Look for all ways to avoid living in Pottersville

One of the most emblematic Christmas movies has always been, How wonderful it is to liveThe tender story of a man, George Bailey, who runs a kind of savings bank with a cooperative to build homes for the poor, and who is besieged by the town's richest man, Mr. Potter, whose dream is for the town to bear his name, Pottersville, for everything to be his, and for the poor to live in destitution. Frank Capra's film represents values, within the framework of humane capitalism, similar to those of... A Christmas Carol Dickens. Social responsibility, humility, empathy for the disadvantaged. Pottersville, which resonates ever more strongly in the present, is, on the other hand, the great metaphor for unfettered capitalism and inhumanity.

We live in a time when the housing crisis has reached increasingly worrying dimensions, and the metaphor of the fifty or so people still living under a bridge in Badalona today is a powerful example. These people are the tip of the iceberg of an increasingly evident problem. There are all kinds of situations, but there is clearly a lack of affordable rental housing to cope with emergencies like these. Because, in fact, we have been living in a continuous emergency for some time now, and organizations are overwhelmed trying to provide temporary shelter to people who become homeless.

All levels of government, from municipal to European, are competing to see who can promise to build more apartments, but we know that carrying out this process is not easy. It's not just because you need available land, public or private developers to make the investment, and a reasonable construction time. Often the problem also lies in bureaucratic delays and the lack of mixed models that guarantee the housing will be publicly available and affordable for many years. Private investors are often not interested because it's not profitable enough for them, and government agencies have a very slow decision-making and management pace that often makes them inefficient.

For this very reason, a number of entities from across the country, some also from Catalonia, are working on a legislative proposal to regulate the housing associationsA type of private entity with a public interest that operates in many other European countries precisely by promoting affordable public housing. In Spain, although there are cooperatives and entities that somewhat fulfill this role, there is a lack of clear regulations to help these entities receive better funding, a key element not only for construction but also for subsequent management. The law would allow for incentives for this model with anti-speculative guarantees and a clear definition of the profit limit. In principle, these are private, non-profit organizations, and although they can have private or public capital, by working within a highly regulated framework they can access direct or indirect public funding and also tax incentives.

It's a model that works well in the Netherlands, France, Austria... It needs to be incentivized in Spain as well, and that's why a law to support it is necessary. The housing crisis doesn't allow for much more delay if we don't want to end up, effectively, living in Pottersville.