Investigating Corporate Landlords across Europe. A cross-border collaborative project, coordinated by Arena for Journalism in Europe.
High demand for rental flats across European cities has contributed to make housing a very attractive investment. At a time when many people can’t find an affordable and decent flat to live in, reports of a huge increase in investment flows into housing across Europe go hand in hand with stories of abusive practices by ‘corporate landlords’, companies that buy and rent out housing for profit.
Where is all that money coming from? Who are the companies and investors buying so much housing across Europe? How does this phenomenon affect people’s lives and homes in European cities?
During a period of more than seven months, a team of over 25 investigative and data journalists and visualisation experts from 16 European countries, have been working on the cross-border collaborative project Cities for Rent: Investigating Corporate Landlords Across Europe.
We wanted to find the data and visualise these developments, and document their effects on our cities and in people’s lives. We found that since the financial crisis international investment funds and housing corporations have been buying up homes across European cities. And there are different critical issues connected to this.
With a new recession looming, and an already massive housing crisis, tenants are building towards new models of social solidarity.
The article by Sotiris Sideris in AthensLive points to many important points that should not be left forgotten in the shadows of the Corona epidemic. Foreclosures and E-auctions, inequality and alternative forms of solidarity.
This is a repost from May, but a read too important not to spend some time to read or re-read on a Sunday like this.
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"“Apart from the large anti-auction movement and smaller collectives such as neighbourhood assemblies and solidarity initiatives, Greece has never had organized tenant unions,” said Panos Alexandrou, a member of the initiative who also participates in other self-organized collectives for the right to housing. “That’s because the concept of housing in Greece has always been based on property. Homeownership has a strong tradition in our country. Since the 1950’s, it has been used by many governments as a key driver for growth through the investment and support of smallholders to build or buy their own block of apartments. This shows that providing people with adequate housing has never been an obligation of the state,” he added.
“The situation is compounded by the recognition of housing as a vehicle for profit, rather than a basic human right,” Christina Sakali, post-doc researcher in the department of Conflict and Development Studies at Ghent University, told AthensLive.
Meanwhile, it should go without saying that the government had (before the coronavirus outbreak in Greece) agreed with its lenders to lift the protection of primary residences for debtors by the end of April. “Protection of the primary residence harms the economy,” Development Minister and New Democracy Vice President, Adonis Georgiadis, said in February.
With the end of the protection, the wave of evictions and auctions is expected to intensify in the coming months. And as Sakali added: “While the state should work towards a social housing policy, or at least affordable and decent housing for all incomes, it prefers to facilitate easy profits for big private investors.”
The problem is political will. We were in a national crisis before the pandemic and short-term fixes associated with it will not solve the problem that existed beforehand."
Worried for their own survival during the COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic, people in Greece who owe money to the state or banks and can’t pay will be eligible for bankruptcy only if everything they own is taken from them.
The New Democracy government, praised for its response to handling the crisis, has ended the Katseli’s Law that provided relief for people who couldn’t pay their bills because of almost a decade of harsh austerity measures.
...The government wants the new framework to be ready in the next couple of months under a plan designed to appease Greece’s creditors, the Troika of the European Union-European Central Bank-European Stability Mechanism (EU-ECB-ESM) and banks.
It will replace the Katseli Law, the main residence protection status and the clauses about the bankruptcy of enterprises, the paper said, pushed through quietly while people were distracted with the fear of COVID-19.
The Katseli Law designed to protect people was too lengthy, the government said, as it could take up to 15 years to complete bankruptcy procedures and banks want their hands on properties and people’s asset faster,.
That doesn’t include New Democracy and its former coalition partner the now-defunct PASOK Socialists who owe some 250 million euros ($271.87 million) in bad loans that aren’t being paid and with a former Conservative government giving immunity to the bank officers who approved the payouts to the parties.
Spring is already in the air across Greece. Even in the bleakest of times, nature’s renaissance renders hope irrepressible. But this one is proving a cruel spring for a people caught up in a decade-old crisis yielding one ritual humiliation after another.
Costas runs a small bookshop in my central Athens neighbourhood. Although jovial by constitution, he finds it difficult to hide the worry lines multiplying on his face. Fifteen years ago he put his flat up as collateral for a business loan to spruce up the bookshop. When the Greek debt crisis wreaked its havoc, it was impossible to service that loan.
Today, Costas is one of hundreds of thousands facing foreclosures by funds that have purchased debt like his from the banks at bargain basement prices. The bailiff and the auctioneer are circling above distressed homeowners and small business people such as Costas.
