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Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

I am not familiar with the specifics in Spain, but in a lot of jurisdictions that would be illegal. Until they are legally evicted they have the exact same rights as regular tenants, and harassing them would be a crime.

The reasoning behind this is that some shady landlords might try to claim that genuine tenants are squatters in order to get rid of them. There are plenty of desperate people who'd accept a verbal contract and payment in cash, after all. Not that hard of a choice when the alternative is being homeless. Oh, but you paid your rent a day late? Sorry, you're now a "squatter", so we're cooking you alive until you leave.

Making it too easy to get rid of squatters would expose the most vulnerable people in society to even more abuse, and making it trickier for absentee landlords to get rid of real squatters is considered a fair price to prevent this.

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Not sure how the situation is in Spain, but I think that in Europe in general, if you have a contract saying that you are a tenant, it's quite hard to kick you out, even if you don't pay, at all. If the tenants don't have any papers and they try to game the system, then this is probably a risk that they should take into account?

The easy fix here is to require property contracts in writing and to be filed with the government and educate everyone on that point. We already do this for property sales to avoid these very issues on ownership. The same thing for leasing would provide better protections for both parties.

That is how it actually works in Spain. You must present the contract when you legally register as a citizen in the city's town hall.

That doesn't stop people from circumventing this requirement, on either side of the contract.

Thanks for that info! So why is this such a big problem? Is it just that the government doesn't want to trust it's own records? If people are bypassing the law, I would think it reasonable to allow the consequences to transpire - eg evicted if you don't have a written contract.

As mentioned in other comments by Spaniards weighing in, it's not really a big problem as in that's happening all the time. It is a multi-faceted issue, and for some, a philosophical standpoint stemming from the economic crisis, gentrification and speculation, and related problems.

Take in mind that the post shared here is written by a company that provides listing services.

Housing is more of a right in Spain than in other countries, and at least in Catalonia, there is precedent that it supersedes property rights.

Ah, I see. The article was claiming it was "surging", but I guess it's hyperbolic advertising.

You'll understand the inevitable tension on policing this issue considering that a couple of years ago Spain passed a law that made access to adequate and dignified housing a constitutional right.

You are saying that as if it is never the owner's fault.

If your revenue is not enough to pay for an housing under regular contract but a shaddy owner allows you to pay a rent for the place so that he can bypass a number of regulations by pretending he has no tenants, would you choose living in the street or a car or would you accept it, hoping it is a temporary situation?

Most people would choose the later hence the way the laws are written. Landowners are usually the wealthy ones, so the less at risk of suffering.

There needs to be penalties on the landowner side too. The paper requirement should carry penalties enforced against them if they are violating it. This would be better than just a chance of pain from the eviction process. After all, if they are shady landlords they might push people out in other ways to avoid the eviction process currently anyways.

If you read through the article, it becomes a bit clearer exactly why it still happens.

I saw some of the different factors in the article but none of them seemed to really address the lack of checking a registered source of data for the leases and why they wouldn't be a good idea.

> Oh, but you paid your rent a day late? Sorry, you're now a "squatter", so we're cooking you alive until you leave.

That seems far-fetched as a risk. Why would a company offering rentals push out someone who paid rent (even if late) and lose out on revenue/maintenance costs trying to get another renter?

Because most of their revenue comes from property prices rising, not from rent. The renters are mostly a source of cost / hassle (gotta communicate with them/ fix stuff etc..)

> try to claim that genuine tenants are squatters

This, exactly. These kinds of slanted articles that only state the issue from the perspective of negligent absentee landlords, whether written by ChatGPT or otherwise, all have the same problem: that's not how property disputes are resolved. The first thing that a court would have to establish is that the person trying to remove another person from a given place would be whether the first person has any right to the place, and to what extent. And the next thing would be the question of whether the second person has a stake in the place, and the nature and extent of that interest. Then they have to balance interests.

I know Spain is not America and doesn't share America's uniquely bad system of estates, but we see this all the time in America where a self-described landlord wants the county sheriff to immediately taser some old lady, but they can't even sufficiently demonstrate that they own the home.

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