People without homes, homes without people

The European Commission has acknowledged that the housing crisis is a European priority and, as a first step to address it, announced last week the proposal for the affordable housing act, the European law on affordable housing, the details of which you can read in the chronicle by Núria Sala Ventura for this newspaper. It is not that there has been a move towards Bolivarianism in Brussels. But they have indeed become aware that the fact that a million Europeans have no home to live in, while 20% of the available housing stock within the European Union is empty, is an urgent situation. The purchase price of a home in community countries has risen, in the last ten years, by more than 60%, and rental prices, by 20%. In addition to being an urgent situation, it is an unsustainable, unjust... and illegal situation: the right to decent housing is a basic social right (in the Spanish state it is a constitutional right) that is often violated, or denied, by market impositions. This European housing law –promoted by former minister Teresa Ribera, now Vice President of the Commission, and by the Commissioner for Housing, Dan Jorgensen– aims precisely at what has been said so many times was not advisable (and according to some, not even possible), and which reality now shows is necessary: to intervene in the market, to set limits and caps to prevent it from falling into speculative inertia.That is why the law proposes measures such as legal limitations on the purchase of second homes or non-habitual residences in those regions classified as stressed areas. Also, imposing penalties on owners who keep apartments or houses empty, to force them onto the market. The new proposed law insists, mind you, on boosting the construction of new housing to ease the market (although it is true that it speaks of promoting operators different from the traditional ones, such as cooperatives or non-profit entities, instead of the usual large construction companies). More interesting in this sense are advances like the ZAN law (zero artificialisation nette), from France, which proposes not to build a single more square meter of rustic land and to work, instead, on the rehabilitation, reuse, and transformation of everything that has already been built.The European proposal aligns well with the ban on tourist apartments by the Barcelona City Council, or with the penalties for having vacant flats in force in Catalonia for four years. In the Balearic Islands, on the other hand, the spokesperson for the PP parliamentary group in the Parliament, Sebastià Sagreras, has declared that “he cannot fathom” that a Majorcan “cannot buy a second residence in another municipality.” Not many things fit inside the spokesperson's head (the PISA report leaves the Balearic Islands at the tail end of the Spanish state, which in turn is at the tail end of Europe in educational matters, and this is also noticeable in the government officials). What won't he say when he finds out that the majority of Majorcans cannot even think about buying a first home in any municipality.