Sánchez announces a €30,000 grant for young people to rent subsidized housing with an option to buy.

BarcelonaNew announcement from Pedro Sánchez on housing: the Spanish Prime Minister has explained that his government will approve a package of measures that will include a new rental aid for young people of around 30,000 euros to pay rent with an option to buy. Sánchez did not provide further details, but the measure will only apply to homes that are already subsidized, according to sources from the ministry explained to the newspaper ARA.

"We will create a new rental aid with an option to buy of almost 30,000 euros so that young people can reside for years in permanently subsidized housing and eventually acquire it," Sánchez said this Monday in Congress, during an interparliamentary meeting of the Socialist group. The money will be used to pay the rent before the beneficiary decides to buy the home. Once they want to make the purchase, the money they have paid towards the rent will count as partial payment for the apartment or house.

"As this is a permanently protected home, the price will be fixed and cannot be freely set by the seller. This means that if this home is sold in the future, it must be sold at a fixed price and to a person who meets the same requirements as the previous owner," explained sources from the Ministry of Housing. The protected home will maintain this status permanently.

The measure is similar to the one announced a few months ago by the Government, which in this case introduced aid in the form of an interest-free loan to pay the down payment. The condition was the same: that the acquired properties become permanently protected. However, the big difference is that one of the conditions for receiving aid from the Generalitat (Generalitat)—of up to 50,000 euros—is that the home in question not be classified as protected.

This requirement has several implications. On the one hand, it reduces the Spanish government's measure in the protected housing market: therefore, where there is no supply, no aid will be available. And, on the other hand, the requirement that it be protected could avoid one of the main risks of purchase aid, which is that it is capitalized in the price, which entails a transfer of resources from the administration to the sellers, especially in areas with restricted supply. Ivalua, the Catalan Institute for the Evaluation of Public Policies, warns of this in its latest systematic review of the academic literature on accessibility policies. "In this way, we protect housing paid for with state resources from speculation," the same ministry sources assure.

Guarantees for homeowners

Regarding other measures in the package, Sánchez also announced up to 10,800 euros to buy a home in rural areas and rent default insurance for young people. These announcements come just the day after the president announced that The Spanish government will require platforms to remove 53,876 illegal tourist apartments.The €10,800 grant for rural housing may not exceed 20% of the acquisition cost and will only be available in municipalities with 10,000 or fewer inhabitants.

The default insurance—aimed at rents that do not exceed 50% of the household's net income—is a measure that already announced in January This was widely requested, especially by landlord associations, such as the Catalan Landlords' Association and the president of the Habitat 3 Foundation and president of the Metropolitan Housing Observatory (OHB), Carme Trilla. The State will act as guarantor for affordable housing so that tenants can access it and landlords can be guaranteed payment at the end of the month.

Sánchez also announced that he will send the previously announced proposal for the National Housing Plan to the autonomous communities with the commitment to triple state investment in housing—and reach 7 billion euros in the next five years—if they also commit to promoting social housing. The president He raised it at the last Conference of Presidents and Catalonia is one of the five communities who want to benefit from the state plan.

This financial incentive for the autonomous communities has been a common measure of the Spanish government since it passed the housing law. The goal was for the regions to implement the law's measures, especially the implementation of the rental price cap, but many PP-led communities refuse to implement it a year and a half after it came into force.