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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

What is the law in Spain for squatting?

In the US for most states squatting doesn't really 'pay' as legally you have to occupy the location for a relatively long period of time, maintain it, sometimes even pay taxes regularly before you have any real rights at all.

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In the US to get actual squatter's rights you need to be somewhere for years and basically not get noticed or requested to leave at all. The idea is pretty interesting: if a piece of property is being completely unused to the point where its legal owner does not even know someone is living there, it's better for society for the squatter to live there and keep an eye on it, and it doesn't even really negatively impact the legal owner because how can they possibly care about a place they never visit?

Yeah, adverse possession laws which kick in after years/decades of using some property make a lot of sense. You can even think of them as a sort of statute of limitations on property disputes

My understanding is that the most common use of adverse possession is something like I have a dock on the property line. That dock has been there for 20 years, but my neighbor sells their property and the survey shows the dock is over the line by 6 inches.

By adverse possession, I get that 6 inches of property and don't have to move the dock.

> By adverse possession, I get that 6 inches of property and don't have to move the dock.

AP needs to be exclusive. So if you didn't have a fence keeping the neighbor off the dock, then what you'd get is a prescriptive easement. You'd get to keep using your dock where it is, but the neighbor would still have title to the strip of land. There may be some conditions in which the neighbor would get to access the part of the dock on his land.

You can gum up an eviction in the States for several months on very flimsy grounds. “We had an agreement” is sometimes enough to get the police to go away, requiring a lawsuit.

The real experts find a target and record fake deeds, almost guaranteeing a year or two.

Add in the federal “moratorium,” and landlords or sellers in this market will often pay for them to leave.

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 squat because houses are nicer and more spacious to live in, not for lack of any place to stay. On top of extortion.

I didn't say it's for lack of space, I said it's for a lack of money. In fact, more than 10% of the homes in Spain are vacant.

I think you may be talking about your experience in a different country or about a very concrete personal experience, and not in general.

Could Spain not increase taxes on vacant/vacation/second home properties to fund efforts to reduce homelessness and provide affordable housing?

Some of these folks own two, three, and four homes that are sitting empty.

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.

The whole situation is just so stupid.

Do you have some citations you could share? I would love to educate myself on the situation in depth.

Uff man, I don't know if there's any resource that summarizes any of this, or at least I don't know any.

Do you read spanish? I may find something for you, but probably not soon.

I do. No rush. Thank you.

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].

Sorry for the long rant and my terrible English.

1: https://atc.gencat.cat/es/tributs/impost-habitatges-buits/

2: https://www.eleconomista.es/vivienda/noticias/11325256/07/21...

3: https://www.europapress.es/economia/noticia-cuantas-vivienda...

4: https://cincodias.elpais.com/cincodias/2021/02/02/economia/1...

5: https://cincodias.elpais.com/cincodias/2018/09/17/companias/...

6: https://atlas-reanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/Estado-y-te...

7: https://www.eldiario.es/economia/concentracion-airbnb-manzan...

8: https://www.eldiario.es/economia/airbnb-espana-anfitriones-g...

9: https://www.20minutos.es/noticia/4639918/0/el-precio-del-alq...

This was very helpful, thank you for taking the time.

Sounds exactly like the left in Berlin

Pretty much. They're looking forward for the Berlin/Paris models. Already failed ones.

It's just bonkers, but people get angry when you point about the stupidity of such decisions. I even got a few downvotes in HN.

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.

Fair enough

> What is the law in Spain for squatting?

Totally different as represented here. The "48h or is mine" for example is a rumor that journalists love to repeat, very good FUD element, but is false. The laws don't say that. Journalists know it of course, but they spread the rumor from time to time, because outrage attracts eyeballs.

This is a very local problem, maybe in tourist flaws, and empty houses or factories owned by banks, not so much to private homes, neither main or secondary. You can find outrageous cases in private homes involving vulnerable poor people that rent some room to the wrong people, or local politicians or judges that choose not to act, but is not the general rule. If you see some TV channels or tabloids it seems that is happening everywhere and that the police don't do anything of course, but it depends a lot on the place.

tourist flaws -> tourist flats

If you leave the property unattended and squatters move in, after 48h of them being on the property, you cannot have law enforcement kick them out and have to use the courts for months of proceedings.

I clearly don't understand all the dynamics here - but this seems completely ludicrous. So I go away for a weekend, someone breaks into my home, and when I come back I am homeless? Where is the delineation between "someone breaking into my home" and "squatting"?

It's difficult.

Sometimes in England a landlord will be attempting to illegally evict a lawful (non-squatting) tenant, so the tenant calls the police for help and is surprised when the police assist in the illegal eviction! Obviously this is not supposed to happen. The police should not be evicting people just because some random told them he owned a property and it was being squatted.

On the other hand, the legal situation for evicting squatters in your home isn't so bad here. You have 28 days after you find out you are being squatted, and the eviction only takes 24 hours.

Unless you register all tenancies with the state (which seems like massive overreach) how can the police quickly determine the lawful possessor?

>Unless you register all tenancies with the state (which seems like massive overreach) how can the police quickly determine the lawful possessor?

You already effectively have to do that, landlords are supposed to pay taxes on the rent, and people are required to register where they live.

Property ownership is public information, in the US at least. I bet many/most of these situations could be solved by simply verifying that the evictor is the property owner

To avoid confrontation in the 48h window, a good squatter strategy is to target summer or weekend houses that have typically other weekend houses next to it so that neighbours aren't there and won't alert the owner.

Then squatters move in in two steps. First they do a small break in and leave, observing whether someone notices and fixes the first break in. If the first break in goes unnoticed, it is probably safe to move in, change the locks and squat there permanently as nobody will confront them in the 48h window.

Bringing a toothbrush and knowing your rights. If make it look like you're living there and say you have a verbal agreement, cops will let the courts handle it.

This refers specifically to adverse possession and differs by state. If memory serves New York is 10 years, Texas is measured in months, both require real improvements to the property and a formal legal process.

You don't get any legal rights over the property even after long periods of time (as in some countries or US states that give you rights kind of similar to a tenant if you stay long enough).

Here you can only wait to get evicted, and that'll happen sooner or later. But as right now the courts are understaffed and overworked, it's more later than sooner. Probably between a couple months to two years.

Also, during the pandemics, evictions were suspended to avoid situations of people loosing their jobs, and then their homes and having no surviving options in the middle of a lockdown,

> You don't get any legal rights over the property even after long periods of time (as in some countries or US states that give you rights kind of similar to a tenant if you stay long enough).

Adverse possession actually gives title to the property, not “rights kind of similar to a tenant”.

Ah sorry, I was thinking of the "tenant-after-30-days-in-a-hotel-room" laws and some other examples in Europe that are different.

Thanks for the correction.

In the US it might end as soon as the squatters are found trespassing illegally on someone's property, especially if the homeowner notices a forced entry (could be reasonably interpreted as an intention of harming the occupants) [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-your-ground_law

By the US definition this isn't squatting, it's more B&E followed by extortion.

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