Housing and fear

You hear the actors involved in the housing debate speak, and it turns out that, here, everyone is afraid.

The fear of tenants is called eviction, with all the associated anxieties that damage physical and mental health. And the fear of landlords takes the name of legal insecurity.

The fear of economists is due to the rampant lack of rental supply for an enormous demand. Real estate agents and other professionals such as notaries see people in their offices every day who no longer want to rent, withdraw their apartment from the rental market, and put it up for sale. Or who give up on buying an apartment they intended to rent out because they do not want to be indefinitely subject to a series of obligations.

In the middle are the developers and builders, who complain about the bureaucratic slowness of the administrations, especially in Catalonia, where five years can easily pass between the purchase of a plot of land and the handover of the keys to the apartments to the new tenants, not to mention the 15 years it has come to cost to develop an urban plan in the metropolitan area of Barcelona.

The right and the far-right have managed in not-so-distant times to turn the housing debate into one about squatting (to the great joy of alarm installation companies, which have made a killing). In Spanish, they even invented the term inquiocupas. Meanwhile, landlords feel criminalized with the name "rentiers" for having been able to save, buy an apartment, and rent it to someone in need of one.

And finally, we are witnessing the fear of politics to sit down and negotiate anything because it looks weak. It does not matter that we are talking about the right to housing. The fear is that by legislating on the fly, we are putting a short-term patch on things without a housing policy worthy of the name.