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Comment by pimterry | Hacker News Reader

> It's not a small problem, there's like 12K cases per year last time I checked.

https://maldita.es/malditateexplica/20221026/datos-okupacion... has the actual data (in Spanish):

* 10-17k cases of occupation annually (rising until 2021, but down in 2022 and further down in 2023: https://www.cronista.com/espana/actualidad-es/adios-okupas-c...)

* Of those ~15k, 5% are actually occupation of somebody's residence (allanamiento de morada) and 95% of cases are occupation of an empty and unused house/shop/office (usurpación de vivienda). That includes unused commercial properties, and homes that are neither rented nor used by the owner.

* Note that a personally used holiday homes are also considered as a person's residence, so any occupation there would also come into that first 5%: https://www.ocu.org/fincas-y-casas/gestion/gestion-patrimoni....

That is to say: it is a problem (the 500 - 1000 cases per year nationwide of occupation of people's homes is clearly problematic) but it's not a really widespread problem for most middle-class people (the vast majority of people even in the middle classes do not own totally unused property).

It is a significant concern if you're a commercial landlord with any shops & offices between rental contracts, or if you're directly investing in property as pure speculation, without using it at all (which imo should be discouraged regardless - although I'd rather punitively tax it).

In the really problematic 5% case of people's homes, my understanding is that the law has tightened significantly, and if you can show that you're registered as actually living there, in theory they will evict okupas within 24 hours (I don't know how well that works in practice though).

View on HN

These stats don't account for the much more common case of people that start renting a house and stop paying the rent indefinitely because technically it doesn't fit the definition of "okupas." I've seen estimates of that number being as high as 1% of the people renting, making it ~30K extra people living on a house they don't own and are not paying for.

The only stats I can find are https://www.idealista.com/news/finanzas/economia/2023/03/03/... - that shows 30k people actually evicted from houses they were renting but stopped paying for in 2022.

Can't find any numbers on how many people are not paying and indefinitely staying in flats. While I'm sure it's a slow process, personally I'd be surprised if there's that many people in that situation long-term, since there's clearly laws and a working process to remove tenants in this case (30k evictions for non-payment in a year means forcing an eviction is clearly possible).

Idealista has some details on the process and how long it takes here: https://www.idealista.com/news/inmobiliario/vivienda/2022/10... and suggests that 7-8 months is typical (really interesting how effectively Idealista dominates as the source for info on all these topics, superb example of content marketing).

That's interesting , where can I see those stats? And legally as you say it's not the same as squatting, it's quite different.

In the US, I knew someone who owned a second house in the same city that they had never lived in and planned to rent out in the future. When someone broke in and squatted there early in covid, they reacted as though the squatters were in the house they actually currently lived in - describing their fear and trauma in a way such that people who didn't know the story sometimes literally thought someone had broken into their own residence.

So I wouldn't be at all surprised if a lot of those empty homes being squatted in are felt as personal attacks and violations by the absentee owner, which would make it feel like a much bigger problem for individuals if you move in circles where people own empty properties.

Squatting is a problem, period. Doesn’t matter if the house is empty or not.

I don't agree with squatting on the whole, but this distinction clearly does matter. If someone squats a property that you were planning to rent out then you lose the income that you could have gained thereby. That's not nearly as bad as losing access to the home you currently live in.

It can be worse, as you are losing rental income, which can have larger impacts on your budget and life.

I have family in California that had to deal with squatters on a rental property. It cost them ~400k, which included their kids college funds and retirement.

Costs were 3 years of lost rent while they paid the mortgage 250k damages done by the squatters, plus legal fees.

It could be worse for some people in some cases, but it’s pretty clear which is going to be worse in general most of the time.

Perhaps, financial damage is real and can have long term consequences that outlive short term inconvenience.

You are probably right in the majority of cases,but I do think it is a mistake to automatically discount financial harm as less.

If I invest 20 years of my income in a property that someone has stolen, that is a significant loss to me in human terms as well as financially.

I would be open to treating the destruction of such property equivalent to the taking of an equivalent amount of one's life.

>If I invest 20 years of my income in a property that someone has stolen, that is a significant loss to me in human terms as well as financially.

You've also paid for your primary residence. But on top of that, you need it to live in. So it's a worse situation, generally speaking.

That was a general comment, true for both cases.

Maybe the moral point is that housing shouldn't be an investment class?

Housing is inherently an investment.

