In my opinion, this research is very biased: Looking at the first 5 questions [1] I see a materialistic context that channels the answer towards a materialistic view of happiness, where of course money is key.
Now, let's take the Aristotelian definition of happiness: It is about doing good and matching one's nature with one's actions. Then I would design questions like:
- Do you feel that your life is interconnected with the lives of others?
- When you reflect, do you feel that your life is what it should be?
- Are you satisfied with your life?
- In your daily life you do things out of obligation that do not correspond to your true nature?
- etc.
It all depends on what definition of happiness you take, and the one selected by the sponsors of the work I guess is not mine.
The questions used are only biased towards money, in so far as you believe that the ideal life requires materialistic goods, that excellent conditions require money, etc.
Aristotle by the way, did not believe that people with insufficient means could ever be as happy/good as (read; experience levels of eudoimonia commensurate with) freeborn males with plentiful means; and he was big on "natural slavery", which the Stoics disagreed with.
All Spaniards are entitled to enjoy decent and adequate housing. The public authorities shall promote the necessary conditions and shall establish appropriate standards in order to make this right effective, regulating land use in accordance with the general interest in order to prevent speculation.
It does not mean you have the right to live in a flat en La Castellana for whatever you want pay. It means the State has to implement policies to help people access housing.
Also, article 33 give citizens the right to private property. You cannot come squat in my house because article 33 should prevent it, even when article 47 exists.
Let's avoid considering outliers to maintain a balanced discussion.
While I don't believe anyone has the right to live in Castellana or the Royal Palace, it also wouldn't be fair to require someone to move to the desert to find a home.
Living in Spain, I have friends from both ends of the spectrum: those speculating with houses and those who cannot afford to buy one.
We can blame the okupas, calling them lazy if that suits you. But we are missing half the story if we don't consider the other end of the spectrum: people buying property purely for speculative investment. For example, consider the housing crisis in Majorca [1].
Since we have enough money to buy a house, it's easy to blame the okupas. However, you should ask yourself: How much would housing prices need to increase before I can no longer afford a home? What would I do with my kids in that situation?
Justice should be defended with a veil of ignorance about your personal situation. It's easy to talk about what is fair regarding housing if you own two or three properties. Talk to people, and you will understand how lucky you may have been.
> We can blame the okupas, calling them lazy if that suits you. But (...)
I think you are completely missing one of the main origins of okupas in Spain: organized crime involved in extortion schemes.
I personally witnessed a case where individuals took over a store lot previously occupied by a restaurant. As the story goes, the restaurant operator tried to negotiate lowering rent to no success, followed by spending many months not paying rent until they were evicted. As yet another retaliation tactic, the restaurant operator managed to find a kind of service where he arranged for a lawyer team supporting a group of indigents to take over the store space, report it as their home address, and declare squatter's rights. The indigents were day in day out involved in disturbs, all sorts of vandalism, assaulting passer-bys and patrons in neighboring stores, etc. Nasty bunch, they were even caught on film shitting in a sandbox of a kids playground nearby for absolutely no reason. The police came in every single time, but every single time their lawyers were a moment's away. It took a couple of years of due process and multiple court cases exhausting with the lawyer team exploiting all possible legal recourses until the okupas were kicked out. The landlord had to hire a round-the-clock security because the exact same indigents, once kicked out, repeatedly tried to invade the same space.
The street was packed with businesses. The restaurant was a business hoping to profit by taking over someone else's property against their will. Once their profiting scheme failed, they resorted to pull extortion schemes at the expense of every single person living in a 4 block radius.
You're here talking about greed as if the businesses trying to freeload off of everyone are social justice warriors, when all they were doing is trying to turn a profit by putting everyone around them in danger.
I’m not sure how they do it in Spain but in the US merely lowering the rent is not always realistic with the way financing values properties based on rent values (collected or not).
Housing is expensive because:
1. Progressive governments making incredibly difficult and expensive to build houses, apartments, etc.
- E. g. I'm trying to build a house since SEVEN YEARS ago. Do you know what's the financial cost of having the land sitting there for 7 years? Who do you think is going to pay for that? Not me: it will be whoever buys that house.
- E. g. the 2023 Housing Law making mandatory to offer 40% of the housing a lower prices. Since construction costs are fixed and very well-known by now, who do you think is going to subsidize that 40%? Correct: the other 60%.
