Hacker News Reader

> Madrid has 3.4Mln people and is the second-largest city in the EU. How big do you want it to become?

Bigger, obviously. Because the number of people who want to live in Madrid or visit it is higher than that. This can create a lot of economic surplus. Part of that surplus can be used to pay off locals (e.g. with housing in the newly built stock) so they win too.

The real problem, as far as I can tell, is that there's no socially accepted system for paying off locals. So locals end up resisting growth, because there's nothing in it for them except higher rents, and everyone loses.

Last time they touched the housing laws one of the brilliant things they did was to force the owner of the flat to pay the expenses for signing the leasing contract of their tenants, before that change this was paid by the tenant. What happened is the landlords switched from long term rentals to short term rentals because they did not modify that clause for those type of rentals, so the tenants got the worse outcome: rental contracts of 11 months instead of 5 years, which also opens the door to massive rent increases every 11 months or eviction instead of just the inflation rate of the year under the other contracts.

They also keep increasing the difficulty of evicting non paying tenants, taking a lot of rentals out of the market because owners are simply afraid of not being able to evict a non paying tenant, or making prices increase to account for that risk.

> was to force the owner of the flat to pay the expenses for signing the leasing contract of their tenants

The reality is, anyone renting in Spain can readily tell you things don't work this way, if you query this, they go with someone else. Tenants paying the contract fee has an enormous momentum and it's way to easy for landlords to ignore it, in our hot housing market.

Like I said, in order to avoid this mandate they turned their rentals into short term ones, the law had a loophole which made everything worse.

So the problem is the loophole, not the fact that they tried to do something good for tenants.

It’s been years since that, sheer incompetence.

Build more and higher. Often times people don't want to build higher although they really need to, I hope Madrid is not one of those places.

Ban AirBnB's and ban estate funds from owning homes.

Nothing wrong with estate funds owning homes as long as you keep building. They will invest at slight profits and that is why to give flexibility that renters need.

Just need to prevent them from hoarding land or delaying building.

They have to make money so that means yearly price increases for the tenants. It's literal rent extraction while no actual value is being added.

Tokyo has almost 15 million and works very well as a city. China is building many new cities close to the big cities to allow housing. The young population needs to live in the big cities because where the jobs are. Freezing prices will not solve the problem for the vast majority of the people besides the ones that were lucky to born in the place before the freeze.

You keep building until everyone has a house. There is no such thing as "too big".

The Dutch government designed entire cities and reclaimed land from the sea in the 1970s and it's already full. Human civilization is endless growth or death.

I also reject "just building more", at least in already too big cities. I think a more viable long-term approach would be to foster the economy in such way that creates more jobs in smaller cities. Spain needs cities like "Düsseldorf" or "Austin".

I am sceptical of this kind of central planning. Fighting against organic growth and artificially trying to increase jobs in other cities seems like it would cost a lot more as a whole than trying to solve the problem where it actually exists.

You are right to be sceptical and should be. However in this particular case, what we see today, is exactly the outcome of central planning, from the previous regime that ended in the 70s, which effectively decimated industry on the countryside and forced everyone to live in large cities.