Vertical growth or territorial expansion: Catalonia's dilemma to avoid housing collapse

BarcelonaThe bursting of the housing bubble in 2008 left a housing surplus in Catalonia: there were too many empty apartments and unfinished houses. This surplus compensated for the lack of new construction until 2013. Since then, housing production has consistently fallen short of new construction, resulting in a chronic deficit. Furthermore, Catalonia has been at the bottom of the list in Spain for private housing production for twelve years, despite being one of the regions with the highest population growth. Now, this shortfall, which largely explains the current housing crisis, is beginning to reverse, but Catalonia still produces far fewer homes—almost 14,000 per year—than its estimated net increase until 2037—around 25,000 per year—according to the 2010 Sectoral Territorial Plan.

Furthermore, this reality now clashes with the urban planning model that emerged after the housing bubble, which focuses on generating housing through urban regeneration—that is, building within urban land. The goal of all this is to generate sufficient and adequate housing without damaging, from a sustainability perspective, a scarce resource like land. But it is a slow, costly process with several bottlenecks. A hypothetical case would be transforming a city block with four low-rise buildings, a workshop, and a parking lot, for example. This would likely require demolishing buildings and constructing new ones, which would involve reaching agreements with various property owners—those of the apartments, the workshop, and the parking lot—relocating and compensating the residents, and carrying out numerous procedures and processes.

The bottleneck of the POUMs

This is one of the conclusions of the eighth policy brief Published by the Housing and Future Business Chair at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and the Association of Developers and Builders of Catalonia (APCE), the report, authored by Agustí Jover, Miquel Morell, and Marc Gras, highlights Catalonia's housing deficit and, in particular, the difficulties presented by urban planning, which, for sustainability reasons, tends to concentrate housing potential in urban areas. However, public initiative is limited (18% of areas), and most of the transformation falls to the private sector. In fact, this sustainable urbanism has been implemented through Municipal Urban Development Plans (POUMs), and the authors of the study have now analyzed nine new-generation plans—approved between 2009 and 2023—belonging to medium-sized cities. At an aggregate level, 55% of the country's housing potential lies in urban land (UL) areas and 45% in areas of limited developable land (UDL), but the costs of urban development in urban land (UL) are between 1.46 and 1.83 times higher than those of expansion in sprawl (UDL). All of this leads the authors to question the public commitment.

"We are creating a model where we want everything without an efficient instrumental framework," says Jover. "The message of the policy brief "If the future of addressing the chronic housing deficit involves generating housing on urban land, beyond densification, then we must innovate with new tools," agrees Miquell Morell, who advocates for instruments that overcome property fragmentation and reduce costs. "Growing vertically is a good idea. It's not being considered. We're at a point where we have a serious problem, and we must address it. The debate on densification and vertical growth of the urban fabric must be addressed at all costs," adds Jover. In fact, while a developable land sector (DLS) can generate, on average, about 368 homes, urban renewal projects operate with what the authors call a "large small," which on average can generate 9 (4) 368 DLS.

Densify or urbanize

However, the report warns that "simply looking at the urban fabric is not enough" to solve the housing deficit, since the scale of the surgical intervention required in the consolidated city lacks the impact offered by new expansion areas. According to the data collected, areas designated for development are much more likely to be developed than those on urban land, which often remain stuck for decades in the Urban Development Plan (POUM) documents.

"Both things have to be done simultaneously; it's very difficult without public leadership, without an active administration," explains architect and former director of Incasòl, Maria Sisternas, to ARA. She advocates for empowering urban planning departments and revitalizing municipal public housing developers. "The idea that people need to stay is based on the fact that in London, a city with low-rise buildings, very accustomed to Victorian houses, one in seven new homes is in buildings of more than twenty stories. This is what is happening in Europe," she concludes.

"The responsibility lies with the municipalities; nobody wants to be the first to increase density. Either we occupy more land or we look to the sky. I don't want to be misunderstood: growth is possible without 25-story skyscrapers. The authorities must accept this. There is resistance from towns that have had many tall buildings," he says, adding that the debate isn't just about housing. "Mobility is key. I don't know how long it's been since an infrastructure plan was implemented in that country," he says.