Squatting is a problem, period. Doesn’t matter if the house is empty or not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just build more houses and then nobody will care.
Just trying to understand how this right to shelter works.
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.
There's no free land, but there is cheap land, especially in deserts. Simply owning land might not be as nice as you imagine
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
Yes there are power costs with 100% usage vs idle time but there are also cost of upkeep on a house.
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.
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.
Once you understand the difference, you'd understand that you can continue living your life like normal :)
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.
>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.
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.
See also: security theater, the TSA.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
I think that private property should not get nationalized.
There are homeless shelters where people can have shelter without paying rent.
Be careful: Meme Magic works in both directions, and it is often difficult to detect its presence.
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...
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.