2. Rental prices are up, and will be even higher, because landlords have no protection against quatters and default tenants. I have suffered the problem myself: I put out for rent the apartment were I used to live until a few years ago and the tenants only paid for the first month. Then it took me 18 months to kick them out. That apartment will not for rent until the law changes. There's MILLIONS of apartments in Spain like that. Protecting the landlords (eg kicking squatters and defaulters in 2 weeks instead of 2 years) would make one million apartments available immediately, bringing prices down.
Maybe the housing crisis is related to the lack of legal security that owners have, which severely reduced the offer and obviously increased the prices.
The housing law that the current government passed wasn’t very clever…
Your apartment is being squatted and you're selling it at a discount, not being prepared to navigate the legal landscape. The buyers evict the squatters, fix it up and list it at a higher than market price. They do this as a commercial enterprise.
> That logic also applies to demand. Why would you buy a house if someone can waltz in and...
The clear answer is you'd buy one if you know how to handle squatters. In other words, you are well connected and have enough capital to take preventive measures described in the article.
In other words, rich can get richer by having lengthy security apparatus to protect their property. Middle class investors, who might want to buy an extra house to have a stream of income from rents gets that ladder pulled away from them.
One might believe that renting itself should not exist and making money from housing is immoral. If so, let's pull that ladder away from everyone including the rich (though that won't end well since not everyone can be a homeowner).
Criminals who were behind the bars for 20 years, just came out and have nothing to buy a house with.
Families moving to another city for 1-2 years because one of the parents found a lucrative job assignment (I literally have some extended family members in this situation).
People who declared bankruptcy recently and cannot have any assets in their name by definition.
Grad students who are in a university town only for 1-2 years (I was one and I know dozens of my classmates who were in the similar situation).
and on and on. Society is just too complex to make everyone a homeowner. Lot of people need to rent.
> Criminals who were behind the bars for 20 years, just came out and have nothing to buy a house with.
Criminals who were behind bars for 20 years, just came out and have nothing to pay rent with either. This isn't logic.
We shouldn't be releasing people from prison with no way to house themselves because that's practically guaranteed to push them back into crime. Solutions to that unavoidably involve giving them housing in some way: if your solution gives them rent, all your solution does is add landlords as middlemen and ensure that criminals never become homeowners. Giving them housing that they can work to buy is a much better solution.
> Families moving to another city for 1-2 years because one of the parents found a lucrative job assignment (I literally have some extended family members in this situation).
Why can't they buy a house for 1-2 years? Why are you assuming that housing liquidity would remain just as bad as it is now, when rentals and speculation removing liquidity from the market?
> People who declared bankruptcy recently and cannot have any assets in their name by definition.
That's... not how bankruptcy works. Many bankruptcies do not result in homeowners losing their residences, because that's obviously bad, so there are options to not do that. You may not be able to buy a new one... but maybe that should change, i.e. if you're selling your house to buy a newer one, that should be allowed, even encouraged if you're downsizing.
> Grad students who are in a university town only for 1-2 years (I was one and I know dozens of my classmates who were in the similar situation).
See previous.
> and on and on. Society is just too complex to make everyone a homeowner. Lot of people need to rent.
Well, right now your examples just sound like lots of people are forced to rent by current systems which are designed to maintain rental properties as investments.
> Well, right now your examples just sound like lots of people are forced to rent by current systems which are designed to maintain rental properties as investments.
Rather, right now your arguments seem to be based on some idealized utopia with fancy assumptions - perfect liquidity in housing market without any friction of transaction costs, perfect society with ideal treatment of prison population, perfectly rich grad students who can buy housing etc. If such things were possible, other initiatives based on ideal human nature would have succeeded as well (eg. communism).
I will flip your argument back to you - show me a place where the system is NOT designed to maintain real properties as investments.
> Rather, right now your arguments seem to be based on some idealized utopia with fancy assumptions - perfect liquidity in housing market without any friction of transaction costs, perfect society with ideal treatment of prison population, perfectly rich grad students who can buy housing etc. If such things were possible, other initiatives based on ideal human nature would have succeeded as well (eg. communism).
No, this is just a perfect solution fallacy. We don't need perfect liquidity, frictionless transactions, or rich grad students to make this work. We need no landlords and no speculative investment in housing: the rest will take care of itself, due to basic free market principles because that's massively increasing supply with a demand that's bound by population. And it doesn't have to happen perfectly, just well-enough. If you don't believe in supply and demand I'm not sure you have much grounds for accusing me of communism.