It take a huge amount of materials and labor to build, and returns value slowly over time. Depending on the inputs and returns, this can either create positive or negative value.

Of course we should invest in actual property building, I meant investment class as in asset class - a thing you buy with the hope of capital increase. This is clearly quite different from investing in building houses that results in a new house.

Buying a house and purposefully leaving it empty is immoral, sqatting or not.

No, it’s not. Living where you want, for free, is not a right.

Why it's not immoral? can you elaborate?

Because our society believes in property rights. Individuals can have any reason they want to own property and do with it what it pleases them.

Property rights are human rights.

So if you buy a fixer upper, one that would be unfit for renting to people. You can't spend your weekends and holidays working on it for a few months to get it into better condition without being called immoral? Sorry that my lack of funds and desire to better myself offends you, but that's a crazy take.

Squatters doesn't make purposefully leaving houses vavent any less immoral.

Get rid of the pathetic scarcity mindset.

Just build more houses and then nobody will care.

Having a free shelter is fundamental to a person's freedom, arguing otherwise is immoral.

And who has to build that shelter, and what about their freedom?

No one has to build that shelter, no one should be coerced to that.

So nobody is forced to build shelter, but if someone does build one for themselves, it can be taken?

Just trying to understand how this right to shelter works.

It's crucial to understand that if we let a person that build a shelter keep it for eternity then that person can build many shelters such that there will be no land left for other people to build their shelters on.

Indeed.

This is why in a society free from theft, one must build or make something for exchange to get things you want.

I don't see why buying two plots and building two houses entitles someone else to one of them.

I don't agree with the notion of buying a plot. No one should ever have to pay for an empty plot of land.

OK, so you dont buy the plot and just build two houses on them. How does that change your logic.

How do you deal with a situation where some people don't have any land anymore to put their houses there?

They make something they can trade, or go somewhere where there is land.

How they can make something they can trade, if they have no land on which they can make it? Where can they go, if private property exists in most of the world?

You make things that don't need land, like 99% of humans on the planet. AKA get a job.

There's no free land, but there is cheap land, especially in deserts. Simply owning land might not be as nice as you imagine

> And who has to build that shelter

Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter

https://www.habitat.org/carter-work-project

> what about their freedom?

I think they made good use of it.

We in the USA are the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. We could solve homelessness and hunger tomorrow.

I'm not saying that people should lose their property to squatters, that's not the solution. I'm saying that we could build ~300,000 new homes and give them to people for free and it would barely register on the national budget.

Yes, if you assume people won't destroy the free houses, I totally agree.

I think it is remarkable that people argue for theft from others instead of donating their time, effort, or money to building those houses.

The underlying hypocrisy is that most people argue that others should pay, but won't act individually on their own beliefs

Then everyone will go sleep in the street, in order to get a free house.

No, they won’t.

Would you sleep in a tent for a year to get a million dollars? I already have a house and would still do it.

Hell, I would do it for 10% of that. No job and drinking and camping for a year sounds like an epic vacation.

Before you doubt me, I was certifiably homeless in San Francisco for 3 months it was a blast. Slept on couches everyday, worked cash jobs, and partied every night.

You can't have a freedom that's conditional on somebody else's forced labour.

It's not conditional of somebody else's forced labor, why do you think that?

Everyone is entitled to free shelter, but nobody is required to build them? Where do you think the free shelter is going to come from? Because, looking around, I don't see very many free shelters, so they're going to have to come from somewhere.

And if your answer is to take all the existing houses and give them, one to each family that needs a place to stay, that's great in the short term. In the long term, though, who's going to build a new one when it will just be taken from them? And if nobody builds new ones, where are new ones going to come from, as the population continues to grow?

At worst everyone should have an access to piece of land where they can build a shelter for themselves, or live in a yurt or an RV if they don't want to build the typical housing.

I actually lived in a country where everyone had a right for free shelter. It was called the USSR.

The quality and quantity of said shelter was beyond abysmal. Several families sharing a single apartment, a family per room, was the norm.

If anyone attempted to squatter anywhere, they would very quickly find themselves free sheltered in Gulag. If they were to argue for their rights against oppression and exploitation, like you do, they would be very quickly free sheltered in a mad house and injected with generous doses of haloperidol.

Yeah, on the other hand you had Anarchist Catalonia or currently Zapatistas. In USA you had MK Ultra, where government experimented on people through for example drugging them and you have homelessness too. Moreover people who fought for liberation were diagnosed with schizophrenia.

