Protest against housing crisis in Spain

GuestFAUniverse

I hope people vote accordingly and do not forget who dismissed the decree.

jadermcs

The solution to house prices increase is to build more houses, but the protests demand to freeze prices instead of building more. Are they dumb or is it intentional to keep their cities small and exclusive?

pj_mukh

This now just looks like YIMBY’s screwing over old ladies out of their homes. I empathize with a universal right to housing, but is that a universal right to a house in East village NY, Marina SF or El Retiro Madrid? For everybody? Or only for those who got in, in the 90’s? How does that seem fair? These details have to be worked out before you can get the public to commit to one of these and just rioting in response will only get you so far.

samuel

This article does an abysmal job of describing the situation, but I hope a skeptical reader will realize that something is very odd when they notice that these protests are directed against the opposition and not against the government.

ErneX

The current government has only worsened the situation and now somehow they want to be the champions of fixing after almost 8 years in power. They are not fooling anybody.

ricardobayes

It's difficult to comment on news like this, if there was a good, fast solution, it would have been enacted by now. I do somewhat agree that more renter protection is unlikely to solve much. Spain had years of complete eviction bans, meaning even if you completely default on your rent, the owner couldn't do anything. Even if a court ordered removal, enforcement was impossible. This lady was living in a very desirable, central area of Madrid, paying peanuts for rent. Think Central Park rent for $500. The spanish public generally doesn't want to, "build more", as they reject megacities. One of the biggest problem is there are no good, viable second and third-tier cities that have jobs. While there are very cheap places on the countryside, no one wants to live there as there are no jobs. A complex solution would help: Canada-style ban of non-resident ownership, at least in stressed areas, "building more", but not in Madrid, Barcelona or Valencia, and in parallel, boost small businesses and remote work to help de-centralize living. However I don't think any country really cracked the code how to fix housing.