> I will flip your argument back to you - show me a place where the system is NOT designed to maintain real properties as investments.
I am truly confused how you think this is flipping my argument back at me.
You were downvoted but you're hitting the nail on the head.
The housing problem is an issue of supply and demand. Currently demand is bigger than supply and that leads to problems, no matter what you do. Either renting prices go up until many people can't afford to rent anymore, or if some law is put into place such as restricting rents or reducing owners' rights, supply will become even smaller and demand even bigger.
To solve the housing crisis the government has to either decrease demand or increase supply, or both.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> We can blame the okupas, calling them lazy if that suits you. But we are missing half the story if we don't consider the other end of the spectrum:
I disagree. Two wrongs don’t make a right. You don’t have to put different people’s situations on to a spectrum and allow only one of them to be wrong and therefore anything the other person does is right.
It’s also disingenuous to pretend like all of the okupas are from desperate people who have no other choice, when there’s plenty of evidence that the okupas is being abused for extortion, crime, or just for fun.
If you can’t afford a home its still not justifying squatting. Just rent like everyone else in that situation the world over. At the end of the day homes aren’t priced to be impossible to afford for everyone or else they wouldn’t sell at all. You just might need a better job than the first one you can find. Afaik Spain seems to do better with producing housing to meet demand than the US or a lot of other places too.
> Consider laws restricting how many houses a person can own, or maybe an increasing property tax on each unit. These are good solutions.
So they set up a company and buy the property using the company. Pressure is always the answer, whichever tactics are used.
I understand the issue in Mallorca after visiting Mabella. Also the locals don't have to live on a holiday island, but they can elect pressure the speculators and their clients. Somehow this doesn't happen in Greece.
Until such laws are instated -if they ever are - then "theft" is very much an answer .
I'm sure smarter people than me here can come up with a good number of examples where you would agree that "condoning theft" is a good thing. Such ethical problems are never black and white.
Theft is a violation of property laws. If you recognize that property laws are in some senses arbitrary/designed to fit a purpose (which you seem to, since you are proposing changes to them) then I think you should also recognize that treating theft as a purely black and white topic does not make sense.
Not advocating for the burglary higher up the thread, still a shit thing to do so someone
I'm curious how you read that as an endorsement for that sort of behavior?
Your 'but indigenous peoples' reeks of point scoring behavior. If you wanted to explore that topic you'd be more specific. If you were engaging in good faith you might assume that I'm generally opposed to genocide. Taking an abstract point about theft and property laws to accuse me of endorsing genocide ('immoral barbarism') is not good behavior.
I didn't read it as an endorsement of theft, but defining theft as malum prohibitum, contingent on a time, place and legal system, is a flawed argument. Laws can be wrong. But the fact that a bad law or an unjust system bans theft does not make theft ok. Lots of bad laws enable theft (e.g. those enacted as post-justification for land theft), which also doesn't make it ok. No bad law can sanctify what is morally and universally wrong, and no rebellion against a bad law can sanctify it either. When we say a law is bad we mean: There is a larger moral framework in which it is unjust. Therefore the same is true in resisting bad laws: Resistance can't justify morally repugnant behavior. That was the point I was trying to make.
I didn't pick indigenous land theft to score points, but only because it's the most obvious example of some type of unregulated theft still being universally recognizable as wrong - and it's frequently brought up by many of the same people who make the case that other types of theft are in the service of justice.
Well HN's favored solution seems to be not caring that people are homeless until they start scaring rich people, at which point you lock them up in "mental health" institutions that are less about helping them and more about keeping them away from rich people.
My solution is not letting people own homes they don't live in, but that's going to crash a lot of rich people's investments, so we can't have that. Making sure the rich get richer is apparently more important than meeting citizens' basic needs.
So frankly, theft is the best answer currently available. I'd prefer they stole from the people actually causing the problem, the rich who buy up housing and make it unaffordable. But when they don't, maybe the middle class being stolen from shouldn't be so confused about why that's happening.
Ultimately I'm not sure why you don't have the same moral outrage about rich people buying up people's basic needs and holding them for ransom so they can get richer, as you do about poor people stealing to meet their basic needs.
