The Plenary of Santa Cruz yesterday approved a motion requesting the State to “include new procedural measures to improve the protection of natural or legal persons who are owners or legitimate possessors of a home or property, with the aim of recovering full possession of a housing or part of it, provided that they have been deprived of it without their consent.
In practice, it is about urging the State to toughen the penalties against home occupancy. With this wording, CC managed to soften the motion presented by its government partner, the PP, which asked for tougher, in a general way, prison sentences up to five years, without attending to any type of extenuating circumstance.
The rejection of this point was resounding, both by the opposition and by the CC itself, so that only the three PP councilors voted in favor of it. And it is that the general criticism focused on the lack of differentiation on the types of occupation, all agreeing that the fault of not having enough housing lies with the administrations.
“You are going to create more places in Tenerife II than homes to solve the problem”, snapped the UP councilor, María Luisa Tamayo, who added that the data shows that occupation is not a problem in Spain, where, in 2021, just over 17,000 cases were recorded. “Only in the Canary Islands it is estimated that there are 150,000 empty homes, that is a problem,” she said.
The PSOE expressed itself in the same vein, noting that “you are asking for the same prison sentence for a family that has no other option but to occupy, than the one obtained by Urdangarín for embezzlement and fraud.”
That first point was the only one that remained of a motion, that of the PP, which was replaced by the one presented by CC. The Councilor for Housing, Juan José Martínez, asked not to criminalize extremely vulnerable families and agreed with the rest of the groups that what needs to be done is to strengthen housing policies, “as Santa Cruz has done with the implementation of progress of projects for almost 400 homes”, he defended.
In the rest of the replacement text, which went ahead with the votes of the PP and CC, it also called for an increase in tax obligations for empty homes of large homeowners, banks and vulture funds, as a way to solve the problem of the lack of households.
In addition, it was requested to introduce the legislative modifications that allow discouraging the occupation of homes “especially in the case of mafias”, and that, in any case, the Public Administration will guarantee a housing solution for families in vulnerable situations.
The motion of the CC turned the proposals of the PP upside down, which, among other things, asked that people who occupy a house not be able to register, a fact that, they reminded him from the opposition, “would prevent many people in need, such as the families that occupy homes in El Tablero, empty homes belonging to a vulture fund, could not receive the social aid granted by the City Council”.
Thus, what was finally approved was that Law 7/1985, of April 2, on Bases of Local Regime be changed to avoid the use of the registration in the municipal register of an illegal occupant defined in the Organic Law against occupation illegal and for neighborhood coexistence and the protection of the safety of people and things in the communities of owners.
It was also approved to urge the modification of the tax legislation for the reduction of tax obligations of landlords that justify the non-perception of rents for occupied real estate, as well as to change Law 49/1960 on horizontal property so that communities of owners are enabled as legal entities so that they can initiate the processes of recovery of the home.