What is ironic is that I’ve people living like that in the US too. I once lived in a building with a lot of immigrants from different parts of the world. I once got a glance in a living room walking down the hall: two bunks in the living room dozens of people inside. Another apartment was a studio apartment shared by two guys whose main source of income seemed to be charging lime scooters in the apartment. They’d be hauling scooters in and out all day.

So maybe things wouldn’t be that different at all for the poorest of this country but they’d not have the boot of monthly rent pinned on their neck.

Good news - the US is interested in Part B, jail for squatting (including outdoors in a public place) but not Part A, because communism is terrible.

Yes, It is in Spain:

Article 47 of Spanish Constitution:

All Spaniards are entitled to enjoy decent and adequate housing. The public authorities shall promote the necessary conditions and shall establish appropriate standards in order to make this right effective, regulating land use in accordance with the general interest in order to prevent speculation.

No, it's not.

It does not mean you have the right to live in a flat en La Castellana for whatever you want pay. It means the State has to implement policies to help people access housing.

Also, article 33 give citizens the right to private property. You cannot come squat in my house because article 33 should prevent it, even when article 47 exists.

Yep, good point.

Let's avoid considering outliers to maintain a balanced discussion.

While I don't believe anyone has the right to live in Castellana or the Royal Palace, it also wouldn't be fair to require someone to move to the desert to find a home.

Having a right to housing is not the same as having the right to "living where you want".

If they actually had that right then a Spaniard would have the right to live in the king's and politicians' houses which is obviously not a right.

But if "empty living space", space that's reserved but unused, is immoral would you extend it to any such reserved but unused living space?

Is an empty room in your house immoral? Or massively oversized rooms even if you live in them? In the end you're still blocking a lot of "empty space" that someone else could use if only there were smaller but more living units. Same applies when you live in a detached house and "blocking" any potential living space that could have existed on higher floors of a tall apartment building. Zoning laws can also be an issue but the question stands.

To put in in practical terms, one person having two 50sqm/550sqft apartments is immoral. One person having one 150sqm/1500sqft apartment is fine? Where is the line and how arbitrary do you want it to be?

It’s not clear exactly where to draw the line, but that’s true of all kinds of moral distinctions. So I don’t think that kind of slippery slope argument is very persuasive.

I didn't mean it as a slippery slope argument, rather an explanation of why calling "this in particular" immoral is probably just one person drawing the line in such a way that what they need/want is perfectly covered. It's more likely that their changing needs/wants move that bar, than that the moving bar changes their needs/wants.

So "buying a house and purposefully leaving it empty is immoral" is bound to change the moment they purchase a second, empty house.

Years ago I hosted some African refugees in my home for a short time while more appropriate accommodation was in the works. I cannot describe the feeling I had seeing one of the children understand how a modern toilet works: we do our business in a bunch of clean water, and then dump a bunch more clean water to take it away. Given their circumstances this was probably the most immoral thing we could have done in the modern world.

>It's more likely that their changing needs/wants move that bar, than that the moving bar changes their needs/wants.

This seems to be an unsupported speculation. And indeed it cuts both ways. Maybe you only think the second house is ok because that covers your needs and wants (either present or future anticipated). If you leave out the psychologizing, there's nothing to your argument beyond the slippery slope. Even if the exact location where individual people draw the line is psychologically explicable based on self-interest and their particular life circumstances, it still doesn't follow that a moral distinction cannot possibly be made.

More generally, it's fairly obvious that people who believe in strong property rights will tend to be people who have lots of property and people who don't will tend to be people who don't. That doesn't invalidate the arguments of either side; these have to be evaluated on their merits. You can say "I bet you'll believe in strong property rights once you own a house!", while a homeless person might equally say "I bet you'll have more sympathy for squatters once you've lived on the streets for a year!" Those sorts of examples tell us that people aren't perfectly disinterested when forming their moral outlook, but it doesn't tell us much about where moral distinctions can or can't be drawn.

This is absurd.

Is your car sitting in your driveway right now? Someone else could be driving it, it's immoral that you don't leave the keys sitting on the roof.

Is your bed or couch empty right now? Someone else could be sleeping there right now.

Do you have money in your checking account? Someone else could be buying the things they need with that money, you should put the cash outside for them to take.

A house sitting empty while the owners renovate, look for tenants, try to sell, etc is a normal and necessary part of a functioning society.