I think people angry about squatters are thinking that squatters are squatting for political reasons, because for people angry about squatters, this is a political issue.
For squatters, this isn't primarily a political issue, it's primarily a survival issue.
Squatting in the summer house of a CEO does solve your survival need for shelter, but it leaves a bunch of your other survival needs unmet because you're far away from, for example, grocery stores, and don't have the resources that the CEO has to have staff deliver and prepare your food. So I'd guess that's why squatters aren't targeting these properties.
The narrative that squatters are being disingenuous about their political beliefs because they squat the wrong homes is really just a tool to paint squatters as disingenuous political activists. The reality is that while squatters might hold political beliefs, few people would choose to squat if they had other housing options. It's not a secure housing situation. Most squatters are squatting out of necessity not political motivations.
> So I'd guess that's why squatters aren't targeting these properties.
The primary reason they won't target homes of the rich or well connected is because they can afford to be in areas with private security that will make any squatting attempts a complete non-starter.
Thus squatters can only harm the middle class homeowner who can't afford such protection measures.
> The reality is that while squatters might hold political beliefs, few people would choose to squat if they had other housing options
Here in Seattle, time and time again, studies are done which show the majority of homeless, when offered shelter, turn it down and prefer to live on the streets. Which seems to completely contradict your claim that they would make use of housing options.
Maybe Seattle homeless are different than your homeless. I don't know why that'd be the case. The same people with the same political ideologies blame the cause of it on the same things, in both places, at least.
Interestingly, they've found the opposite effect in a number of places in Europe, which suggests that the Seattle homeless population really are quite different, or that there's something odd in how these sorts of policies are being implemented in Seattle. I suspect the latter: you're talking about temporary shelter accommodation, but the policy of Housing First is to give homeless people permanent flats and houses of their own. I can understand why people would not be interested in the former but would accept the latter.
There’s also the fact that compared to Europe, you can do quite a bit of hard drugs in public in Seattle and not really have a cop go after you over it. This also precludes shelters, since accepting the offer of shelter probably means accepting withdraw symptoms as well since you aren’t allowed to do drugs there.
Maybe the shelter comes with strings attached, like no booze on the premisses. This is a nonstarter for people living on the street where they can freely drink booze.
"We offered housing to people with complex pyscho-social circumstances on the condition that they will stop having those circumstances. And yet they continued to have them - this was unacceptable."
At least here in France, the "housing" they offer is just a mattress in a huge room with no intimacy and dangerous people around. Most homeless people are skeptical at first, but after getting robbed/assaulted they certainly will refuse temporary housing for the rest of their life.
If the authorities really cared about the homeless, they would requisition empty dwellings and assign them individually so people have a proper home to rebuild their life.
Sure, but does it not occur to them that property owners might be performing an important function such that a policy that causes most of them to leave landlording might worsen the situation of homeless people and other poor people?
Suppose the government instituted a rule that applies to any game developer and in particular to the developer's office or whatever structure he likes to be inside when he is developing games or meeting with the other developers working on the same game. The rule says that if the game developer leaves his office and fails to hire a security guard to watch the property, then 72 hours after the game developer's departure, anyone (including career criminals) have a legal right to take over the office (even if the developer's office is his home). Wouldn't that curtail -- possibly severely -- the quantity and the quality of new games developed in whatever jurisdiction the rule applies to? Or at least raise the price of games (to cover the cost of the security guards and to compensate developers for the hassle) with the result that some of the consumers who used to be able to afford to buy video games are now priced out of the market?
> Sure, but does it not occur to them that property owners might be performing an important function such that a policy that causes most of them to leave landlording might worsen the situation of the homeless and other poor people?
Sure, but I think most people feel stronger about helping people at the bottom of society, rather than the ones closer to the top.
Worst case scenario for the homeless, they remain homeless and have lesser life expectancy. Worst case scenario for the landlord with vacant properties losing their vacant properties, less wealth in the future.
> Suppose the government instituted a rule that applies to any game developer and in particular to the [...]
Yes, that'd be a terrible policy. Same if it applied to property. So luckily, there is nothing like that in Spain that works like you described it, regarding properties.
> Sure, but does it not occur to them that property owners might be performing an important function such that a policy that causes most of them to leave landlording might worsen the situation of homeless people and other poor people?
Yes, actually, that did occur to me, and when I put any thought into it at all I realized it made no sense whatsoever.
