Classic developers often complain that building social housing is very expensive and slow due to bureaucracy, and that is why they do not build it. Having to process dozens of permits, documents to be validated in different departments, with sometimes conflicting criteria, chaining processes that do not advance if a procedure gets stuck... All this creates volumes of uncertainty that translate into delays and, ultimately, loss of money. In free-market housing, this is not a barrier, because these are costs that are passed on to the sale price. But in social housing, with affordable prices for tenants, it puts many operations at risk. And this, above all, penalizes social promoters and small operators the most. If 50,000 social housing units need to be built, and they are not being built at the expected pace, perhaps we should make it easier for ourselves. I have been lucky enough to be able to lead the development of two social housing buildings, and I can state that the following actions would eliminate barriers to the construction of social housing:1. Land management. In social housing projects, most of the plots are free transfers from developers to city councils or land purchased expressly. In the first case, the compensation boards must leave the plots clean, decontaminated, and urbanize the surrounding streets on time. In the second, it is necessary to carry out demolitions, often complicated by the impact on neighboring properties. Therefore, before being able to place a crane, social housing projects must wait for actions that must be carried out by other agents.2. Lack of clarity in the regulations. There are many sentences in the norms, decrees, and ordinances that give rise to different interpretations. The problem is not whether a civil servant or a private company grants the license; the barrier arises when the person who has the power to stop a certain project always takes it in the most restrictive way possible. Then professional judgment loses its meaning. And a warning: private companies that grant licenses will not take risks, and will always go for the most unfavorable interpretation. It is this lack of clarity that delays the granting of licenses, because good developers will logically always try to defend the interpretations that give more room for good architecture.3. Administrative fragmentation. When a project is submitted, it is accompanied by various annexes: the heritage issue, railway impacts, telecommunications, waste, fires, transport... It is logical that 21st-century cities demand controls over all networks, but perhaps the administration itself could accompany social promoters in all these procedures to recall the public interest of reducing deadlines.
4. Energy. Making tenants pay less for energy has many implications for projects. Sometimes it is necessary to connect them to heating and cooling networks that have exorbitant costs just to have a service connection. It is always necessary to fill the roofs with as many photovoltaic panels as possible, which require separate legalization. Now, in addition, it is necessary to recycle water from showers to fill toilet cisterns, and it is good that it is so. But this requires a large volume of tanks (which consume buildability) and intensive maintenance. Social housing is often more sustainable than market-rate housing, but this has a significant impact on execution costs.5. To connect to the sewage system, drinking water, or electricity, you must contract it directly with the companies, which often direct you to automated forms and it is impossible to speak with a human being. Telephone management is, quite frankly, enough to make you want to commit suicide. Even though connection fees are paid a year in advance, companies can take months to activate the connections. 6. Once the license has been granted at the municipal level, you must contact the Generalitat to obtain the provisional and final qualification for the apartments. Theoretically, there are deadlines for obtaining the qualifications, but sometimes they do not receive the application due to IT issues, or August gets in the way, or they request more documentation than what is indicated on the website itself. To request the first occupancy from the City Council, you must upload the documentation in a form that only accepts 20 MB files, and which takes up to twenty minutes to upload each file. It can take days to upload the documents. Wouldn't it be easier to send it via a single cloud link?
7. Then there is the world of notaries, property registries, the minute discrepancies with the land registry... And if public funding or subsidies have been required, the documentation associated with these processes, which have their own methods of submission. 8. In parallel to the completion of the works, the terms and conditions for accessing the housing lottery must be established. In our case, there were more than 12,000 families registered for 42 and 36 homes. Fortunately, the lottery is the least unfair way to award the apartments, which then must be visited, registered for utilities, have lease contracts approved, deposit the bonds...And I'm still leaving out the visas at the Architects' Association, the technical control offices, the insurance, the health and safety, the taxes, the acoustic tests... If the challenge is for empty public land to be built on quickly with the 50,000 Plan, the period between the signing of the surface rights and the commissioning of the development must be reduced, especially in the project phase: it cannot be the case that it takes two years to process the project for a construction that will last two more. Public developers know this, that all this costs a lot, because sometimes they take months (or a year) between the completion of the works and the handover of the homes. Perhaps the innovation that is needed now lies precisely in supporting social development: the creation of contract templates, communication channels with utility companies, document submission systems to the administration, and processing protocols... For me, knowledge should be used to make things easier, not the other way around.