Intriguingly, he talks little about this, caught up in the media frenzy over the 30,000 or so refugees whom President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey released from the camps in which they had been held and allowed them to attempt crossing into Greece. “We can barely feed ourselves. How can we help these wretched souls?” Costas laments. His predicament captures nicely how Greece’s crisis has spawned a rule of fear: the muted fear of the bailiff and the brash fear of the “other”.
The “Hercules” plan to sell €30 billion worth of non-performing (“red”) loans to funds, with the state acting as the guarantor, was approved a few days ago by the Greek parliament. Of course the loans will be sold at a fraction of the nominal price, and the funds will be given free rein to demand repayment in full, which will naturally include blackmail, forclosures, auctions of real estate collateral, etc.
The symbolism of the name is clear: As the mythical Hercules diverted two rivers to clean the stable of Augeas of tons of manure, similarly the government is diverting up to €12 billion of its reserves to guarantee these loans and clean the accounts of banks of tons of manure. This is not simply “taxpayer’s money”: this is blood money extracted from the people through extreme austerity measures. Unsurprisingly, the European Comission declared that the plan does not constitute state aid.
The paradox is that banks prefer to sell off red loans at 10% of the nominal price to get them off their books, rather than accept a 50% haircut and a renegotiation. This is because the “Hercules” plan constitutes another, the fourth, recapitalisation of Greek banks, again using the taxpayer’s blood money.
A part of these red loans have residences as collateral, and along with the impending abolition of the legal framework that protects primary residence from liquidation, the huge wave of housing collateral auctions that is already underway, and the fire sale of “packages” of already foreclosed real estate by banks to funds, this is a well orchestrated operation of housing dispossession in Greece. As the big real estate sharks are preparing to attack, the Greek housing model, charcaterised by widespread small property ownership and a high percentage of owner occupancy, will begin to falter. Moreover, this takes place in the context of a skyrocketing rental market and a complete absence of any type of housing policy to absorb the shock.
The Greek authorities are planning to introduce to the country’s judicial system the institution of individual insolvency, in which a person is able to declare bankruptcy, liquidate his or her property and receive a second chance in life, free of debt — but without retaining any personal wealth.
This institution, widely known and used for many years in the Anglo-Saxon world, is about to replace the already-existing scheme which protects the main residence of Greek citizens from foreclosure.
This aspect of the plan has led to negative reactions, which have already began to spread.
The Greek government has announced that from May 1, 2020 onward, the law which protects one’s main residence from the auction block will be scrapped; those who meet the criteria to enjoy the protection of the currently-existing law have until April 30 to apply to safeguard their primary residences.
The current scheme will be replaced by a system of individual insolvency, in which an individual will be able to declare bankruptcy, lose all of his or her possessions and then apply for the total removal of any remaining debt.
This procedure will also include the primary residence of the individual, meaning that he or she and their family could lose their only house, something which is nearly unthinkable to many in Greece based on the present practice of total protection of primary homes up to a certain value.
However, the government has said that it will also introduce a scheme that will protect the most vulnerable from becoming homeless, most likely by subsidizing their rent, after their home is taken by the bank.
However, political parties and social organizations have already began reacting negatively to this prospect, claiming that Greek society is not ready to see scenes of families being forcefully evicted from their own homes due to economic hardship.
The latest attack on the squatting movement in Greece is the preamble for a massive operation of housing dispossession by the right-wing government.
“Since New Democracy was elected with a “law and order” agenda last July, the police have been acting like an occupation army in Greek cities, routinely violating human rights and dignity. Arbitrary detentions, torture, beatings, teargas attacks, raids in cinemas and nightclubs, public humiliation, verbal abuse, have been the order of the day.
Even so, as long as the arbitrary violence of the police was directed towards protesters, youth, students, squatters, homosexuals, immigrants or the marginalized, the reaction of the public opinion to daily gross human rights violations was at best timid. Sadly, such abhorrent practices are made possible by the active or passive support of a part of Greek society who have been convinced that in the battle against the internal enemy all means are legitimate, even the violation of constitutional rights and human dignity.
Indares himself, in press statements after he was released pending trial, appeared confused as to what really hit him. He is obviously appalled by the campaign of defamation against him, but he seems to consider himself the innocent victim of a just war. In the leaked audio recording of the moment of his arrest, he is heard reproaching the police of “acting like anarchists,” even though the possibility that anarchists break into his home, beat him up and kidnap him is non-existent. In his desire to remain equidistant, Indares does not acknowledge the arbitrary nature of police repression nor the reality-distorting function of the mass media, as long as peace-loving, hard-working, everyday people like him remain immune from this violence.But it is precisely peace-loving everyday citizens like him who have most to lose in this new cycle of dispossession in Greece.“
