The administration only covers 4% of the demand for public housing

The Catalan Housing Agency has released a figure on Wednesday that illustrates the housing crisis in Catalonia. Between 2021 and 2022, the administration only covered 4% of the requests for access to its housing stock. In this period, the Register of Applicants for Officially Protected Housing had an average of 85,600 registered, while an annual average of 3,450 homes were assigned. These are the most recent data available, according to the report of the Sindicatura de Comptes de Catalunya.

The Catalan Housing Agency manages a housing stock that, at the end of 2022, had 21,875 units. To guarantee better access to housing and reduce the risk of residential exclusion, it is working to increase the supply of public rental housing. This stock includes both publicly owned housing and private housing integrated into the system.

Lack of housing

The report from the Ombudsman's Office states that the main problem in accessing housing is the "serious mismatch between the demand for social housing and the supply available through public administration housing stocks or public and private developments". While the number of people registered in the Register of Applicants for VPO exceeds 80,000, the public housing stock has only 21,875. The increase in the number of homes in this stock was 2% in 2021 and 3.3% in 2022.

The report justifies the low allocation percentages because "the Agency's housing stock is very consolidated and there is hardly any rotation." The occupancy rate of the park, that is, the percentage of homes delivered in relation to the total, ranged between 84.13% and 87.18% between 2019 and 2022, with an increasing trend year after year. The analysis of the Audit Office concludes that the main cause of the existence of undelivered homes is, in addition to the time needed to adapt and assign them, the presence of illegal jobs in the public park.

Deficiencies in management

Beyond the imbalance between supply and demand, the report also denounces shortcomings in the management of the housing stock. There is no register that unifies the availability of housing in the different existing housing stocks. This means that the response to requests from the VPO Register is carried out through housing managed by various entities - municipalities, the Agency or public and private developers - without the Agency having precise control over the total number of available housing.

On a positive note, the report highlights the Agency's initiatives to attract new housing from individuals (Reallotgem programme) and to mobilise illegally occupied housing (protocol for cases with eviction sentences pending execution).