Public housing: much needed, and urgently needed
The housing crisis is a European phenomenon, with Barcelona and Catalonia among its most tense areas. It's no surprise, then, that Mayor Collboni traveled to Brussels once again this week to address the issue through the Mayors for Housing alliance, which brings together 17 cities, including Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Milan, and Rome. The mayors' goal is for the European Commission to create an affordable housing fund that would mobilize €300 billion in public and private funds annually.
This Wednesday, two events on housing coincided in Barcelona. On the one hand, the social third sector has claimed to be part of the solution in the promotion, management, and support of social housing. Between 2017 and 2024, more than fifteen entities have gone from offering 1,500 apartments to 4,098, and they believe that if they received legal and political recognition and financial support—they lack financial muscle—they could take a major step forward. They have the experience and know the demand, which, by the way, remains very serious in the most vulnerable social sectors (especially immigrants: in Barcelona, immigrant tenants spend an average of 41.6% of their income on housing, while among natives it is 18.5%), but which increasingly affects the working class.
In parallel, the city also hosted the real estate fair The District, where the head of the Urban Development division of the European Investment Bank (EIB), Elena Campelo, said that "the demand for new housing in Europe reaches 2.3 million units annually, but in only 4 million," but only just. Campelo announced that the EIB has a budget of 3 billion euros to support the construction of one million affordable homes in Europe over the next five years. In Catalonia, the Catalan government has promised to build 50,000 public housing units by 2030, an operation for which several city councils are already offering public land.
Finally, it seems that things are moving, albeit slowly. Access to housing is today a very serious problem, a source of discontent, a breakdown of social cohesion, and demagoguery from the far right. As a society, it has taken us a decade to fully grasp the magnitude of the tragedy. And now, of course, it's going to take a long time to catch up. Here, the delay is glaring: public investment in housing in Spain stood at 0.5% of GDP last year. In Catalonia, where there are 25,000 empty apartments, most of them in the hands of large property owners and banks, public or social housing represents 2% of the total housing stock, while the European average is 15%. Tourist and speculative pressure is proving lethal, and regulatory measures to combat it have, for the moment, had limited effect.
It's urgent to take a leap forward and focus on initiatives like Housing First.from Iceland, the example of Vienna (with 60% of the population living in social or regulated rent), the 300 housing associations from the Netherlands—which manages 2.3 million homes—or Swiss cooperatives in cities like Zurich and Basel. The diagnosis has been made, and solutions have been devised. Resources, regulations, and going to work are needed.