The solution to housing shortages is to build more housing. That's it, that's the whole solution.

I mean, the massive infrastructure waste that exists to accomodate unproductive cars is a real point that degrades where we live.

So much space in towns dedicated to storing cars while they're not being used, taking space away from where housing can be built. As a non-american, I believe that parking lots are immoral as well :)

It's not absurd. Yes, it's immoral that I am as wealthy as I am (relatively, on a global scale), and it's immoral that I get to eat so much better than others in the same society as I am in. It doesn't mean I'm going to do anything about it, it just means on that axis, I am not a particularly moral person.

It's not a fact that it's immoral. It being immoral is _your_ judgement. If someone else thinks it's not immoral, that is _just as legitimate_.

To take this further, everyone here has a computer. Obviously you don't use 100% of the cycles all the time, so it is immoral if you do not install a program that allows anyone else to use your unused cycles.

Yes there are power costs with 100% usage vs idle time but there are also cost of upkeep on a house.

This is not correct; purchasing real estate is obviously morally neutral.

Purchasing housing can be morrally neutral.

What you do with it (or, don't do with it) is not morally neutral. I believe that hoarding it, preventing others from living in or purchasing it, is immoral.

It is correct. Moral neutrality is a mental defense mechanism to avoid bad feelings. The vast majority of folks find it easier to rewrite their interpretation of events than tell themselves no.

No, because if there is not enough for other people they either are forced to get exploited by landlords or become homeless. Purchasing real estate is immoral, as is whole notion of rent-seeking through usurpation of unused land such that other persons cannot use it when you don't use it and occupy it.

That's probably why there was a second clause to their statement, which you appear to have ignored.

A fair point. I thought what I was saying was too obvious to expound further, but here goes:

Buying a house in order to leave it vacant is morally neutral. To wit,

Mike Murderer buys up real estate along the river and leaves it empty so that the dead bodies he stores inside are not discovered. Mike has acted immorally!

Mayor Susan convinces the city council to buy up real estate along the river and leave it empty to facilitate moving the residents there to higher ground to avoid expensive and dangerous seasonal flooding. Susan has acted morally.

But they both took the same positive action: purchasing real estate. This action was morally neutral.

As other people in this thread have correctly noted, it’s the justification not the action that has moral implications.

Better not leave for work or anywhere else then.

Worth looking up the difference between trespassing on property someone actively lives in, and "okupas" occupying otherwise empty buildings.

Once you understand the difference, you'd understand that you can continue living your life like normal :)

I don't see the difference. How many hours or days can one be away. 1 hour, 1 day, 1 year?

I don't think there is a clear "N amount of days away from the residence means you're not actively living there", the court would look at many factors.

For example, if it's evident the owner is intending to return, there is personal belongings, utility contracts in the owners name and such, courts would (probably) consider it your primary residence even if you take an extended leave from it.

On the other hand, if you're away for several months, there is no clear intent to return and you've removed all furniture/personal belongings, courts can think it looks like it isn't your primary residence anymore, especially if you own other properties that it seems you might be living in instead.

Like most issues in society, there isn't any clear dividing line and no guarantees. That's why we have the legal system we have after all, so nuances can be taking into consideration.

In what case does it make no difference to me, a person who bought or built a structure, that I can no longer use it and it has been stolen?

I'm not sure what the question is, could you reformulate that?

You said

>Worth looking up the difference between trespassing on property someone actively lives in, and "okupas" occupying otherwise empty buildings. Once you understand the difference, you'd understand that you can continue living your life like normal :)

I dont see how the duration between my visits means there is not impact on my life if someone steals my 2nd house. Im still out my savings, or retirement funds, or years of work it took to build the house.

Buying a car and purposefully not using it 24 hours a day as an Uber is immoral. I'll take yours when you leave it parked, okay? You can have it back when I'm done with it, probably when it needs major repairs because I'm not putting any money into it. As the owner of record, that's your problem.

It depends on the actual numbers, which usually don't support the fear coming from the media.

Absolutely. From the article:

Media reports have been instrumental in shaping the narrative around squatting, with stories of 'okupas' sometimes being sensationalised to highlight conflicts and drama.

This is the approach of the class privileged enough to own the media (literally or figuratively): shape, to their favor, the public's opinion & perspective of an issue that affects most people relatively little, if at all, via sensational media.

