In Spain they are tee-ing up politicians as landlords
Easy hits, the landlords, always, everywhere, and eternally popular
The rationale for gold is clearer, that be the ticket to go another way when the crowds go mad
Or when the rulers enabled a crisis, and then seize assets to pay for mistakes - standard protocol
Shall likely happen to gold in easy reach when the time is ripe in enough domains. Soon afterwards, we hit bottom and go flatline for however long. A guess.
bloomberg.com
Barcelona’s Latest Affordable Housing Tool: Seize Empty Apartments
Fill vacant rental units with tenants or we will take over your properties, the city is warning landlords.
Feargus O'Sullivan
July 16, 2020, 12:02 AM GMT+2
Barcelona is deploying a new weapon in its quest to increase the city’s available rental housing: the power to force the sale of empty properties.
This week, the city’s housing department wrote to 14 companies that collectively own 194 empty apartments, warning that if they haven’t found a tenant within the next month, the city could take possession of these properties, with compensation at half their market value. These units would then be rented out by the city as public housing to lower-income tenants, while the companies in question could also face possible fines of between €90,000 and €900,000 ($103,000 and $1,003,000), according to Spanish news outlets.
The plan builds on previous measures in the city to fill empty apartments. Since 2016, it has been legal for municipalities in the Catalonia region, which includes Barcelona, to take control of properties that have been left without tenants for more than two years. The cities can then rent them as affordable housing for a period of between four and ten years before returning them to their owner’s control. This measure, however, has only ever been used in a few cases, and still requires the city to return the properties. Now, using a legal tool approved by the Catalonia region in December 2019, Barcelona will have expanded power to actually buy the apartments outright by compulsory purchase, at 50% of market rate.
Barcelona has been struggling with empty homes for some years now. As Spain’s property market tended towards stagnation after the financial crisis of 2007 to 2008, some companies that own multiple properties are allowing their units to sit empty while waiting for the market to revive. With many units held after repossessions by banks — including Spain’s national “ bad bank” SAREB, which owns 149 empty properties in Barcelona — there has been a tendency for companies to neglect their portfolios, thinking of them primarily as assets to be managed rather than an essential public resource. This has led to high rates of vacancies and neglected properties in some areas of the city, places where Narcopisos —“Narco-flats,” where drug dealers and users trade and consume narcotics — have taken over homes left empty. |
