I was catching up with a friend of mine over coffee this morning and he was telling me about his recent trip to Porto, Portugal. I’ve never been, but it’s fairly high up on my list of places to visit.
He was telling me about how beautiful the center of the city is and how it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But he was also telling me how eerie it was to see so many abandoned and decaying buildings.
And part of the reason for this – I learned – is that up until fairly recently, Portugal had some incredibly onerous pro-tenant rent controls in place that dated back to the beginning of the 1900s.
In fact, they were so onerous that, by some estimates, roughly 150,000 households in Portugal were paying less than €50 per month in rent before the laws were changed!
Because of this, landlords in many cases could not, and cannot, actually afford to maintain their properties. Buildings were left to decay, and in some cases they were completely abandoned. That was their only option. And it led to a virtually