But college was a chance to go or get away. Not a plan for life.
Won’t somebody think of the poor small owners who are exploiting other people’s work and extracting their money without doing anything, just because they were there first to buy the place so nobody else could own it?
So I assume you never had to rent a property. You left your parents’ home and bought your apartment straight away? Well, I didn’t. I rented apartments for many years before I was able to buy something. And all the apartments I rented were simply a second property someone had. Yes, you can design a better system but it would take decades to change. For now, we need people to rent out their spare properties and this bill will make it harder.
Small owners worked to save enough so they could make an investment that gives them a bit of a safety net for their future, and maybe take some freedom to rent another place if they need to live somewhere else for a while. I’m not talking about the ones who inherit enough wealth to do that without working.
Ah, yes, their investiment is harvesting a poorer person’s salary, while killing their chance at ownership. Totally fair.
Serves them right using a utility as speculation then exploiting the housing shortage they cause by increasing the BTL market
Landlords hoard housing. Housing is one of the most basic needs of humanity, and we have known this for thousands of years.
Do not give landlords an inch. The sooner the class no longer exists, the better everyone is. Worldwide.
The proposal, now rejected, was to suspend the evictions of vulnerable households without housing alternatives, until 2030. The suspension would be only mandatory for Vulture Funds.
2·29 days agoIf evictions are banned, why would they care? You can’t get evicted from your own home if there’s no evictions so… 🤷♀️
If there is no guarantee that they can recover their investment, people will not invest to build homes anymore and their will be less or worse homes to live in.
I don’t see that as a bad thing. The thing you get for building a house is a house to live in. Even in our nightmarish housing paradigm, people volunteer for things like habitat for humanity to help their neighbors have a place to live. In a world where housing is not a financial investment and people can’t be unwillingly displaced, I would expect only more desire to build homes that people actually want to live in.
My primary financial security lies in my home equity and I would happily end evictions even if it cost me all of it.
Some people don’t have the capital or don’t want to spend the capital to build a house and need places to rent. How do we get those houses built? Massive state intervention? Not sure it will do better than a regulated market, but why not. Now where is the law for it that should be accompanying this potential collapse of private offering?
I’ve been told by friends from Spain that this was already like this?
Let’s say foreigners buy a house or a flat and they use it as a summer home. Someone breaks in while you are away and then you can’t kick them out.
Anyone from Spain can confirm if this is true?
Yes but this is incredibly rare issue and it’s just talked about because it sounds bad. Most cases are simply people unable to pay the rent for whatever reason. Some people take advantage of the eviction bans and simply stop paying but I don’t know that the % is. Probably also tiny.
Dont let perfect be the enemy of good. Im sure they will keep amending these laws over time.
They should bring those amendments at the same time if they have ideas to prevent a collapse of offer.
I had one neighbour that refused to stop playing music until 4-7am. He was evicted after months of complaints. He probably would’ve disappeared if evictions were banned.
In Holland we have government workers (not police thank fuck) who will handle noise complaints and issue warnings and then fines.
As someone who is not planning to be a landlord ever really, I say yay, fuck those guys. Mostly the big corpos.
But, I wonder if this isn’t going to backfire in some way. If those companies have no way to throw you out, and there can be valid reasons for that still, I would assume they are going to be much more of a pain in the ass when you apply for an apartment. Can you at that time show them that you are not going to cause unreasonable trouble? No? Well you are not getting that apartment then, they’ll find someone else.
Doesn’t Spain already have a problem with people invading a home and not leaving?
Not really, no. It’s a minor issue overblown by the far-right to protect interests of landlords.
I’m sure the problem is overblown unless someone else has hard numbers.
Saw a report on TV. There are even specialized companies now who remove the occupiers. If there’s a business, it’s probably a big enough problem for the Spaniards.
A roughly 10% yearly increase in both house prices and rental prices is insane… can someone explain why? The article only talks about a housing shortage but what drives it? It’s not like Spain’s population has been increasing
Spain population in general is probably not increasing, but people move from less popular areas to more popular areas, where it’s easier to find a job or study
G-r-e-e-d.
Living cost are rising faster than wages. We are nearing the „you will own nothing and be happy“-paradig aka. end-stage captialism.
Come to Czechia, esp., Prague.