Owning things is not performing any function whatsoever. Landlords are leeches on society who remove much-needed resources and provide nothing.
Before you make the tired "but they provide homes" argument: no, builders provide homes.
Before you make the tired "but they make repairs" argument: that's a handyman, and a handyman generally does a better job and is not paid anywhere near as much as a landlord.
Before you make the tired "but not everyone can own homes" argument: the reason not everyone can buy homes is that our entire housing structure is based around making short-term home ownership and home ownership for cheaper than rent impossible. If you remove landlords from the equation, those incentives go away.
> Suppose the government instituted a rule that applies to any game developer and in particular to the developer's office or whatever structure he likes to be inside when he is developing games or meeting with the other developers working on the same game. The rule says that if the game developer leaves his office and fails to hire a security guard to watch the property, then 72 hours after the game developer's departure, anyone (including career criminals) have a legal right to take over the office (even if the developer's office is his home). Wouldn't that curtail -- possibly severely -- the quantity and the quality of new games developed in whatever jurisdiction the rule applies to? Or at least raise the price of games (to cover the cost of the security guards and to compensate developers for the hassle) with the result that some of the consumers who used to be able to afford to buy video games are now priced out of the market?
We have an actual reality we can talk about, we don't need bizarre hypothetical scenarios.
Nobody is saying that squatting is the solution we want. What I am saying is that if you refuse to address the actual problem, i.e. you refuse to get rid of landlords, then you can't be surprised when people whose disfranchisement you support decide to find solutions you don't like.
> > What is it about this issue that makes so many people wish to treat landlords harshly?
> Compassion.
I don't feel like that's the true motivation. Where is the compassion for the middle class worker who can just barely afford some house, just to have it stolen (see parallel threads in this discussion for accounts of that happening) then?
If it was actually compassion, we'd be advocating for the government to provide adequate services to all homeless, paid for by taxes with progressive taxation so the rich also pay into the solution.
> compared to how they see the people with a lot
As noted in parallel comments, the people with a lot are immune from having their property stolen/squatted because they can afford private security measures that make this impossible. The victims here can only be middle class property owners who can't afford private security to watch their property 24x7.
> If it was actually compassion, we'd be advocating for the government to provide adequate services to all homeless, paid for by taxes with progressive taxation so the rich also pay into the solution.
I think that is the solution which pretty much everyone who has compassion for the squatters is advocating for. I'm comfortable saying that almost nobody thinks squatting is a good solution to this problem.
The problem is, providing adequate services to all homeless, paid for by taxes with progressive taxation so the rich also pay into the solution, has to happen first, before you get rid of squatting protections. Because otherwise you're just taking away the bad solution and leaving no solution, for the people most harmed by the current situation. And mysteriously once the squatting protections are gone and property owners' problem is solved, homelessness stops being a conversation until the next time it causes a problem for a rich person.
You're noticeably vague on what you think "adequate services" means. I refuse to be that vague. There is one, and only one, solution to homelessness: homes. Not shelters, homes. Not mental health services (though that would be good, too), homes. Homes: places where you can have privacy and security and pets and the right to decide who gets to enter the space. Services that do not result in homeless people being in homes are not adequate.
Until I see a real solution to homelessness implemented I'm really not interested in solving the problems homelessness causes for better-off people. Solve homelessness, and those problems will likely go away on their own; if not we can talk about it then. But until then, I'm quite okay with society dealing with the ugly consequences of its ugly failure to provide homes for its people.
> But until then, I'm quite okay with society dealing with the ugly consequences of its ugly failure to provide homes for its people.
This ignores a fundamental characteristic of human nature. If you want people to help you out, you can't screw them over.
While I don't know anything about the legislative process in Spain, I guess it is not too different from elsewhere, so you probably need broad support from the masses (middle class) to make big changes.
We already established (elsewhere in this discussion) that the rich don't feel any impact from squatting. They have private security forces, so it is a non-issue to them.
So if we want the government to provide for adequate services, middle class support is needed. If we allow all middle-class property to be stolen by squatters, there will be zero support from the middle class to provide any help to the thieves. Like it or not, basic human nature.
> This ignores a fundamental characteristic of human nature. If you want people to help you out, you can't screw them over.
This is a totally naive approach. I have 0 hope that the rich will "help us out" no matter what we do--rich people don't become rich by being generous. Either we use our majority to make them be productive members of society and pay their fair share, or we get nothing from them. This idea that we're going to concede to them on a few issues and they'll suddenly stop hoarding resources is a total fantasy.