So let's now worry about killings, bombings, rapings, etc because there's not so many of them, right? Don't be that naïve.

In the US, people call CPS or the police on ten year olds playing unsupervised in a park or walking home from school in perfectly safe suburbs and towns because they believe the children will be kidnapped, raped and murdered. So yes, it is possible to worry too much about rape and murder as well.

See also: security theater, the TSA.

Unoccupied (for x or more months) second homes should be rented out, otherwise squatted in or burned to the ground, period. It doesn't matter if you disagree, Might Makes Right.

Be careful: Meme Magic works in both directions, and it is often difficult to detect its presence.

> burned to the ground

Which helps who exactly? Even squatting means that those houses will no longer be maintained and fall apart sooner or later which is how you end up having even more expensive housing long-term because of lower supply.

Higher taxation for uninhabited housing seems like an infinitely more sensible option...

> Which helps who exactly?

A seemingly simple question, but not really.

> Even squatting means that those houses will no longer be maintained and fall apart sooner or later which is how you end up having even more expensive housing long-term because of lower supply.

I would like for humanity to get together and figure out how to genuinely pursue an optimal experience for all people, but it seems like the most wealthy and powerful among us are "not very (genuinely) interested" in that. Okay then, Plan B it is, I say.

> Higher taxation for uninhabited housing seems like an infinitely more sensible option...

Agreed. That's a bit slow for my liking though, we've been kicking that can down the road for generations. I believe fear to be one of the most substantial motivators in existence, and there are a lot more of us then there are of them.

Homelessness is a problem, even having to pay rent to another person to have a place to live is a problem. Squatting is just a strategy to fight an inherently oppressive private property norm.

I would like to know what the limits of your application of this idea is because if I were to extend your argument that "even having to pay rent to another person to have a place to live is a problem.", this is what I get to:

I am currently buying a house, every month I pay money to the bank, this is very similar to having to pay rent. From my understanding of your logic, this would be a problem.

Further from that, I am building a house. I have to make payments to the builder(s) in order to have a place to live. Is this a problem?

I don't think I have a problem per se with the notion of borrowing money, if that's what you are asking about.

I personally don't have an issue with you finding people who help you with building the house that agree to do that for some payment.

Not endorsing the view, just sharing lines of reasoning I've seen.

Paying money to the bank implies you financed your purchase of a home. This is not necessarily a morally-neutral activity, it's in fact nuanced but we've done a good job of handwaving away the nuance in the last 4-5 generations of Americans.

A small vignette to explain: financing allows people to leverage their credit history and income to make larger purchases than they could otherwise afford. This increases the sticker price of purchasing a home, which prices out people with low credit or income. Anything that increases the price of housing effectively increases the price of rent, which limits peoples' abilities to save to actually purchase a home – it's a nasty cycle. One could argue that by participating in that system of financing, you're perpetuating it, but most people immediately dismiss this idea, ymmv.

Building a house, and paying people to build the house, is not a problem. You're exchanging value for labor and assets. You're de facto increasing the supply of housing.

So, I personally like the idea of someone working with a builder to build your house. I also like the idea of only ever buying something rather than financing it.

I also think that if that was only the option, housing prices would rise rather than fall.

Cash up front, I assume in an escrow so that buyer can't cheat builder and builder can't run away with the money.

This means that a someone who wants to build/buy a home is going to need around 150k saved up.

Assuming that 50k yearly salary and rent is immoral, they have to live at home until saved up. 1/3 put aside is 16.66k per year, 9 years before they can get a house.

In actuality, the cost is probably going to be more expensive as you would no longer have developments going up.

Not necessarily, you just might not build 100% of your eventual home immediately.

It used to be (i.e. prior to the postwar expansion of credit to the American consumer) pretty common to build a "starter home" that was intended to be expanded. You start with the basics (basement, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom) and expand modularly from there as your prosperity and needs allow.

In the midwest, they would start by building the foundation, basement, and a very modest first floor. As the family prospered, had children, and developed roots in the neighborhood, they'd expand the above-ground portion of the home in the summer months. You can find homes frozen at each stage of development from the pre-depression 1900s still around today, although they're of greater archaeological value today than housing stock value. A lot of present-day "colonial" housing stock in the Northeastern U.S. have evidence of this gradual accrual over the decades.

This idea of "build a whole mansion at once" was historically reserved for the truly wealthy, and has only been "practical" for a greater segment of society for the last 50 years (again, with the expansion of consumer credit, not because we can actually afford these things).

