Yeah but it’s apartments in the same set so if you want you can have one electric car or air-powered Tata you drive through all the apartments and pretend you’re renty Snowpiercer in the middle of August.
Everybody knows when they have to lift their feet…
No, they aren’t all in the same block. The city is targeting “14 companies that collectively own 194 empty apartments”.
Ah, thank you…sailing a little model Frostpoker train from balcony to balcony is even farther out in chances then. Back to making styled solar panels to match roofing brick?
Exactly this. It’s only 194 apartments so far. These 14 companies may be the worst offenders, or they may just be completely random cases. Either way, every landlord in Barcelona is now taking a closer look at their holdings and wondering if they’re next.
The article quotes Barcelona’s housing commissioner as saying that the goal to is not to expropriate empty flats but to make the landlords rent them out.
Over here its called land banking and its a pretty common tactic, especially where leasing doesn’t bring in much money, but creates lost of hassle.
It still seems like “get it into inhabitable condition or sell it to someone who will” is a reasonable condition of ownership. They could simply extend the deadline to find an occupant for any owner who is actively renovating the property.
For #1, there’s a web site for that: Tenants Rights Information – San Francisco Tenants Union
For #2, I honestly don’t know. I would expect most land lords to want a good ROI, which means keeping the place occupied and generating revenue as opposed to using it as a tax write off.
I know that the previous owners of the house I bought in 2012 here in Arizona had it on the market for several months, probably because they hadn’t bothered making any major improvements in the last 20 years or so, or keeping up on some of the more expensive maintenance items.
And THAT is the problem- Who has the cash reserves to fix up a house? Not most people trying to escape the rent escalator, I can assure you.
Back in 2012 and on a lark, I looked at a house that went on the market that was next door to a friend’s place. we had no intention of buying it, but wanted to see what kind of train wreck it was, and boy, was it ever. The previous occupant had:
AND. since it was a HUD property, we would have had to correct a lot of the more egregious problems BEFORE making an offer on it (according to our realtor, anyway), which would have been several thousand I didn’t have, and that’s not including the HVAC work. (I ended up having to do that to the house I bought about six years after- that was a 13 grand job, but I ended up with a solid system that works.)
Technically, if one looks at just the mortgage and utility bills, yeah, buying a house looks better… on paper. And if you get lucky and get one that’s been well maintained and doesn’t need any major infrastructure repairs/upgrades/replacements.
I have a separate rant about why housing should never have been turned into the investment asset that it’s being used as now, but I’m already frothing at the mouth here… 
Right, it will be professionals trying to make quick fixes and turn it around.
In reality one’s primary resident isn’t ever an investment asset. Its where you keep your stuff. Its a liability for the most part, because the chances of paying off a mortgage are a near impossibility. One doesn’t buy their primary residence based on investment possibility but largely because of personal preferences and tastes. It is not an objectively chosen property.
A big problem is many large scale landlords these days are banks and private equity firms. Less concerned with providing habitable units and income from rents as much as making short term profits and pleasing shareholders. In most cases they simply take a plethora of housing code violations as the cost of doing business and fail to maintain the property adequately.
Thanks for that excellent link to the San Francisco Tenants Union website. Perusing that, it appears California in general and San Francisco in particular has strong protections for tenants to prevent landlords attempting unjust evictions.
My question about point 2 still stands however, and I was hoping that @atl might weigh in, since they seem to think that strong tenant protections are the primary cause of vacant units. Specifically that many landlords would rather carry a unit vacant (presumably for the tax write-off) than risk a short term lease that might turn into a much longer occupancy with eviction proceedings dragging out interminably.
I’m just a regular guy with no investment income, so I’m probably ignorant of the details, but does it work that a landlord who has 20 units (just for example) can carry 10 of them vacant and write off the full monthly rent against their occupied units, effectively zeroing out their income? Not really zeroed, of course, because they have 10 units providing them revenue, but that revenue becomes tax free so long as they can show balancing losses?
If the above is the case, that’s a flaw in the tax laws, not a flaw in tenant’s rights. And Barcelona (to get back to the original topic) seems to be addressing the problem rather directly by seizing units that appear to be vacant solely as a tax shelter.
Or the slumlords look at 194 apartments as a token effort by the government to get some photo ops and to claim that they’re fixing the problem while not in reality rocking the boat.
Plus the government now has to figure out which 194 families are most worthy out of the thousands that need housing.
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