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.
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.
Where I live in Spain this is exactly the case, it’s called a Padrón, and pretty much everyone adheres to it. Without it it’s impossible to do most any business in Spain.