Housing: how to overcome the blockage
Our society seems incapable of articulating a reasonable path to housing access. The protests that have taken place throughout the State highlight the level of tension we have reached. And yet, the legislative deadlock on housing continues, with negative effects not only social but also economic, as it favors a society of rentiers, not producers.
The solutions that had been proposed until now insisted on the same old thing: private promotion, protected or free-market, to which a minimum dose of public social housing is added, with the subsidy of one third of the rent, in addition to public land contributed at no cost. Friday, the two famous decrees fell in Congress. Public policy has practiced (and we shall see if it will continue to do so) state paternalism, with populist messages of minor effects, while the proletarianization of young people and immigrants was consolidated.
We abjure Francoism, of course, but it cannot be denied that in those years workers with official protection housing built up an estate (which today are objects of inheritance or income for retirement). The current situation of rental prices, on the other hand, impoverishes workers in perpetuity, and we have reached the point where the annual cost of renting is higher than what mortgages cost annually (see The cost of housing and hidden poverty in Spain, 2014-2025, Fedea).
The negative flip side of property is that, after a period of effort (whatever is needed to pay for the home), speculation arrives: profit from simple urban position. Because when a property is bought, its location is also acquired, its street, an element that in the long run implies an increase in income. If, when buying a car, we had to buy a share of a toll road, in the long run a vehicle ready for the scrapyard would be worth more than at the beginning. This is the perverse law of urban property.
In social housing, there will be no plausible alternative unless a broad market space with collective and massive effects is made possible. And the path could be the combination of protected housing granted on a term basis on publicly owned land. In fact, it would be a co-ownership between building and land. The first owner would enjoy the concession for 50 or 75 years, or more, and then the housing would pass into the hands of the public sector providing the land. If paid off in a 25-year mortgage, the operation allows for a subsequent benefit: the right to sell, rent, transmit as inheritance... would be maintained, as happens with all protected housing. But the housing would never enter the classic urban property market, which is already simple speculation. Public aid would provide land and location, but not in perpetuity. This would create a specific submarket that would influence the whole, and in the long term, it would create a public housing heritage. We would distribute leading roles among builders, banks, and public land management, without confusion. The land would be awarded through a tender, there would be a public right of first refusal in transfers and appraisal of possible rents, as well as the right of residence for users at a regulated cost once the concession ends. Ownership yes, but without rent-seeking: the model we use with any movable property.
We know that a public sector, municipal or supra-municipal, incapable of creating land, is ineffective, but things do not have to be this way. There is land where we can grow and densify in an orderly manner, and there is a lot of land to transform that is already completely urban. One just needs to know how to see it. If at one time we created green spaces, schools, health centers, etc., now we can create residential land with the same effort and hand it over to a private initiative that would basically be for construction and sale, without the complex multi-decade asset management that renting implies. Finding or creating land is quite possible, but many city councils prefer to find it to offer free vehicle parking rather than apartments for people, in a totally blind urban policy.
These competitions could be of a general model designed on a Catalan scale, but adjusted to each location. They would surely evolve over time and would allow us a wide scope for private initiative, just as was done decades ago with hundreds of thousands of protected apartments, only now with the specific protection and help of the contributed land. The existing private market would not be annulled, nor would social rental options, but a wedge would arise in the market as a whole, one more option, not mandatory for anyone but with overall effects on the market, currently strained by a lack of supply.
We need to open up a powerful liberal playing field, balanced, not speculative nor solely state-driven, and it must be done by law and with social consensus and breadth. We must generate a housing economy: in construction, in better effective wages... We need to overcome the deadlock in which we find ourselves. We must overcome a politics held prisoner at once by the most extreme liberalism and by banally statist populism.
