I think the goal of the squatters isn’t to own the property, it’s to just get a roof over their heads and extort the owners in the process. They’ve carefully chosen a legal zone where they have a lot of room to maneuver.
Most of the squatters aren't trying to extort, they're just trying to get somewhere to live for free or for cheap. Yeah, some are freeloaders, but lots of them have lost their jobs and/or are suffering the combination of the crisis and the spectacular surge of pricing on real estate this last years.
Even with this problems, squatting incidence have been falling on the last 5/10 years.
> Most of the squatters aren't trying to extort, they're just trying to get somewhere to live for free or for cheap. Yeah, some are freeloaders, but lots of them have lost their jobs and/or are suffering the combination of the crisis and the spectacular surge of pricing on real estate this last years.
So much speculation. Do you have any proof for these claims?
They did. Also, municipalities tax by property ownership.
They don't do it more because they know most vacant property is owned by regular folks.
It's just a supply demand problem here. People in Spain just refuses to believe it because there are some narratives circulating, specially in the left, about how the housing bubble ruined spain so constructing is speculation and bad capitalism yadda yadda.
They don't want to hear about public housing neither because "it's expensive" while they advocate for more public spending in other useless stuff. They want price control and such.
AFAIK only Cataluña applied taxes to empty houses [1]. I don't know how is it going. And there are no national laws, it's still a proposal [2].
I don't think there's a supply problem that would be fixed with new buildings. Last governmental statistics shown that there were at least 3.4 million empty homes [3]. Statistics coming from the private sector (real estate agencies, and a private university) this year, they calculated a 10% of vacant homes nationally [4]. That's a lot.
I think there are no good statistics on the quantity of homes that are owned by "regular folks". Also, what's a "regular folk"? Is my landlord, who owns more than 50 apartments in top notch locations, a "regular folk"? (Not counting on the illegal things he's done)
That's why you can't only focus on big companies, like Blackstone (they own 20 billion € in real state just in Spain [5]). A study that has been making the rounds this year on all the economic press [6](pages 22 and 25) has been used, wrongly, to show that "big landlords" only (hah, only) own 4% of all the rental homes in Spain. But if you check the list, it only shows the top 40 companies, being the number 40 in the list owner of 121 homes. Also, I don't see any private owners.
Do you stop being a "big landlord" if you "only" own less than 121 homes? I can't see my landlord in the list.
Truth is, there are empty houses. The rental pricing rise doesn't correlate to salary rises, specially in big cities like Madrid or Barcelona. In less than 5 years (that's the time I stayed in my last apartment) I've seen prices rise 30 to 40% in Madrid. Before COVID AirBnB didn't help either [7], and 30% AirBnB owners were proprietors of at least 5 houses [8], so, pure speculation. And although people (specially those who can WFH) have been leaving Madrid after COVID, rental prices haven't lowered that much[9].
Interesting hearing the situation in Spain! In the US, you sometimes see arguments centered around there being lots of vacant housing, but they usually neglect to mention that a significant majority of those units are actually either (a) so rundown they're actually uninhabitable, (b) empty for a month or two between when the old tenants leave and the new tenants move in, or (c) in middle-of-nowhere cities/towns that don't have any jobs.
