The measure was one of a dozen unveiled on Monday by the country’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, as the government seeks to quell mounting anger over housing costs that have soared far beyond the reach of many in Spain.
Sánchez sought to underline the global nature of the challenge, citing housing prices that had swelled 48% in the past decade across Europe, far outpacing household incomes.
“The west faces a decisive challenge: to not become a society divided into two classes, the rich landlords and poor tenants,” he told an economic forum in Madrid.
The proposed measures include expanding the supply of social housing, offering incentives to those who renovate and rent out empty properties at affordable prices and cracking down on seasonal rentals. In Spain just 2.5% of housing is set aside for social housing, a figure that lags drastically behind countries such as France and the Netherlands, said Sánchez.
Can we get this in Washington State please.
Spotted the savvy European investor.
I hope there is an exemption for people buying houses that they reside in full time. This type of policy is incredibly anti-immigrant otherwise.
Non-EU residents. Right there in the title. If you are residing in Spain then you are a de facto EU resident.
Ffs.
Spain is adjacent to non-EU areas. Gibraltar is technically British and Morocco definitely isn’t in the EU… and when you go a couple of countries further there’s loads more.
Point being, no idea why you think Immigrants only come from the EU. Dominicans love moving to Spain… as do loads of people in countries of latin america.
Yeah, it would only apply to people from outside the EU that also don’t reside in Spain.
Source (in spanish): https://www.eldiario.es/economia/ventajas-fiscales-alquiler-asequible-limites-extranjeros-no-residentes-sistema-publico-garantias-nuevas-medidas-vivienda-gobierno_1_11959199.html
Yeah, that’s what I thought too. But also it says “resident” so I guess you don’t have to be a citizen to buy a house?
At some point you wonder, why not just prevent them from owning homes if they’re not citizens? Kick em out and tell them to come back when they’re EU citizens, problem solved.
At some point you wonder, why not just prevent them from owning homes if they’re not citizens?
Money. Foreign investment also appreciates the value of domestic property owners as well. Aka fuck you I got mine syndrome.
Yeah bur a 100% tax is tantamount to a ban.
Just for those not wealthy enough to not care
Even wealthy people aren’t going to buy a home they can only sell for half the price they paid.
I think you underestimate what it is to have so much money that you don’t have to care about how it’s spent. A billionaire could spend a million a day for three years and still be left with millions because of the interest they make.
The number of people who have so much money that they don’t have to care about how it’s spent are infinitesimal.
That number is increasing
Its quite clever way to do it though. Straight out ban would easily rise more opposition because it seems more severe and this way there might be some income too so its likely easier to suggest.
Just make it so the dwelling has to be occupied by the owner for 9-10 months a year. Every month it is unoccupied, the owner has to pay the value of a monthly rent as tax multiplied by the number of months it has been unoccupied -->
month 1 = rent x 1 month 2 = rent x 2 month 3 = rent x 3
I think that’ll be hard to ignore for most landlords - foreign or not.
How do you confirm whether the property is occupied?
Customs
I don’t understand.
Everytime you leave the country you need to have your passport stamped at customs, and eventually you’ll need to re-enter the country and show your ID or passport. At re-entry, you can be checked. This plus a yearly in-person check mandate can make sure you stay there.
Yeah… Which customs? I can just step in a car and drive trough multiple countries without ever needing to show my passport.
The comment I replied to isn’t really talking about foreign ownership, but ownership in general. That is, owners need to live in the properties they own or pay taxes. Obviously many locals have never left the country and never cleared customs.
Additionally, most countries don’t bother to stamp your passport anymore, a kiosk just scans the chipped page in your passport and takes your photo.
Finally, a yearly in-person mandate to check where people are living is absolutely bonkers. Absolutely no one wants the gestapo coming to their house every year to confirm that they really live there.
The post is about non EU residents right? Spanish citizens might own multiple properties and I cannot stop that. And also, nobody is going to come and check if you live there, all that’s necessary is a physical letter to the location requiring you pass by a police office or citizen’s bureau in person and identify. Literally 1 minute’s worth of a job. And it would only be for non-EU residents.
This comment chain is not specifically about non-eu residents.
Letters do not confirm where someone lives. It would be trivial to work around that.
This might shock you, but if you announced a law whereby everyone has to go to the police station once a year to confirm where they live there would absolutely be blood in the streets. It’s a ridiculous over reach and a gross invasion of privacy.
In tax legislation the goal is to be broad based, which means easy to administrate and difficult to avoid.
The solution to this problem which people have been talking about since the 1940s is land tax. Tax the fuck out of all land, but allow people to apply for an exemption for 1 property. It will never become law because the powerful people that make law own property and do not wish to pay tax.
How does the state know which house you occupy / where you live?
They do not.
Brutal, I love it
I’d have assumed that the majority of landlords were EU citizens… then remembered about Brexit.
That’ll upset the brexiters, and they’ll howl about the mean Spanish government…
I remember back during the Leave Referendum that many Briton pensioners living in Spain voted Leave “To keep the Spaniards from entering ‘our’ country” and later were very suprised that they themselves were also impacted and had to apply to live in Spain (and apparently after the end of the transition period some even got expelled from Spain because they couldn’t be arsed to register and became illegal immigrants).
On the surface it seems like a good idea: if the home isn’t going to be your primary residence you pay extra—a lot extra—to curtail a housing shortage caused in part by foreigners buying and inflating.
That said… if the issue there is anything like it is here in the states, the buyers will have more than enough capital to buy anyways and just pass the cost along to tenants… making the problem worse?
See below, the idea is for rent control to take care of that, which is part of the package. Along with the government supposedly planning to build their own company to compete.
If they were able to manage getting this implemented, which is dubious for political reasons, it probably would work, but it’d take at least a few years and there are many ways the increasingly anarchocapitalist conservative forces around it can disrupt it. We’ll see. As a model for other places… it’s probably a good place to start looking, it just needs a legal framework where you can deploy all of it (rent control, direct government development and rental, fiscal pressure on speculative property purchases). Just one piece alone probably won’t do it.
rent control
Rent control is such a poor substitute for building massive amounts of social housing. I wish it would stop taking up oxygen in the debate already so that we can focus on effective solutions instead
You’re literally replying to a comment about rent control being part of a multi-pronged approach, one that INCLUDES building massive amounts of social housing, not a substitute for anything.
Sounds like you want building to be the ONLY prong, which wouldn’t work for anyone except the developers that would get to build and thus profit more.
Literally just building more houses does work though.
Not in itself, no. With no additional levers, developers will just build more luxury condos and “investment properties”, since that’s what’s most profitable.
You need to be MUCH more specific than just “build more houses” to solve the affordable housing crisis.
There’s significantly more empty homes already than there are unhoused people, but unaffordable homes existing doesn’t help.
Science has shown that even just building high-end housing will lower housing prices across the board: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119022001048?via=ihub
They take the money from the rich people, lowering prices in the middle class, lowering prices for the lower class.
That’s one study specific to the circumstances of Helsinki, not a universally agreed on law of commerce.
