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Comment by ghostDancer | Hacker News Reader

In Spain there are lots of empty apartments, from the bubble and IIRC are more than 2 million empty , but prices are still going up, most of the market is on the hands of foreign funds who are emptying the cities with their prices. There's a lot of speculation with housing in Spain. Not to talk about the campaign in the media about squatting, sowing fear continuously. The supply is artificially being held by the owners.

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Then the government should make it less attractive for speculators to hold those homes, e.g. by introducing taxes for empty properties. And on the other hand they could make it more attractive for them to rent them out, e.g. by improving owner's rights.

Introducing speculator taxes and then making it more attractive to be a speculator (landlord) just means that speculators pass the speculator taxes on to renters.

Letting people get rich off holding people's basic needs for ransom is never going to be part of the solution to homelessness.

A tax on empty properties can't be passed onto renters.

It is when its passed onto their landlord when a new landlord buys it to rent it out.

No, its not. And if you think about the effect of the tax on supply and demand you’ll see why pretty quickly, I would think.

The problem imho is that a lot of people, not only "the very rich" but also some very "middle class" people/families, have access and can make use of houses as investment vehicles, but houses (aka shelter) is also a primary need for humans. If you hold share of a publicly traded company, you can hold it forever until you think somebody can accept to buy it from you at a price that you like, hoping to make a profit if such price is high enough, and nobody will suffer from this process. But with houses, there is always somebody in absolute need for it, which means that either they will accept to rent it to a price that covers extra taxes applied by the state to you (as a landlord), or they will try to squat if they can not. It's really hard to enforce the right set of disincentives that are wide enough to convince people not to "hold" but at the same time does not apply to too many people but mostly the ones that are using houses as investments.

The whole thing is complicated by being geographically unequal: for example I think even Spain is full of affordable houses, only they are not in Madrid or Barcelona or Valencia, which is where people really want to live. So if you have a second house in an unpopular town you actually have not much - thus you are not rich - and you have often an empty house (nobody wants to rent/buy it) which is an easy target for squatters, and therefore you will become "one of the poor people ruined by squatters", while othen you are somebody who accepted the narrative that using houses as investment was a good idea, both an investment house cheaply in a town that never attracted enough people, thus "lost the game" and is now also losing the house to squatters...

> The problem imho is that a lot of people, not only "the very rich" but also some very "middle class" people/families, have access and can make use of houses as investment vehicles, but houses (aka shelter) is also a primary need for humans.

As an example, we bought our house for $280k in Iowa seven years ago. It held steady for a bit, but jumped up to close to $400k shortly after Covid. YIMBY policies in my area could cost me as much as $120k of wealth that I now possess. What percentage of home owners are going to willingly give up tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in wealth to support more equitable housing? Even for a liberal, $120k is a hell of a lot of money and it's only growing year after year under our current system. With that equity continuing to grow, maybe I have some hope of retiring in the future? That's a hell of a lot to put on an individual to ask them to support more equitable housing. Other people's suffering is their only chance to not suffer constantly until they die. And when you think in terms of not just my suffering but my family suffering, it becomes a lot easier to slip into NIMBYism.

How do you decouple primary housing from investment without fucking over literally millions of homeowners who have done the best they can under the existing rules? It's something I'm personally interested in. But I also don't want to be working until the day I die. What is the compromise that satisfies the majority of people?

End foreign owned property, tax vacant property harshly, and offer discount loans to first time owners... there are plenty of options to reduce the pressure on the unhoused. Your house isn't a business and does not continuously create value for the community, why should you be guaranteed profits and have advantage over everyone that cones after you?

Those three points wouldn’t do anything significant but change how property companies organize themselves perhaps. only building more housing to meet the demand would cool prices.

The most building would do is cool off the market and limit future gains. I believe only a proper economic crash is capable of smashing prices at this point.

> e.g. by introducing taxes for empty properties

So the speculators set up a company, buy the property and list it on AirBnB at several times the market price. Now it's not an empty property, it's a business. Business is slow so they only have to bother with guests during spikes in demend.

To get around this, we'll establish complex municipal regulations around AirBnB, with steeply escalating punitive fines.

https://airbtics.com/airbnb-regulation-in-barcelona/

And then you list it illegally anyhow.

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