Living in your own place is a reasonable goal to have. Many articles in the Spanish news talk about the cost of an apartment by the square metre, the shortage of decent homes on the market or the fall (or rise) in house-sales and maybe the problems with noise, location, neighbours, lack of transport and so on. Other articles – aimed more at the foreign readers – treat of similar things, but differently. We are no longer in the city looking at apartments on the seventh floor, but on the coast or the islands, wondering if there’s a decent school nearby and if some developer is going to come along next year and spoil the view. The local town hall is pleased enough to have us no doubt, but generally prefers tourism over mass foreign settlers and is more concerned about its hoteliers and local souvenir shop-owners than its foreign dog-owners. The foreigners, you see, don’t vote much and they don’t have a lobby.
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Picture by Andrej Mashkovtsev
There is a third kind of property story though – and that’s about those who don’t own the property they live in. They generally can’t afford to own and they may be stuck with a lifetime mortgage or perhaps must put up with landlords who want them out (default, unpaid rents, owner wants to sell the place, or divide it into two, or put up the rent…). More cheerfully, the growing number of foreign renters includes those sensible souls who intend to buy a place… but later.
Vulture Funds – investment houses that operate solely for profit – can be a problem, putting the rents up by a hefty chunk, or failing to keep up the maintenance or even, as happened in Valencia last week, waiting until the 82 year-old-lady went out to buy something at the shop, before rushing in and changing the locks. Other owners might even use anti-okupa companies to remove tenants rather than wait for the slow process of law.
Apartments for rent can be a bit small these days, or maybe there’s just a room for rent, or may just a bunk bed in a room for rent.
Another route is to stay with your parents, or live in a caravan (or even a car), or to go and find an empty home (that could be used for squatting in). There are apparently some 3.4 million empty homes in Spain (mostly owned by the banks and, on paper at least, of value). We worry not so much about these – they are usually unfinished or without services – as about the second homes taken over, on occasion, by professional mafia groups that then pass them on to discriminating squatters with some extra cash. Owners of these may resort to the courts or perhaps the desokupa people. A home with squatters is not the same as a home with tenants who are in arrears. In their case, it might take years to eject them legally.
We could move far from the city and try our luck in an old abandoned village, far from all amenities. The hippy settlers of Fragua in Guadalajara tried this. After ten years of concentrated opposition from the regional government, plus a few of their number thrown into jail for illegal occupation, they have now thrown in the towel. So much, say the hippies, for repopulating the empty regions of Spain.
Hoping to find new places to turn into homes, even slightly peculiar ones, some cities are now allowing those empty or abandoned ground-floor business spaces built and bricked up below the apartment blocks to be turned into homes. Madrid is already allowing this and now Galicia is following suit.
Another issue for home owners and renters alike is mass-tourism. Too many tourists waving their cameras, attracting the pickpockets, the tour guides, tuk tuks, the wally-trolleys and the souvenir-shoppe people. They also attract short-term rentals (as Airbnb) which are far more profitable than regularly leased apartments. In short, the centre of Madrid or Barcelona can be a dreadful place to live ‘as they are turned practically into theme parks’ (it’s true of some resorts as well, such as Mojácar which only took down its Ferrero Rocher Christmas Decorations on Andalucía Day this Wednesday February 28th).
In all, maybe the hippies were on the right path… they just needed shorter hair.
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