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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

What about pooled investment funds? Are they "people" who should be able to do whatever they want with their properties?

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Why does it matter what sort of entity owns a piece of property? They pay property taxes, they should get to do what they want with their property.

Unconstrained property ownership has consequences. As a society you have to understand and decide how much you want to regulate how markets and limited resources can benefit some and harm others.

There is clear social harm to have cities filled with empty homes while there are people who want homes and can't afford to buy any on the market or are forced to commute long distances.

Using real estate to store money and other speculation does harm to people who want to participate in the market to actually use the limited fundamentally necessary resource.

It makes good sense for property owners who actively use their property themselves to have more rights than those who seek to profit from market conditions or others' use.

Having paid taxes is a weak justification for any freedom.

Especially in constrained areas like Barcelona (or urban areas in the U.S.), property ownership is a monopoly, so it has market repercussions. Buying up units and then refusing to rent them out (or have anyone occupy them) can be viewed as interfering with the local market. These are micro markets that are price sensitive to interference.

If you are a landlord, you need to rent the place out at the current market price. If you do not want to do that, you can sell the property and get out of the landlord business. Just squatting on it and leaving it empty/boarded up distorts the local property market and should be heavily taxed to discourage absentee landlords from interfering with local markets.

Agreed.

Just to put it in a US perspective, Barcelona as a whole has 10% higher population density than Brooklyn (41,000/sq mi vs 37,137/sq mi).

I don't know how its done in US or other countries. But in my country (some small island in west side of Pacific Ocean), some properties just left empty for very long time since no one can afford that piece of thing.

At night, you walk through that place, its quiet like abandon for very long time, and there won't be any retail stores / business nearby since only ghosts and wondering dogs/cats will be there.

But I also wondering, if the city mayor decided to make this bill work, he need the local city council pass the bill, will this make him lose in next year's election?

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