I don't agree with squatting on the whole, but this distinction clearly does matter. If someone squats a property that you were planning to rent out then you lose the income that you could have gained thereby. That's not nearly as bad as losing access to the home you currently live in.
It can be worse, as you are losing rental income, which can have larger impacts on your budget and life.
I have family in California that had to deal with squatters on a rental property. It cost them ~400k, which included their kids college funds and retirement.
Costs were 3 years of lost rent while they paid the mortgage 250k damages done by the squatters, plus legal fees.
It take a huge amount of materials and labor to build, and returns value slowly over time. Depending on the inputs and returns, this can either create positive or negative value.
But if "empty living space", space that's reserved but unused, is immoral would you extend it to any such reserved but unused living space?
Is an empty room in your house immoral? Or massively oversized rooms even if you live in them? In the end you're still blocking a lot of "empty space" that someone else could use if only there were smaller but more living units. Same applies when you live in a detached house and "blocking" any potential living space that could have existed on higher floors of a tall apartment building. Zoning laws can also be an issue but the question stands.
To put in in practical terms, one person having two 50sqm/550sqft apartments is immoral. One person having one 150sqm/1500sqft apartment is fine? Where is the line and how arbitrary do you want it to be?
It’s not clear exactly where to draw the line, but that’s true of all kinds of moral distinctions. So I don’t think that kind of slippery slope argument is very persuasive.
I didn't mean it as a slippery slope argument, rather an explanation of why calling "this in particular" immoral is probably just one person drawing the line in such a way that what they need/want is perfectly covered. It's more likely that their changing needs/wants move that bar, than that the moving bar changes their needs/wants.
So "buying a house and purposefully leaving it empty is immoral" is bound to change the moment they purchase a second, empty house.
Years ago I hosted some African refugees in my home for a short time while more appropriate accommodation was in the works. I cannot describe the feeling I had seeing one of the children understand how a modern toilet works: we do our business in a bunch of clean water, and then dump a bunch more clean water to take it away. Given their circumstances this was probably the most immoral thing we could have done in the modern world.
>It's more likely that their changing needs/wants move that bar, than that the moving bar changes their needs/wants.
This seems to be an unsupported speculation. And indeed it cuts both ways. Maybe you only think the second house is ok because that covers your needs and wants (either present or future anticipated). If you leave out the psychologizing, there's nothing to your argument beyond the slippery slope. Even if the exact location where individual people draw the line is psychologically explicable based on self-interest and their particular life circumstances, it still doesn't follow that a moral distinction cannot possibly be made.
More generally, it's fairly obvious that people who believe in strong property rights will tend to be people who have lots of property and people who don't will tend to be people who don't. That doesn't invalidate the arguments of either side; these have to be evaluated on their merits. You can say "I bet you'll believe in strong property rights once you own a house!", while a homeless person might equally say "I bet you'll have more sympathy for squatters once you've lived on the streets for a year!" Those sorts of examples tell us that people aren't perfectly disinterested when forming their moral outlook, but it doesn't tell us much about where moral distinctions can or can't be drawn.
What you do with it (or, don't do with it) is not morally neutral. I believe that hoarding it, preventing others from living in or purchasing it, is immoral.
No, because if there is not enough for other people they either are forced to get exploited by landlords or become homeless. Purchasing real estate is immoral, as is whole notion of rent-seeking through usurpation of unused land such that other persons cannot use it when you don't use it and occupy it.
A fair point. I thought what I was saying was too obvious to expound further, but here goes:
Buying a house in order to leave it vacant is morally neutral. To wit,
Mike Murderer buys up real estate along the river and leaves it empty so that the dead bodies he stores inside are not discovered. Mike has acted immorally!
Mayor Susan convinces the city council to buy up real estate along the river and leave it empty to facilitate moving the residents there to higher ground to avoid expensive and dangerous seasonal flooding. Susan has acted morally.
But they both took the same positive action: purchasing real estate. This action was morally neutral.
As other people in this thread have correctly noted, it’s the justification not the action that has moral implications.
It is correct. Moral neutrality is a mental defense mechanism to avoid bad feelings. The vast majority of folks find it easier to rewrite their interpretation of events than tell themselves no.
So if you buy a fixer upper, one that would be unfit for renting to people. You can't spend your weekends and holidays working on it for a few months to get it into better condition without being called immoral? Sorry that my lack of funds and desire to better myself offends you, but that's a crazy take.
I actually lived in a country where everyone had a right for free shelter. It was called the USSR.
The quality and quantity of said shelter was beyond abysmal. Several families sharing a single apartment, a family per room, was the norm.
If anyone attempted to squatter anywhere, they would very quickly find themselves free sheltered in Gulag. If they were to argue for their rights against oppression and exploitation, like you do, they would be very quickly free sheltered in a mad house and injected with generous doses of haloperidol.
