[AnthonyMouse]

> The bulk of this sort of investment is focused on a gentrification strategy, where cheap residential buildings in low-income neighborhoods are bought to flip them to cater to a high-income market. Often, occupation density is also lowered as the number of apartments per floor is reduced so that the real estate investors can market larger, spacious apartments.

What you're referring to is the type of construction which is allowed under the existing regulations -- increasing density is prohibited so the only way to profitably operate a construction company is to make the same number of units into more expensive ones.

They don't convert a smaller number of units into a larger number of units because that's the thing they're not allowed to do, which is exactly the problem. Buying a 5-unit building and turning it into a 50-unit building would otherwise be quite profitable because you get to sell 10 times more units than you bought, which is profitable as long as the price of a unit is higher than the construction cost.

[themgt]

A lot of this stuff just comes off as highly abstract and ideological, banging the same one-note drum over and over and not listening. Have you ever been to Barcelona? It's a real place, not just an abstraction. Here's a good photo to get a sense:

https://handluggageonly.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Han...

Here's an idealista link of properties for for sale:

https://www.idealista.com/pt/point/venta-viviendas/41.39993/...

A few things to point out is the city is already highly dense and meticulously planned (numbers suggest Barcelona has ~50% more people/sq km than NYC - it is far more densely populated than any city in the United States), and there's relatively a lot of property available for sale, but it's quite expensive if you're on a European salary. Arguably there's failed market clearing. And units are quite small by American standards, not at all something you can subdivide 5 units to 50 unless people are going to live in coffins. Final point is a large number of the cheaper properties will say "illegally occupied", because they have a (usually absentee/investor) owner who left the place empty and squatters have taken over who can't be evicted under Spanish law.

It's a complex situation and many more pages could be written about it by people who are on the ground and have ideas, but this one-size-fits-all "just build more density!" solution, while often reasonable in the (globally bizarre) American context with lots of land, car culture, deserted crime-ridden downtowns, etc, is out of touch with the complexity of what's going on in Barcelona/Spain/Europe more broadly.

And yes they could also just put up lots of 50 story steel skyscrapers to blot out Sagrada Familia, but then it would no longer be Barcelona.

[motorest]

> What you're referring to is the type of construction which is allowed under the existing regulations

No. I'm referring to the kind of gentrification that takes place in the real world.

Retrofitting a residential building is far cheaper and profitable than a full demolition followed by a rebuild. That's what real estate investors go for.

Also, there are limits to which you can increase the number of floors in a building. These are not whimsical, arbitrary, "oh it's just regulation" rules. They reflect real world constraints such as water supply, waste management, access to emergency response teams, even parking. Even the impact on environment and quality of life is considered. Rules like the 45 degree rule don't just happen. Why do you think the Dubai-type bullshit happened?

You guys talk a lot about regulation but you know nothing about it and worse don't even have the intellectual honesty to try to discover what you don't know. You just yap away about stuff you know nothing about, and come up with conspiracies to hand wave over your voluntary ignorance.

[AnthonyMouse]

> No. I'm referring to the kind of gentrification that takes place in the real world.

Because that's what's permitted under the existing laws.

> Retrofitting a residential building is far cheaper and profitable than a full demolition followed by a rebuild. That's what real estate investors go for.

Suppose that it costs a million dollars to build a 5-story building with 20 units. Furthermore, a quality unit is going for $500,000, and there is an existing 2-story building with 8 dilapidated units that you can buy for three million dollars.

You can update the units cheap -- let's say it's even free -- so then you turn the $3M into $4M.

But if you spend another million dollars, you get 20 units instead of 8, and turn your $4M into $10M.

When the price of a unit is high compared to the cost of construction, that is obviously the more profitable thing to do. Unless it's prohibited by law.

> Also, there are limits to which you can increase the number of floors in a building. These are not whimsical, arbitrary, "oh it's just regulation" rules. They reflect real world constraints such as water supply, waste management, access to emergency response teams, even parking.

At the current growth rate, the water treatment plant will be at its design capacity in three years. Therefore, prohibit any additional growth to preserve the status quo forever.

That is a tyrannical attitude.

If the water treatment plant will be at its design capacity in three years then the government's role is to issue a bond to fund an upgrade and then use the property tax revenue from the new construction to pay for it.