A report from the UPC defends building more social housing and denies that it makes private housing more expensive.
Professor Josep Roca-Cladera regrets the boycott that has been made of the 30%.
BarcelonaThe lack of housing is a major concern for a large part of the population. It's a topic of much discussion, but often concepts and even vested interests are conflated. In response to all this debate, a study by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) aims to debunk some of the most widespread theories after comparing them with data.
The report focuses on the need to build more social housing. The data is alarming: only 17% of the housing completed in Spain between 2007 and 2023 was social housing. This proportion was only exceeded between 2009 and 2016, and has been gradually decreasing since then, reaching a low of 7.4% in 2024.
"It's the great challenge that remains," argues the UPC professor and researcher at the Center for Land Policy and Valuations (CP). But, to justify this urgency, the study points out that social housing does not increase the prices of market-rate housing, contrary to what is often said. "The more social housing we build, the price of market-rate housing tends to decrease, and this generates benefits for the market as a whole," explains Roca-Cladera.
But it's not just a matter of building more social housing; it needs to be built everywhere, avoiding the widespread notion that it should be sent to cities beyond Barcelona. "Social housing can't be relegated to the periphery. It must be built throughout the city, including Pedralbes, Diagonal Mar, and Nou Barris," emphasizes the professor, one of the authors of the study along with Blanca Arellanos-Ramos. He hasn't held back his criticism of the "boycott" of the Barcelona City Council's 30% social housing reserve policy in each development. "There was a clear intention for it to fail. It's been insisted that it was a failed policy, but it was a policy that was sabotaged," he lamented. To illustrate this, the expert argues that real estate developers have built less since the regulations came into effect. Therefore, as with rent control, Roca-Cladera advocates for generalizing this obligation and not focusing it solely on the Catalan capital. "Developers can limit their activity for a specific period in Barcelona, but they will hardly be able to do so in a larger area," he points out.
Contain rental prices
More social housing, but also more rents with regulated prices. In this sense, the professor believes that rent control should be applied to more stressed areas throughout Spain, currently only declared as such in Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Navarre. The exception is A Coruña, in Galicia, the only city in a region governed by the PP (People's Party). "Prices haven't yet reached bubble levels; there's still time to act. There's a social consensus that intervention is necessary, but political consensus is another matter," he said.
Another theory that the UPC (Polytechnic University of Catalonia) report refutes is that the price increase is due to a supply deficit, as the Bank of Spain maintains, after observing that this rise is occurring throughout Europe. Nor is it due to a lack of land, with Spain being the European country that has urbanized the most from 2000 to 2018. Furthermore, it also concludes that building more doesn't help lower prices; quite the opposite.
