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Comment by otherme123 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of text, but didn't read the obvious: Spain is having three elections in the next month. This is an electoral stunt with no reality behind. The statistics show that Barcelona (and Madrid) are at a historical minimum of empty houses available, yet the spanish population is migrating from smaller cities to the big ones. This is pushing the rents up, and the politicians are obligated to "do something". Colau, Barcelona major, has already fought against AirBnB last year, turned Barcelona in a heaven for squatters, and now this. Rents keeps going up, as the problem shown in the stats is the lack OF NEW HOUSES.

Spain suffered the worst housing bubble in 2007, and even now talking about building more is anathema. For Colau is even worst, as she built his political career fighting against the bubble.

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>are at a historical minimum of empty houses available, yet the spanish population is migrating from smaller cities to the big ones.

So doing this in Barcelona actually makes sense then?

I read that as "the properties aren't empty", not "there are lots of people keeping empty properties off the market".

Doesn't that make empty properties especially offensive then?

There has never been as few empty properties as there is now (according to parent comment). As such, it should be less of a problem now than before? Not the other way around?

Barcelona had a reputation for squatters before Colau was elected.

> The statistics show that Barcelona (and Madrid) are at a historical minimum of empty houses available, yet the spanish population is migrating from smaller cities to the big ones

Sources, please?

The historical minimum seems to check out, only 1.52% of houses are empty (13k compared to 80k in 2011): https://www.20minutos.es/noticia/3299445/0/barcelona-detecta...

Also, less than 500 in 237657 were illegal touristic lodgings, so it seems Airbnb and such can't be blamed either.

Short-term lets don't have to contravene current regulations to cause a residential housing crisis.

> The statistics show that Barcelona (and Madrid) are at a historical minimum of empty houses available

There are few empty houses NOW. That is why, if Ada Colau was also NOW passing a law to fine people for keeping houses empty, that would probably be a political stunt.

HOWEVER, today's news is not about any law being passed, but about the consequences of a law passed in 2007.

With that in mind, let's see if that law has been effective at decreasing the amount of empty houses since then, as that's the relevant time frame for this news story (below I'm just quoting the figures from[1], first shared by [2], AFAIK):

(2007: the anti-empty-houses law is passed) 2011: 80,000 empty houses (9.6% total over the 2019 total housing number, so probably underestimated) 2016: 31,000 (3.7%) 2019: 13,000 (1.52%)

This trend is far more interesting, as it strongly suggests that the law managed to unblock 8% of the total housing in Barcelona in under 8 years, making it 6 times smaller than it was. Make any problem you have 6 times smaller and you'll understand how big a deal this is.

So, clearly not a stunt: Ada Colau is just following the rules given to her and everybody else. She may be the first one taking those rules seriously, actually, but in any case, if the fines were not issued, all the landlords in the 8% that did comply with the law, could sue the government, and rightly so.

More generally, Colau cannot possibly be responsible for all problems currently plaguing Barcelona. They have been brewing over years of incompetence under governments both from the left-wing unionist party and the right-wing religious nationalists alike, who have all been stealing from the middle class for their own profit for the last thirty years or so, just as the political elites of virtually every major Western country.

I definitely think Colau can be criticized on a number of things, and I generally agree she's an awful major, but nobody can blame her for problems whose magnitude is so big that they obviously took decades to fester.

[1] https://www.20minutos.es/noticia/3299445/0/barcelona-detecta... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/vote?id=19429961&how=up&auth=23...

Please, leave politics aside here. I can smell your antiColau feeling from miles away.

You're right that people should keep partisan swipes out of their comments here. However, the other comment did include other information, while yours didn't; that's probably why yours got downvoted.

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