You could still choose to build things this older style. Our culture of "obtain everything all at once, immediately up to the limit of your purchasing power" is the main impediment. That, and building codes might frown on some earlier-phase iterations, though YMMV.

My ~150k is for a starter home. That is what a ranch 3 bedroom, 2 bath with kitchen/dining and living room, no basement goes for in my area, based on 1990's code.

Current code is more stringent.

I know that people used to add on, that is however going to be more costly in the long term. Think about heating and A/C system, rather than buy the system once and keep it for 15 years as you expand you need to keep redoing duct work and adding capacity.

You will end up with insulation and vapor barriers between two interior walls.

Plumbing and electrical will become interesting as well.

I grew up in the kinds of homes you are describing, I like them but the building style does have challenges.

I also like the idea of people putting down roots, however this in turn limits people's opportunities.

This also limits the type of housing, what would be required in order to build a duplex or townhouse? A condo/apartment building?

Part of the current green movement talks about getting rid of suburbia and condensing into more urban areas. This would be a direct opposition to that as you would need to buy a lot size that guarantees that you can grow.

> even having to pay rent to another

I'm curious how would you expect housing to stock to grow or even stay stable if nobody had to pay rent?

Would all housing be used owned by the state and assigned to individuals based on certain criteria (with huge amounts of inefficiency and corruption that such a system creates)?

It could grow either by people making their own houses on their own, or by them finding others who would help with this process, or by paying someone for the labor required for the house to get build.

I think that private property should not get nationalized.

Right, so basically you want the system we currently have?

No, I want for example to abolish private property of land and natural resources.

Fortunately, most citizens are not economically illiterate enough to support this ideology. Private ownership of land and natural resources is the foundation of 21st-Century economic prosperity.

No it's not. Private property created a world where 8 persons control as much wealth as the poorest half of humanity. This is not common prosperity, this is exploitation.

So you’d rather the poor be even poorer as long as the rich wouldn’t control as much wealth or didn’t exist at all?

No, I think no one should get exploited and oppressed and everyone should have an opportunity to develop to the heights of one's potential.

@TotalCrackpot, I completely agree. Thank you.

Are you willing to provide your address so we can stay at your place? It would be inherently oppressive if you don't.

There are homeless shelters where people can have shelter without paying rent.

I am living under my address, I am occupying that place, so I am not fine with providing my address. But I am fine with people living in abandoned houses.

How do you define abandoned? If I leave for 1 day is that abandoned? What about 1 week, 1 month or 1 year?

I think it depends on local customs and local agreements, it can differ. I guess I could consider a house abandoned if no one lives there for a year or 2. While for a mine, I think I would consider it abandoned the moment previous miners left it, such that other can get into the mine and mine some resource.

I'm a little confused. You said you want to get rid of private property but also your residence is occupied so I can't stay there. Who gave you the right to say that? If there is no private property it seems like we should be able to vote who can stay in your residence.

Occupation of bank-owned homes also causes a lot of trouble. I hope you never have to experience living next to squatters, as among other things, you might end up paying for their exaggeratedly high utilities.

> That is to say: it is a problem (the 500 - 1000 cases per year nationwide of occupation of people's homes is clearly problematic) but it's not a really widespread problem for most middle-class people (the vast majority of people even in the middle classes do not own totally unused property).

I don’t understand the point of trying to downplay or diminish this problem.

Is dividing the victims along arbitrary class lines and arguing that most victims are not “middle class” supposed to make it better? It’s a problem regardless of who owns the property.

> Is dividing the victims along arbitrary class lines and arguing that most victims are not “middle class” supposed to make it better?

The class lines aren't arbitrary: a squatter in someone's unused third vacation property or whatever is causing much less harm than a squatter claiming someone's only residence while they're out of town.

So yes, the dynamics of who it happens to can make it better or worse. The only reason that wouldn't be the case is if what you consider bad about it is a violation of abstract property owner rights, rather than the potential material harms.

I completely agree.

> Is dividing the victims along arbitrary class lines and arguing that most victims are not “middle class” supposed to make it better?

That was in reply to the parent comment, arguing this is a serious problem primarily for the "not-so-rich middle class" that is being ignored because we falsely imagine it's mainly a problem for banks and rich people.

In fact, the data suggests this really is primarily a problem for commercial landlords and property speculators, and the risks for typical homeowners is very low.

