Housing and power without control

“Article 47. All Spaniards have the right to decent and adequate housing. The public authorities shall promote the necessary conditions and establish the appropriate regulations to make this right effective”

ERC has announced that it will present a bill called “One family, one home” as soon as the Congress of Deputies is constituted, and at the demonstration on the 11th, a banner went viral that said “No family without a home, no home without a family”. These slogans and others do nothing but vindicate what the Spanish Constitution establishes in a categorical and unequivocal manner. What has failed?

Another of the demonstration's slogans answered this question by stating: “Housing must be taken off the market”, but many had signed up for it before. As early as 2023, for example, Ester Capella declared that “housing must be taken out of market logic, just as has been done with public health and medicines”, and in the weeks prior to the demonstration, the general secretary of CCOO, Unai Sordo, heated up the atmosphere by stating that it is necessary to “kick out vulture funds and investment funds from the housing market with a stick”.

I can distinguish three underlying ideas in these slogans.

The first is that investment funds hoard housing and abuse this position to drive up prices. This idea is unfounded, because a private individual is much more prone to leaving a home empty (waiting for a child to move out, or needing to sell it to deal with some contingency without the hassle of renting it to who knows whom) than an investment fund; the latter are in a hurry because they have to present quarterly results to their investors. One might wonder why housing is much more affordable in Zurich or Frankfurt – cities full of financiers – than in Barcelona. On the other hand, these funds are already leaving here. This week, and quite naturally, a real estate agent in my neighborhood informed me that they manage a portfolio for a “large holder” and that they are putting the homes up for sale as rental contracts expire. Who will buy these homes, and will they lower the rent just by the fact of owning one or two homes instead of twenty? I cannot imagine it.

The second is that prices should not be determined by supply and demand. To some, this claim seems like anathema, because for them the market is sacrosanct, but to me it seems most reasonable given the very special characteristics of this market. However, in Catalonia, prices no longer respond to market logic, because since the laws of 2023 (regional) and 2024 (national), they are set de facto by the Generalitat.

The third –and most important– underlying idea of the demonstration's slogans is that it is possible to assign a home to every family. Unfortunately, this idea is mistaken. Between 2016 and 2019, the brand-new mayor Colau carried out a “census” of empty homes in the city of Barcelona and discovered that only 1.22% of the total were empty (about 10,000). Other studies carried out in cities of the first metropolitan ring have led to similar results: there were very few empty homes in metropolitan Catalonia. There are a great many in rural Catalonia, but we want them in the metropolitan area. And now? Since 2018, 300,000 families have been created in Catalonia, but we have only built about 110,000 homes: obviously, if there was a shortage when the Tenants' Union burst into Catalan politics, now there is a shortage of 200,000 more.

An advertising campaign for a tire brand used the slogan “Power without control,” suggesting that it posed a risk. In Wednesday's demonstration, the protesters represented power, and the control must be provided by the politicians. Will they be up to the task? So far, they have not been.

Not for lack of desire: since 2018, both in the State (all this time) and in the Generalitat (most of this time) and in the vast majority of metropolitan councils (in Barcelona, all this time), left-wing parties have governed that have declared themselves extremely worried and extremely busy with the housing problem.

Not because they have been inactive either: I have already made reference to the laws of 2023 and 2024, which followed those of 2007 and 2015.

Has their zeal served to solve the problem? No, because if more families than homes are created every year, it is indifferent whether financiers leave the country or if housing leaves the logic of the market, because there will increasingly be a shortage of homes.

Will our politicians know how to move beyond slogans and address the problem in a rational, and therefore, effective way? This, and no other, is the question.