Too many houses? The country needs someone who can rent them in peace.

According to Jornal de Notícias , the country actually has hundreds of thousands of available homes, ready for occupancy. They're in the census, satellites, and statistics. Apparently, all that's missing is for someone to open them. While the article is provocative, the subtext is more serious: if the homes exist and aren't being used, the problem isn't structural, it's moral. The blame lies with those who own them, not those who govern, or have governed. As always, the enemy is the owner.

This type of discourse, which mixes resentment with naiveté, has been gaining ground across Europe. Politicians from across the political spectrum repeat variations on the same theme: that the market has failed, that the state must intervene, that the right to housing prevails over private property. It's housing populism disguised as social justice. And like any populism, it offers blame instead of solutions.

The problem is that reality doesn't bend to the will of empty slogans. The houses do exist, yes. But they are closed because those who own them have been left unprotected by the system. And this lack of protection isn't the paranoia of the rich or a conspiracy of real estate funds. It's a rational response to a punitive regulatory and fiscal context, shaped over decades. Governments that confuse regulation with virtue and believe that setting prices by decree is enough to nullify the law of supply and demand.

Today, in Portugal, owning property is risky. The state treats property as a suspect privilege, not a guaranteed right. The judicial system is slow. Taxation is volatile, burdensome, and penalizing. Legislation changes according to the political wind, introducing uncertainty into contracts and fragility into the relationship between landlords and tenants. And, as if all this weren't bad enough, a public discourse is fueled that romanticizes squatting and demonizes those who invest.

This is the scenario that drives thousands of properties off the market. Not out of greed, but out of legal vulnerability. Small property owners, those who inherited an apartment, invested their savings in a rental property, and planned to supplement their retirement with a monthly rent, have left the market. Not because they are bad citizens, but because they don't want to be turned into legal victims. This behavior is not irrational. It is the logical response to a hostile environment. And it is precisely here that economic theory offers the key to understanding what is happening. George Stigler, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, explained in 1971 that regulation is not neutral . It is often captured by interest groups and used to protect incumbents, creating barriers to entry and distorting the market. Anne Krueger demonstrated that this regulation generates artificial rents, which encourage rent-seeking —the pursuit of profit through political influence rather than innovation or efficiency.

Gordon Tullock showed that this behavior has high social costs. Resources that could be used to rehabilitate buildings or create mobility solutions end up wasted on lawsuits , political lobbying, and other blunders. Sam Peltzman and Mancur Olson completed the picture: over time, these distortions accumulate , reducing productivity, hindering growth, and deepening inequalities. For once, what works in practice has passed the test of theory.

The Portuguese housing market is a textbook example. We have controlled rents, slow evictions, perverse incentives, and a legal system that protects defaulters. We have a state that promises everyone the perfect home, while punishing those who dare offer real homes, with real costs, real risks, and real contracts.

The result is tragic: less supply. And with less supply, more competition for the few available properties. And with more competition, higher prices. Irony of ironies: price controls, legal restrictions, and moralistic rhetoric not only fail to solve the problem, they exacerbate it. They want to protect tenants and end up pushing them into precariousness. They want to guarantee affordability and end up reducing options. They want to impose justice and end up creating scarcity.

Faced with this, what should we do? Freedom. But not an abstract or ideological freedom. A concrete freedom, based on contractual responsibility, legal certainty, and respect for property. It means allowing landlords and tenants to negotiate freely. It means ensuring that contracts are fulfilled. It means streamlining the judicial system, creating extrajudicial dispute resolution mechanisms, stabilizing the tax framework, and treating housing as an economic asset, not a political weapon.

This freedom is the only serious way to increase supply. Because without trust, there is no investment. Without predictability, there is no rehabilitation. And without respect for the rights of those who have housing, there will never be housing for those who don't.

And no, this isn't a liberal utopia. It's what already works in dozens of countries. Just look at the European examples that respect property, allow free contracts, and have vibrant and affordable rental markets. In Berlin, when they tried to freeze rents by law, supply fell, free-market prices soared, and the measure had to be revoked . In Stockholm , years of state rent control created a black market for subletting, where only those with "friends" can get a place . In Barcelona , while dreaming of the Catalan commune, they turned their backs on the market. Municipal intervention scared off investors, halted construction , and pushed housing into informality.

Portugal seems intent on repeating all these mistakes. And it does so with an almost religious conviction. Every new law limiting contractual freedom is sold as a civilizational advance. Every measure that weakens landlordism is applauded as if it were social justice. Every attack on property is romanticized as a defense of the weak. But all of this has costs. And these costs are paid, ironically, by the very people it was intended to protect.

Do we want to solve the housing crisis? Let's start by freeing the market. Let's stop treating housing as an ideological trench and start treating it as what it is: an essential market that requires supply, investor protection, and legal stability.

And let's please stop repeating that there are thousands of homes ready for occupancy. They are unavailable due to laws, inefficiencies, and insecurity. And until this changes, continuing to blame those who own them only serves the rhetoric of those who attack private property, when the real problem lies with those who block, discourage, and harass those who rent them.