Spaniards fight Wall Street landlords

When margins and misery are correlated.

One of the original sins of the modern economy was sidelining unions and social programs as a path to upward mobility and installing property speculation in their place. Converting the distribution of shelter (a human right and necessity) into a speculative asset had far-reaching consequences, and an eventual violent rupture was baked in from the start.

A path to prosperity runs through the appreciation of your family home (not through wage-gains and access to education, health-care and pensions) recruits a vast army of everyday wage-earners who will fight for any policy that pushes up real-estate values. That’s true even when those policies are bad for the people who live in homes, rather than gambling on them.

For example, the more protections we have for tenants, the less the homes they live in will be worth. Even if you sell your home to someone who plans on living in it, they’ll be bidding against people who might turn it into rental property, and their top offer is based on how much they think they can get from their tenants.

Rent control lowers property values. Easy eviction raises property values. Obligations on landlords to maintain their rentals lower property values. The right to extract high surcharges from tenants raises…