Can we establish that the squatters are doing this out of economic necessity and not to "profit" (e.g can't afford to rent or own someplace else)? I imagine so as living with no security in an abandoned building with no utilities seems pretty desperate, sub-optimal and sad.
If we can then realistically the root cause to this is lack of housing supply. "Just build more f**ing houses" would fix this no?
No, we can’t explicitly establish that. It is of course true that many squatters do so out of financial necessity, but others do so for other reasons: a lifestyle choice, a political choice, or plain freeloading and financial gain - in a squat in my village there were people living there with full time jobs and driving brand new Audis!
I would add further that the responsibility of paying the utilities and tax falls on the building owner even if it is occupied by squatters.
None of this diminishes the fact that housing is increasingly expensive in Spain, particularly in Madrid and Barcelona, and this is causing real problems.
But the situation is definitely more complicated than just ‘build more houses’.
I wonder what the split is here? Lets say 1000 squatters how many can afford housing but choose not to?
Of those who can afford to rent how many have jobs and cars but do this so they can save for a house deposit rather than all 60% of thier income going to housing?
I'm not "pro squatter" or anything I just think you could solve 90% of this problem if you built much more housing.
Yes, but housing market is a market, so for owners to have a ROI on their houses, the supply needs to be lower than the demand.
Usually the way governments "patch" this is by building social houses and apartments, but if you were building enough of them then people would rent or buy them instead of the other private ones. So, again, it would make home owners unhappy to not have their investment go up.
I don't know if it's the same in all countries, but in France, 3.5% of households own 50% of the homes rented by individuals. So it's not even a problem for people buying a home for themselves, or a second home as a passive income, but it's a problem because it's highly concentrated. And they're the ones who want to have their investment to go up, at any cost.
Same in the UK. I think we can choose any number of options to maintain this;
We keep building houses until house prices are stagnant and do not grow any more. Honestly even if houses lost ~1% of their value almost no-body would be underwater on their mortgage.
a bunch of specific areas to "build 100K homes" and have the government garentee to buy anyones house in that area at any time in the the next 25 years for the value of it on the scheme announcement date. Existing home owners dont lose.
Spanish here. I've been to many homes occupied by squatters due to the nature of my voluntary service for quite some years.
The people you seem to be describing just applies for a tiny proportion of the actual landscape of squatting in Spain. So your sentence is partly true, but nowadays as the situation becomes chronic, most people just do it because it is convenient for them
Believe me when I say that I've been tasked to helping "homeless" people and once I got closer, some of them were begging in the streets, making +300€ on a good day. I was speechless the first day that I heard about it.
He did the whole electrical installation and had a giant water deposit on the basement that he filled once a month with the waterolympics: getting the water from the next street from a fire hydrant. Such a great guy. With a lot of social conscience, firm to his ideals and he worked!
> an we establish that the squatters are doing this out of economic necessity and not to "profit"
in some cases yes
but in some cases it's also clearly not the case
and there are likely many ideologically driven cases too
> with no security in an abandoned building with no utilities seems pretty desperate, sub-optimal and sad.
you would think so but I have seen enough cases of people willingly abandon such things in context of ideologically driven life styles (not in Spain, but anyway)
> realistically the root cause to this is lack of housing supply. "Just build more f*ing houses" would fix this no?
no if anything the root cause is the lack of affordable housing, and that is much harder to fix as building housing is expensive so providing affordable housing is much harder then just increasing housing
worse the problem also often isn't affordable housing in general, but affordable housing in the right place e.g. where you can reach your workplace with public transportation or even just something as simple as housing where you can reach a supermarket with the means available to you
and a problem for that is affordable land to build on houses, which is sparse due to two reasons 1. most land is already in use 2. a lot of shitty money economy leading to stuff like land banks and similar, basically a small number of very wealthy entities (not necessary people) have bought a lot of the land and housing (directly or through proxy) and have absolutely no reason or insensitive to provide reasonable affordable housing. In some cases they don't even have the insensitive to use the land housing at all, i.e. they would prefer to not rent the apartments they own and just keep them around as monetary investment.
In general this isn't a Spanish problem it's a problem in most (all?) countries which have a banking/investment/money market roughly similar to the US when it comes to property. Sure each country has their own country specific problems on top of it (e.g. zoning laws in the US) but the problem by itself is much more deep rooted. And if you want to starkly oversimplify it the problem points back to a few siphoning of the wealth of the many in increasingly sophisticated ways. As long as the many generate enough new wealth this can work (like during economic boom times) but that hasn't been the case for a long time with especially "small family cooperation becoming increasingly economically impossible" playing a big role. At the same time we where for a long time able through technologically advancement (or producing in china) to still keep a high living standard and most of the basic needs for many people covered. So the consequences where limited. But that doesn't help with apartments especially given of property ownership has become a really nice and desired way to keep money somewhat save during turbulent times which combined with speculative investment in housing has driving prices up beyond what would normally have happened in many regions in the world.
If we can then realistically the root cause to this is lack of housing supply. "Just build more f**ing houses" would fix this no?