Have a problem with your property? ILP is on its way!
I’M GOING to start by speaking about the LPH (the Horizontal Property Law).
For many of you I’m also going to change your life for the better by the end of paragraph four and oddly it has nothing to do with LPH.
The LPH was published on July 21, 1960 to ‘provide access to urban property through a capital investment... making it more affordable to all’.
That’s the idea anyway, plots are much more limited than built areas as you can build upwards as well as horizontally. In other words, in the 1960s more and more people started to live in flats as they were cheaper so they need to legislate for that reality.
Sixty years later, the text has undergone multiple modifications to adjust the original to the new situation in the country, where most people – 65% of the population – lives in flats. It’s now the norm and not the exception. So what the LPH states affects the way most people live in Spain. There have been nine reforms since the LPH was introduced. The most important of which was the modification of 04/08/1999.
Now this bit is worth taking notice of as you stand a real chance of participating in
a similar process, sooner than you might think. That reform to the LPH was introduced as a result of an ILP, (Iniciativa Legislativa Popular). In the region of Valencia the number of signatures required for an ILP, a project for changing the law here is, 10,000. That’s less than the number of Brits registered as living in Orihuela.
Which is just one of the 542 towns in which we and our fellow
expats live. Basically, all we have to do is persuade one in every six people on the Costa Blanca News Facebook page to support a proposal and that proposal will appear on the Valencia government’s ‘to do’ list as a legal project.
Clearly this doesn’t guarantee the success of that project but, it does mean it has to be debated and any party opposing it would know that they stand to lose thousands of votes at the next municipal elections (the ones for the mayor), or more effective still they face the votes being moved strategically to their opposition in marginal seats. Not the last time you’ll be hearing from me about that.
Back to 1999 reform of the LPH, which included things such as what to do on community debts aka ‘defaulting neighbours’. They really speeded things up, and among the changes were: reducing the processing of legal claims for community debts to two months (instead of two years); preventing indebted or delinquent neighbours from voting in the owners’ meetings and challenging their decisions; restrictions on annoying neighbours; changes in the system for adopting agreements in the board of owners – since then unanimity is only necessary to modify the statutes of the community or constitutive titles (and those are few and far between); and the mandatory creation of a reserve fund, so necessary things do get paid for quickly.
In the 2013 reform the affectation period was extended to three years (when the property indebted to the community changes ownership, the new owner must take over the outstanding debts for up to three years).
All positive changes but, they happened a long time ago so next time we’ll bring you right up to date by taking a look at the roles defined for owners in the HOA (president, vice-president, the board of owners and the community itself) through the lens of the LPH.