In 2007, the magazine Ideas In an excellent article by Jordi Mas, the Rafael Campalans Foundation proposed a Catalan Housing System understood as a "protection system based on rental housing," outlining an equitable policy designed to prevent the privatization of public housing and its high turnover. The aim was to ensure that public land was allocated to rentals and to foster a fairer system, capable of truly serving the families or age groups in need. This system would guarantee that when the tenants' personal circumstances improved, their rental contracts would not be renewed, and the apartments could be offered to a new family genuinely in need. Young people who had managed to stabilize their income after a few years would then transition to the private housing market.
Now, the Rafael Campalans Foundation itself, in its report "53 Proposals and Recommendations to Address the Shortage of Social Housing in Catalonia," estimates that promoting the development of owner-occupied social housing has advantages such as ownership, supplementary financial value for retirement, and eliminating the additional costs of managing and maintaining the rental housing stock. Some proposals are interesting, but returning to the model of selling social housing seems like a step backward.
The difference between developing apartments for sale or for rent is significant, as it has a major impact on the Generalitat's budget, which is responsible for ensuring affordable housing. Building subsidized housing for sale or lease is relatively easy for public administrations, because public developers only need to take out loans for four years and recoup the construction costs with a down payment of between €30,000 and €40,000, plus the corresponding mortgage loan paid by the buyer up to the value of the apartment. In contrast, renting requires an investment that won't be recovered for up to 30 years.
The sales promotion model has allowed the Metropolitan Institute for Land Promotion and Asset Management (IMPSOL) to develop housing for many years without any financial contribution from the metropolitan municipalities. In this way, it has developed more than 12,600 public housing units in some thirty municipalities within the Metropolitan Area. However, most of these apartments have been sold and, therefore, can no longer be counted as part of the public housing stock.
Furthermore, it is necessary to understand what type of families are seeking affordable housing in Catalan cities: according to data from the Housing Secretariat, there are 129,157 families registered in the Applicant Registry in Catalonia, most of which are family units between 35 and 65 years old. 77% are Spanish nationals, 23% are non-EU citizens, and there are very few applications from European families. Among these families, renting or rent-to-own are the most requested options; 48% are for single people, 24% for two people, and only 2% for households of more than six people. The majority have low or middle incomes, but they do have income.
Now, for each allocation process by the Barcelona Housing Consortium (15 buildings with an average of 50 apartments per building), more than 8,000 families have applied for a flat. Fortunately, the allocations are made by lottery before a notary, as it's already clear that demand far exceeds supply. Winning a subsidized rental apartment is literally a lottery, but as the public housing stock expands, it will become a more realistic possibility.
If we add to all this the social changes that have occurred in recent decades, with income polarization, an aging population, declining birth rates, and prolonged job insecurity, it becomes very difficult to defend public housing promoted for sale. While it is true that this reduces the financial pressure on the regional government, it actually postpones the imperative duty to expand the public rental housing stock. Furthermore, building more apartments at the expense of making them very small is a perverse temptation, because, as Professor Jesús Leal-Maldonado describes, homes are now used for much more: in addition to sleeping, they are used for work, study, cooking, and providing care. What we build now will be the legacy we leave for the next 200 years.
Why is the debate about selling off public housing starting all over again? I suspect it has to do with the budget: 50,000 apartments were promised, but in section 431 of the draft budget law, the investment figure for public housing development is quite similar to that of previous years. The Catalan Finance Institute (ICF) is expected to finance 7,000 subsidized housing units (which is welcome), but it doesn't seem likely that public developers can recover their pre-bubble production levels if the Catalan government (Generalitat) doesn't provide them with a minimum of its own funds. Without the concrete details of the State Housing Plan or the Spanish Sovereign Wealth Fund, which has promised non-repayable severance packages, it's very difficult to believe that the number of subsidized apartments completed annually can increase from 1,800 to the promised 10,000. Financing the 50,000 Plan will require a commitment from the Ministry of Housing and repayable financing mechanisms over 30 years, but we cannot in any way return to the option of selling public housing.