What is ironic is that I’ve people living like that in the US too. I once lived in a building with a lot of immigrants from different parts of the world. I once got a glance in a living room walking down the hall: two bunks in the living room dozens of people inside. Another apartment was a studio apartment shared by two guys whose main source of income seemed to be charging lime scooters in the apartment. They’d be hauling scooters in and out all day.
So maybe things wouldn’t be that different at all for the poorest of this country but they’d not have the boot of monthly rent pinned on their neck.
Yeah, on the other hand you had Anarchist Catalonia or currently Zapatistas. In USA you had MK Ultra, where government experimented on people through for example drugging them and you have homelessness too. Moreover people who fought for liberation were diagnosed with schizophrenia.
We in the USA are the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. We could solve homelessness and hunger tomorrow.
I'm not saying that people should lose their property to squatters, that's not the solution. I'm saying that we could build ~300,000 new homes and give them to people for free and it would barely register on the national budget.
Everyone is entitled to free shelter, but nobody is required to build them? Where do you think the free shelter is going to come from? Because, looking around, I don't see very many free shelters, so they're going to have to come from somewhere.
And if your answer is to take all the existing houses and give them, one to each family that needs a place to stay, that's great in the short term. In the long term, though, who's going to build a new one when it will just be taken from them? And if nobody builds new ones, where are new ones going to come from, as the population continues to grow?
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.
I don't think there is a clear "N amount of days away from the residence means you're not actively living there", the court would look at many factors.
For example, if it's evident the owner is intending to return, there is personal belongings, utility contracts in the owners name and such, courts would (probably) consider it your primary residence even if you take an extended leave from it.
On the other hand, if you're away for several months, there is no clear intent to return and you've removed all furniture/personal belongings, courts can think it looks like it isn't your primary residence anymore, especially if you own other properties that it seems you might be living in instead.
Like most issues in society, there isn't any clear dividing line and no guarantees. That's why we have the legal system we have after all, so nuances can be taking into consideration.
Is your car sitting in your driveway right now? Someone else could be driving it, it's immoral that you don't leave the keys sitting on the roof.
Is your bed or couch empty right now? Someone else could be sleeping there right now.
Do you have money in your checking account? Someone else could be buying the things they need with that money, you should put the cash outside for them to take.
A house sitting empty while the owners renovate, look for tenants, try to sell, etc is a normal and necessary part of a functioning society.
The solution to housing shortages is to build more housing. That's it, that's the whole solution.
To take this further, everyone here has a computer. Obviously you don't use 100% of the cycles all the time, so it is immoral if you do not install a program that allows anyone else to use your unused cycles.
Yes there are power costs with 100% usage vs idle time but there are also cost of upkeep on a house.
It's not absurd. Yes, it's immoral that I am as wealthy as I am (relatively, on a global scale), and it's immoral that I get to eat so much better than others in the same society as I am in. It doesn't mean I'm going to do anything about it, it just means on that axis, I am not a particularly moral person.
I mean, the massive infrastructure waste that exists to accomodate unproductive cars is a real point that degrades where we live.
So much space in towns dedicated to storing cars while they're not being used, taking space away from where housing can be built. As a non-american, I believe that parking lots are immoral as well :)
Buying a car and purposefully not using it 24 hours a day as an Uber is immoral. I'll take yours when you leave it parked, okay? You can have it back when I'm done with it, probably when it needs major repairs because I'm not putting any money into it. As the owner of record, that's your problem.
Media reports have been instrumental in shaping the narrative around squatting, with stories of 'okupas' sometimes being sensationalised to highlight conflicts and drama.
This is the approach of the class privileged enough to own the media (literally or figuratively): shape, to their favor, the public's opinion & perspective of an issue that affects most people relatively little, if at all, via sensational media.
In the US, people call CPS or the police on ten year olds playing unsupervised in a park or walking home from school in perfectly safe suburbs and towns because they believe the children will be kidnapped, raped and murdered. So yes, it is possible to worry too much about rape and murder as well.
Homelessness is a problem, even having to pay rent to another person to have a place to live is a problem. Squatting is just a strategy to fight an inherently oppressive private property norm.
I'm curious how would you expect housing to stock to grow or even stay stable if nobody had to pay rent?
Would all housing be used owned by the state and assigned to individuals based on certain criteria (with huge amounts of inefficiency and corruption that such a system creates)?
It could grow either by people making their own houses on their own, or by them finding others who would help with this process, or by paying someone for the labor required for the house to get build.
I think that private property should not get nationalized.
Fortunately, most citizens are not economically illiterate enough to support this ideology. Private ownership of land and natural resources is the foundation of 21st-Century economic prosperity.
I would like to know what the limits of your application of this idea is because if I were to extend your argument that "even having to pay rent to another person to have a place to live is a problem.", this is what I get to:
I am currently buying a house, every month I pay money to the bank, this is very similar to having to pay rent. From my understanding of your logic, this would be a problem.
Further from that, I am building a house. I have to make payments to the builder(s) in order to have a place to live. Is this a problem?