This is in sharp contrast to most media coverage, and the parent comment, which paint a picture of substantial risks that your personal home will be taken over by squatters. That is not true. The real level of risk to the average Spaniard is very roughly 2x the risk that they'll be murdered this year - not absolutely zero, but not very far from something you'd worry about day-to-day in Spain.

Neither huge amount of somewhat legit cases of 'unused', nor media coverage doesn't make it right. I also wouldn't easily compare the murder count (which are hardly underreported) and occupation count (which most likely are, because legal way is way more expensive and lengthy).

> I also wouldn't easily compare the murder count (which are hardly underreported) and occupation count (which most likely are, because legal way is way more expensive and lengthy).

The legal process is definitely lengthy for actual occupation (usurpación) where the average eviction time is now but for people breaking & entering into your personal residence (allanamiento) it's not at all. If you can demonstrate this (easy enough: show you're the owner & empadronado, ask the neighbours to vouch for you, or show the utility bills all have your name on them) then it's clear allanamiento and that means there's no judicial order or further investigation required and the police can (and do) forcibly remove & arrest people _immediately_. It's a very nice clear-cut crime.

Basically the strong legal protections for personal dwellings cut both ways: they protect okupas who make somebody's empty property their legal residence, but they'll also strongly protect you & your own home if it's your legal residence.

There's more detailed background from an actual law firm on that here: https://vecindia.es/desalojo-okupas/cuanto-tardan-en-desaloj...

Given all that, I'd be quite surprised if allanamiento is underreported at all.

> Neither huge amount of somewhat legit cases of 'unused', nor media coverage doesn't make it right.

I'm not saying it's right, or that the problem doesn't exist. There are a small number of real cases of individual's homes being invaded. Even in other cases, property ownership does need to function reliably for commercial properties, and although owning empty properties may be problematic this is not a very good solution to that at all. I would be very happy to see usurpación cases resolved much quicker, and to increase property taxes on empty properties to reduce speculation instead.

That said, I do think that:

* The media hype about it is overblown, and for most people who worry about it (and some people worry about this a lot!) it's really not a serious risk.

* Political discussion & action related to it is frequently overblown for political advantage, and that's why some people think losing your home and being unable to recover it is far more common than it is.

* The victims here are generally large business and property speculators. The law should definitely protect those groups too, yes, but the strictness & speed of legal & police procedures should be proportional to the damage to the victims, and an empty shop being used by okupas is clearly less problematic than having somebody take over your actual home.

* Media hype (and political discussion) is overblown from both sides. That's partially what keeps the left in the news because otherwise they don't have much to offer against capitalism unless maybe Hamas puts some show. And carefully calculated policies and solving problems is not rock-n-roll enough.

* The victims here are everyone who okupas can reach, the limit is not some imaginary moral boundary of the trespasser, but a sheer cost/reward balance. And it's not obvious where you should draw the line. Is a small shop worth it less than a relatively well off private citizen? How small a shop should be to be protected?

Arguably in the countries where the banks are protected the private citizens look even more protected, but I'm not going into that.

Thanks for the info. It's not that widespread, yes, but due to its gravity it's intoxicating and polarizing the public.

From what I observe, the amount of cases could have dropped down because many people choose to not buy or somehow shield their property (sometimes just filling windows with bricks, for example, which looks weird). So I'm not sure it's because the okupas/govt/police somehow changed the direction, it's just like the people get better at protecting themselves.

Btw, bying an apartment in Barcelona costs you 10% tax already, that probably discourages most speculation (and the prices have been stagnant for a couple of years).

> Btw, bying an apartment in Barcelona costs you 10% tax already, that probably discourages most speculation (and the prices have been stagnant for a couple of years).

I'm not too sure those measures deter those who are filthy-rich. Would you agree that it can be viewed as the cost of doing business... and, worst — that it could price out small competitors (allowing for the formation of cartels of big landlords)?

nope, there's no cartels of big landlords in Bcn, that's a leftist fantasy

Maldita is a joke. Sometimes they don't know how to read data, other times they actively engage into twisting numbers. Every time they debunk something, you can be sure that they debunked is actually true. I remember a case where the claim was something like "there's 300.000 cases of <something>" and they debunked it with "FALSE, bla bla bla bla bla"... and when you read the fine print, it was not 300.000 cases but 298.000 cases. They are 1000% unreliable.

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