> We already established (elsewhere in this discussion) that the rich don't feel any impact from squatting. They have private security forces, so it is a non-issue to them.
I disagree. The middle class has largely been disfranchised from owning the homes they live in, so the idea that there's some massive section of the middle class that owns second homes they leave empty doesn't hold much water. The people you're talking about aren't middle class.
> So if we want the government to provide for adequate services, middle class support is needed. If we allow all middle-class property to be stolen by squatters, there will be zero support from the middle class to provide any help to the thieves. Like it or not, basic human nature.
Thank you for the strategic advice, but no thanks. This strategic advice you're giving sounds suspiciously like you trying to represent rich people as middle class, and represent rich people's goal of enforcing property rights as a step toward achieving goals that you don't even support. That may not be your intent--for all I know, you completely support the progressive taxation and regulation of landlordism necessary to provide (free) homes for the homeless. But if that's the case I think you're being naive: the promise that if we just give the rich people what they want they'll magically become generous and start giving back has been part of the conversation for decades, and those promises are never kept.
> > If you want people to help you out, you can't screw them over.
> This is a totally naive approach.
I would've thought this was the entirely uncontroversial part of my premise!
Are you seriously saying that you feel the way to get people to help your cause is to screw them over?
We're going to fundamentally disagree there. The whole premise of politics is to find ways to make alliances to achieve goals. If you make most people hate your cause, you won't get very far.
> the promise that if we just give the rich people what they want they'll magically become generous and start giving back has been part of the conversation for decades, and those promises are never kept.
Of course. That's just a variant of trickle-down economics, which is nonsense. The rich will keep it all very happily and never give anything back.
> The people you're talking about aren't middle class.
And yet, they must be. The actual rich are immune from house occupations. Their houses are either in private enclaves where you can't possibly get in, or in the case of standalone houses they have private security coverage where you can't possibly get in.
This is how it is in the US. I realize the article is about Spain, so perhaps the very rich act different in Spain and they just let their multiple properties sit unguarded for long times.
> Are you seriously saying that you feel the way to get people to help your cause is to screw them over?
No, I'm saying that we don't need rich people to help our cause, because non-rich people are the super majority.
> And yet, they must be. The actual rich are immune from house occupations. Their houses are either in private enclaves where you can't possibly get in, or in the case of standalone houses they have private security coverage where you can't possibly get in.
There's a lot of rich between "private enclave with security force" and middle class that can't afford a second home to sit empty that you're ignoring.
Sure, multibillionaires are above it all. But I think you're drastically underestimating how rich one has to be to have even one empty home. If you own the home you live in you're already on the upper side of middle class. And if someone breaks into the house you live in, there's no place in the world where that person has legal protections.
> No, I'm saying that we don't need rich people to help our cause, because non-rich people are the super majority.
So, we agree on that.
We just have different perceptions of who "the rich" are.
A software engineer making $100K/yr (in a low cost of living part of the US, not in silicon valley) is not "the rich", but these people often have multiple apartments. I know first hand since many my of my friends are in this demographic.
> Sure, multibillionaires are above it all.
It doesn't take a multibillionaire to own more than one house/apt. It just takes a middle class income person in many parts of the country.
> And if someone breaks into the house you live in, there's no place in the world where that person has legal protections.
Ended up watching a few news reports from Spain to understand these home invasions better.
Here's one example where an 80 year old woman left the house she was actively living in for only two days to visit her son elsewhere. After coming back two days later the house had been invaded. The police say they can't do anything. That they supposedly have to wait 24 hours (then changed to 48 hours) and start a judicial process. Even though this was her primary residence and was only gone two days.
> I don't feel like that's the true motivation. Where is the compassion for the middle class worker who can just barely afford some house, just to have it stolen (see parallel threads in this discussion for accounts of that happening) then?
If you have someone trying to break into the house you live and stay in, you don't call them "okupas", it's trespassing/breaking and entering. One quick police call and you'll get help to have them thrown out.
The squatting/"okupas" thing is about occupying otherwise vacant properties.
Being offered one night in a shelter that won't let you and your wife sleep in the same room is not a good faith example of being offered housing. It's not at all surprising that people prefer living on the streets to sleeping in a crappy shelter.
