Why is housing now a collective emergency and it didn't seem that way a few years ago? Because there was a battery of slogans that were repeated without much foundation. Today they seem outdated, but I list them because it is worth refuting certain dogmas.
A recurring theme for many years has been "the lack of supply." That it was necessary to develop a lot of land and that this would lower the prices of flats. The paradigmatic example of this is the "Southeast of Madrid" or the Eixample Nord of Vilanova, which remain undeveloped. The weakness of this premise is that capital is primarily interested in everything that is well located in urban centers; the peripheries or intermediate cities do not seem attractive to them. Real estate development is a risk-averse business, and very little willing to invest in new sites.
In the 1920s, 90% of the population in Spain and the UK lived in rented housing, and this was not a stigma: the well-off also lived in rented housing. What is radically new is that successive cuts in the Urban Leasing Act (LAU) have diminished the rights of tenants. And that the high-income segment is displacing middle-class income in attractive cities such as Barcelona. This also reduces the supply of affordable housing, and is not compensated by the generation of more peripheral land.
Over the last fifteen years, there has also been a strong feeling that "there is no money to build housing." As Jover, Morell and Ragàs describe very well in an article for the Barcelona Association of Developers (APCE), for too many years the State has stopped providing the promotion aid and loan subsidies that had historically allowed it to incentivize the production of affordable housing. On the other hand, Law 13/1996 on the deposit of deposits indicates in its article 7 that the Catalan Land Institute must allocate the amount of the deposits it has on deposit to investments for the public construction of housing. But, unfortunately, between 2012 and 2022, Incasòl did not build or deliver any rental flats to expand the public housing stock. Neither the State nor the Generalitat invested the necessary budgetary money, but the resources generated with the deposit of deposits were not invested in building new social rental flats either.
Another issue that has been overcome is that of competences. All the municipalities have suffered from municipal underfunding, which, in a context of debt restriction, have grown mallows on the plots of land that the developers had given them as protected housing reserves. The municipal developers have had to sell flats to start new works, and they have not obtained stable financing to expand the public park with a return of 30 years, which after 35 years would have already provided them with interesting patrimonial income, stable and sustained over time. Therefore, it is true that the City Councils have the plots of land, but it is up to the Generalitat to finance and prioritise at a territorial level where the resources from the public budgets must be provided.
A difficult debate that is contrary to the slogan of "lack of supply" is the need to rehabilitate before building again. Indeed, the climate emergency requires rethinking actions outside the scale or large urban extensions in areas of ecological fragility. But field studies indicate that there are not as many empty flats as predicted, nor does renovation help to create housing for the new households that are formed. On the one hand, we tend to live in more fragmented family units, which means that, even in a context of demographic stabilization, we need more housing. And, on the other hand, the figures indicate that we are in demographic expansion; the population is growing due to migration, because this country has become prosperous for decades by welcoming people from other latitudes. And we see it every day in the Eixample; renovation (materially exquisite, in some cases!) is displacing the middle class and the elderly who live in rented apartments or in residences, as this newspaper has explained. The renovation of apartments to put them up for seasonal rent increases the deficit of affordable housing. In Barcelona, in the 21st century, according to data from the INE, there are some 16,320 apartments of less than 30 m2, 8,600 of which are inhabited by more than two people; despite efforts to rehabilitate older flats, substandard housing has not been completely eradicated.
Other arguments to dilute the seriousness of the housing problem are the historical mismanagement of the flats built by the public sector (why build, if they will end up being a problem?), the belief that if there is economic activity in a city, the citizens will have better salaries and therefore will be able to pay rent without problems (the data indicate that without a public park, there are no effects (debate overcome in schools and in health, which have shown the opposite effects).
Having said all this, it seems to me that the questions that will now allow us to move forward are: where, how, and in how much time will we make these houses that we need?