Not endorsing the view, just sharing lines of reasoning I've seen.
Paying money to the bank implies you financed your purchase of a home. This is not necessarily a morally-neutral activity, it's in fact nuanced but we've done a good job of handwaving away the nuance in the last 4-5 generations of Americans.
A small vignette to explain: financing allows people to leverage their credit history and income to make larger purchases than they could otherwise afford. This increases the sticker price of purchasing a home, which prices out people with low credit or income. Anything that increases the price of housing effectively increases the price of rent, which limits peoples' abilities to save to actually purchase a home – it's a nasty cycle. One could argue that by participating in that system of financing, you're perpetuating it, but most people immediately dismiss this idea, ymmv.
Building a house, and paying people to build the house, is not a problem. You're exchanging value for labor and assets. You're de facto increasing the supply of housing.
So, I personally like the idea of someone working with a builder to build your house. I also like the idea of only ever buying something rather than financing it.
I also think that if that was only the option, housing prices would rise rather than fall.
Cash up front, I assume in an escrow so that buyer can't cheat builder and builder can't run away with the money.
This means that a someone who wants to build/buy a home is going to need around 150k saved up.
Assuming that 50k yearly salary and rent is immoral, they have to live at home until saved up. 1/3 put aside is 16.66k per year, 9 years before they can get a house.
In actuality, the cost is probably going to be more expensive as you would no longer have developments going up.
Not necessarily, you just might not build 100% of your eventual home immediately.
It used to be (i.e. prior to the postwar expansion of credit to the American consumer) pretty common to build a "starter home" that was intended to be expanded. You start with the basics (basement, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom) and expand modularly from there as your prosperity and needs allow.
In the midwest, they would start by building the foundation, basement, and a very modest first floor. As the family prospered, had children, and developed roots in the neighborhood, they'd expand the above-ground portion of the home in the summer months. You can find homes frozen at each stage of development from the pre-depression 1900s still around today, although they're of greater archaeological value today than housing stock value. A lot of present-day "colonial" housing stock in the Northeastern U.S. have evidence of this gradual accrual over the decades.
This idea of "build a whole mansion at once" was historically reserved for the truly wealthy, and has only been "practical" for a greater segment of society for the last 50 years (again, with the expansion of consumer credit, not because we can actually afford these things).
You could still choose to build things this older style. Our culture of "obtain everything all at once, immediately up to the limit of your purchasing power" is the main impediment. That, and building codes might frown on some earlier-phase iterations, though YMMV.
My ~150k is for a starter home. That is what a ranch 3 bedroom, 2 bath with kitchen/dining and living room, no basement goes for in my area, based on 1990's code.
Current code is more stringent.
I know that people used to add on, that is however going to be more costly in the long term. Think about heating and A/C system, rather than buy the system once and keep it for 15 years as you expand you need to keep redoing duct work and adding capacity.
You will end up with insulation and vapor barriers between two interior walls.
Plumbing and electrical will become interesting as well.
I grew up in the kinds of homes you are describing, I like them but the building style does have challenges.
I also like the idea of people putting down roots, however this in turn limits people's opportunities.
This also limits the type of housing, what would be required in order to build a duplex or townhouse? A condo/apartment building?
Part of the current green movement talks about getting rid of suburbia and condensing into more urban areas. This would be a direct opposition to that as you would need to buy a lot size that guarantees that you can grow.
I am living under my address, I am occupying that place, so I am not fine with providing my address. But I am fine with people living in abandoned houses.
I think it depends on local customs and local agreements, it can differ. I guess I could consider a house abandoned if no one lives there for a year or 2. While for a mine, I think I would consider it abandoned the moment previous miners left it, such that other can get into the mine and mine some resource.
I'm a little confused. You said you want to get rid of private property but also your residence is occupied so I can't stay there. Who gave you the right to say that? If there is no private property it seems like we should be able to vote who can stay in your residence.
Unoccupied (for x or more months) second homes should be rented out, otherwise squatted in or burned to the ground, period. It doesn't matter if you disagree, Might Makes Right.
Be careful: Meme Magic works in both directions, and it is often difficult to detect its presence.
Which helps who exactly? Even squatting means that those houses will no longer be maintained and fall apart sooner or later which is how you end up having even more expensive housing long-term because of lower supply.
Higher taxation for uninhabited housing seems like an infinitely more sensible option...
> Even squatting means that those houses will no longer be maintained and fall apart sooner or later which is how you end up having even more expensive housing long-term because of lower supply.
I would like for humanity to get together and figure out how to genuinely pursue an optimal experience for all people, but it seems like the most wealthy and powerful among us are "not very (genuinely) interested" in that. Okay then, Plan B it is, I say.
> Higher taxation for uninhabited housing seems like an infinitely more sensible option...
Agreed. That's a bit slow for my liking though, we've been kicking that can down the road for generations. I believe fear to be one of the most substantial motivators in existence, and there are a lot more of us then there are of them.