> > The reality is that while squatters might hold political beliefs, few people would choose to squat if they had other housing options
> Here in Seattle, time and time again, studies are done which show the majority of homeless, when offered shelter, turn it down and prefer to live on the streets. Which seems to completely contradict your claim that they would make use of housing options.
Shelters aren't homes.
Can they store their things there and reasonably expect they won't be stolen? Can they have pets? Can they have privacy?
Would you stay in a homeless shelter? I mean, come on. The fact that anyone at all says yes to staying in these places shows just how bad staying on the streets is.
> Well HN's favored solution seems to be not caring that people are homeless (...)
I think you're not realizing that "homeless" and "okupas" are completely separate problems, and "okupas" in Spain are typically criminal organizations dedicated to pulling extortion schemes.
I'm talking about lawyer-types riding in BMWs which get a hold of indigents to invade a space, and proceed to demand "compensation" from property owners to "convince" said indigents to walk out.
This is not new or rare. It's a Spanish twist on the old protection rackets, and one which only exists because useful idiots convinced themselves that siding with organized crime networks is somehow benefiting society.
In his book "Collapse," Jared Diamond speculates about the cutting down of the last tree on Easter Island and how this event might have contributed to the civilization's downfall.
Might someone in the future ponder who initiated the last airline for dogs?
Maybe if we were to re-employ horses in the economy we just need horse/AI centaurs (with waldos[0] based on lip/tongue manipulation)? They've got plenty of sensorimotor and perception skills (consistent with more cerebellum); just a little low on natural reasoning ability (or for that matter, any prefrontal cortex).
y recognizing a face
y moving around in space
y judging people's motivations
n catching a ball[1]
y recognizing a voice
n setting appropriate goals
y paying attention to things that are interesting
y perception
y attention
y visualization
y motor skills
y social skill[2]
I agree with you, they have a big impact on several levels: noise, landscape, soil, wildlife and even local economy (would you like to go on a rural escape to a beautiful mountain village full of roads and metal giants)?
Where I live in Spain there are several associations trying to prevent the installation of wind turbines in many of the beautiful mountains that are otherwise going to be industrialised [1].
I recommend joining local associations if you want to prevent wind turbines from being installed on your home.
Yes, but first you have to go through a period of 1 month, then the final change of metabolism occurs, your age is frozen and you will never increase it.
>> To lose weight long term we need to fix whatever caused the regulating machinery to malfunction as we can't really eat less (over long term).
Hi, why do you say this? I mean I was a glutton (and still am), but I have been able to reduce the amount of food eaten by skipping dinner as a way of eating less. I've been at it for 2 years now, not long term maybe but medium term and I have no intention of stopping given the benefits I'm having.
I lost about 15kg last year over the span from August to December. That was a lot faster then expected, but the primary change I made was to cut out a lot of empty calories in favor of defined meals: i.e. I drink a lot of coffee, so I cut out the milk. I moderated morning cereal down to an exact serving suggestion and a specific amount of milk. Cut out having toast as snack food, cut out sour dough bread (which is absurdly dense). Reduced rice serving sizes.
And honestly? With those habits changed, I'd say I basically don't notice the difference. I'm not dieting now, and it's actually taken some effort to stop losing weight (which I just had a look at my calorie tracker app and realized accounting for thermic effects probably explains why 2750 naive calories is closer to 2275 if I'm targeting 120-150g of protein per day since now I chase muscle gains because it turns out I can get them).
Basically I eat better, and more frequently, then I did and enjoy it more. Which is to say: my bad habits were just unfulfilling, and as soon as I actually held myself accountable for the effects, the changes in my diet were all improvments in my overall quality of life.
Now, let's take the Aristotelian definition of happiness: It is about doing good and matching one's nature with one's actions. Then I would design questions like:
- Do you feel that your life is interconnected with the lives of others?
- When you reflect, do you feel that your life is what it should be?
- Are you satisfied with your life?
- In your daily life you do things out of obligation that do not correspond to your true nature?
- etc.
It all depends on what definition of happiness you take, and the one selected by the sponsors of the work I guess is not mine.
[1]Source: https://go.trackyourhappiness.org/
- In most respects, my life is close to my ideal.
- The conditions of my life are excellent.
- I am satisfied with my life.
- So far I have achieved the important things I want in life.
- If I could live my life over again, I would change almost nothing.