A good book on housing is by Javier Gil, Generación inquilina, published by Capitán Swing. It is because it is written in plain language and grounds some of the forecasts that Saskia Sassen and Richard Sennett had made in the case of post-bubble Spain. The author explains that the contradictions in housing matters in the Western world begin with the neoliberal policies of dispossession of the working class, with a battery of decisions that favored rampant speculation and the preference for the accumulation of wealth, which reversed the trend of stable rents towards the purchase of housing for investment. He connects it with the well-known theses of Thomas Piketty: when housing is an investment good, it becomes inaccessible to the majority and patrimonial income grows above labor income.However, in addition, Gil quantifies the magnitude of the tragedy in Spain: after 2007, investment funds such as Blackstone, Lone Star, Oaktree, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs or Cerberus bought hundreds of thousands of homes from Spanish banks. Blackstone, Cerberus and Lone Star alone acquired 450,000 homes in Spain in a few operations. The giant Blackstone has bought large volumes of apartments in Spain, while in the rest of the world it has more diversified assets. This deserves a study, because, simultaneously, many local developers have been lost.Meanwhile, the State allocated 72 billion to the bailout of banks, and 51 billion for the creation of Sareb. Gil asks an important question: what would have happened if the largest mobilization of public funds in history had been used to buy the homes obtained through evictions?
Gil's question leads me to insist that perhaps twenty years later it is no longer possible to buy the apartments guarded by the funds, but we are in time to buy the land. Many areas pending urbanization were halted by the bursting of the real estate bubble and are in bankruptcy proceedings. Acquiring this land to expand the public land patrimony would avoid having to go to excessive densities. It is about reversing the speculative cycle and acquiring land that banks and opportunistic funds have forgotten to create a rental park that can be sustained by public rental income. It is important to read, explain, and talk about this book so that when we do participatory budgeting or when groups draw up the budget project, we ask ourselves what the cost of not acting from public initiative is.The book also describes the usury processes produced by renting rooms (how can a room be worth 600 euros a month and be legal?), the concentration of wealth in certain investment companies and the role of inheritances in inequalities. Regarding construction, I fully share the diagnosis: between 2000 and 2006, six million homes were built in Spain, 20% of the total stock, and this did not serve to generate a more stable housing stock. In city centers, good homes are taken by those who can pay more, and many buy them as an investment or to go there only a few days. In city centers that are not transformed, it is very difficult to make room to promote protected housing, and Barcelona has difficulty creating affordable housing in Gràcia, Eixample, Sarrià, or Les Corts as it did in Ciutat Vella thirty years ago. What Gil defends is that houses must be built outside the logic of the market; for example, under a cooperative regime, which allows homes to belong to cooperatives and not to individuals. I would add that social promoters who do not operate for profit, and public promoters, can perform the same function, as it is understood that if they are well managed they do not generate margins but neither do losses. These operators must be dedicated to providing social rent, with stable contracts but that allow, when people prosper, the flats to be allocated to other families. Therefore, instead of building indiscriminately, what is now needed is to promote the construction of protected housing. And here, collaboration between town councils and entities is fundamental, because operators who work without profit do not have a cushion to cope with delays or unforeseen events. In light of this book, it becomes even more inexplicable that, in 2013, the Community of Madrid sold 1,860 protected apartments to the Blackstone fund, or that from 2010 to 2020 the Generalitat de Catalunya was more occupied with Hard Rock and the sale of land to Amazon in Prat de Llobregat than with acquiring apartments from banks, exercising the right of pre-emption or promoting rental apartments with the money it held on deposit as deposits. For those of us from Javier Gil's generation, the tenant generation, this book makes us think about how important it is to update the housing priorities of the usual political parties.
