Bad times are coming for holders of variable-rate mortgages. The daily 12-month Euribor, the main reference for this type of loan for home purchases, has closed the month with an average above 2.8% (2.804%) and is heading towards 3%, according to analysts. Thus, the monthly payment for an average mortgage of 174,132 euros with Euribor plus one point, which was 833.11 euros, will rise to 900.39 euros, an increase of 67.28 euros more or 807.36 euros more per year.

The Government will extend the age of access to emancipation loans to 40 years from Monday. It is an "instrument to facilitate the payment of the down payment for a home for young people so that they can subsequently apply for a mortgage: "They encounter a barrier, a wall, which is the down payment," explained the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, at an event at the Institut Català de Finances (ICF) this Friday.

Mayor Jaume Collboni (Barcelona, 1969) receives ARA when there is just one year left until the municipal elections. We talk about housing –the main problem for Barcelonians–, tourism, security, and also about the situation of the PSOE amidst the Zapatero storm.

Financial or property donations signed before a notary have grown by 20% to "all-time highs," and the Notarial College of Catalonia links this to the housing crisis and the need for assistance to buy a home. "They respond greatly to the desire to help a son or family member who wants to acquire a home, and donations can be the solution: either money to buy one or property if parents are fortunate enough to have more than one," explained the vice-dean of the College, Raquel Iglesias, at the presentation of the data from the V Notarial Observatory of Catalonia. "Donations out of pure generosity, without need, do exist, but we don't see them as much," she clarified.

The Barcelona Chamber of Commerce presented its plan this Wednesday to combat the housing crisis. The business entity announced a set of 20 "structural" measures to face the challenge that it represents for the country. According to the Chamber, the objectives of the initiative are to "sustainably increase the housing supply, reinforce legal certainty, and guarantee access to decent housing for all citizens". Estimates collected by the entity indicate that in the next five years, more than 180,000 new housing needs will have to be met.

After more than a decade of research between Harvard University and MIT, Ramon Gras (Barcelona, 1984) co-founded Aretian in 2018. Through digital twins, this start-up analyzes how a city's morphology influences its economy and innovation. In recent years, it has developed the one for the metropolitan region first and then for all of Catalonia. A project that has the support of the Torres Foundation and Barcelona Global, which is already available to administrations and will soon also be open to the private sector.

Searching on any of the major real estate portals for lofts or studios on the ground floor in Barcelona generates a results page full of listings for properties without a certificate of habitability available for purchase –mostly– or for rent, some of which at prices far above the market average and that can reach 760,000 euros. Despite being a legally required document to live in a dwelling, when asked by ARA, Catalan administrations –such as the Generalitat or the Barcelona City Council– do not currently provide data on inspections and sanctions for this matter.

The Barcelona Metropolitan Housing Observatory calculates the real impact of the rent cap. Prices in the Catalan capital would have risen by between 160 and 270 euros more per month if this measure had not been implemented, according to a report prepared by this entity. Without regulation, the document states, rents would have continued to rise to 1,318.6 euros per month, following the trend of the last decade, or could even have risen further, to 1,492.2 euros, if the accelerated growth rate of the market in recent years had been maintained.

The Spanish economy is holding its ground despite the impact of the war in the Middle East, but it is not without risks. This is one of the main conclusions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) economists in their annual report on the Spanish economy, the so-called Article IV, in which they launch a series of recommendations to the Spanish government, starting with the need to carry out fiscal consolidation to help strengthen public finances.

The Spanish government announced this Thursday a new sanctioning procedure against a "large real estate company" – the executive refuses, for the moment, to make its name public – for allegedly violating consumer rights in housing matters. It is the fourth procedure on this issue opened during the legislature, which began three years ago, according to sources from the Ministry of Consumer Affairs confirmed to the newspaper ARA.

Ivan Giesen is 68 years old and has been living for 27 years in an apartment at number 153 of Ramon Turró street, in Poblenou. In 1999 he moved there after living for a few years in the Gothic Quarter, at a time when the rent price in this more central area began to double. "I was looking for a place and I found this apartment in Poblenou, which, moreover, suited me very well because at that time I was running a language academy in the neighborhood," recounts the resident. In 2019, however, the company Maramca SL – owner of the building since 2012 – began renovation works in the building and notified that it would stop renewing the contract with the residents, including Giesen.

Catalonia breaks the streak of monthly growth in home purchases, which had already lasted six months. According to the latest data on property rights transfers, published this Monday by the National Statistics Institute, sales have fallen by 3.5% in March compared to the same period last year. The decline in the third month of the year reverses the trend that had been maintained since the beginning of the year, with growth of 1.4% in January and more than 5.7% in February.

Ildefons Cerdà said that “the culture of peoples is inscribed by the construction of their homes, or what is the same, that civilization and urbanization run in parallel, they are the same thing”. That is why Anne Frank's house, Steinbeck's family farm in Oklahoma, or Bachelard's attic say many more things about the homes and the moments they lived through than the plans do. I am from the last analog generation, like Llucia Ramis, and I have also lived in many houses. Like her nephews, my daughters have moved around a lot until we finally got a mortgage, outside of Barcelona. But I wouldn't know how to explain shared flats, moving, and conversations with friends and loves with so much cunning. One square meter is a delight because in painful situations you have to face them with a bit of humor and sensitivity. For an architect like me, reading about life experiences in houses and burdens is material of incalculable value.If the Mary Beard of the future, two thousand years from now, reads Ramis' writings, this reading of over twenty-five years of Barcelona trajectory will constitute a very precise source of what the city means for young people without patrimony or the elderly who have lived by renting. It is very symptomatic that in the midst of the 21st century, nomadism returns to an urban world full of cities that were invented precisely to provide stability. It is one thing to change homes because you need more space or because you find work 100 km from home, and another is to have to change homes because the market always needs to extract more income and more money from it.It all runs through my head and I wonder what we've done wrong as a profession, we who studied the legacy of municipal architect Aldo Van Eyck in Amsterdam, the manifestos of GATCPAC, the revolutionary ideas of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture, the shared projects of Team X, and we made industrialized housing projects to dream that it was possible to reduce costs.

The housing crisis and the rising cost of both rentals and purchases have cast doubt on a significant part of the taxation of real estate companies due to the low level of taxes they pay compared to other sectors of the economy. One of the targets of criticism for this low taxation are SOCIMIs, publicly traded real estate investment companies.

The Government strengthens its objective of building 50,000 public housing units by 2030 with the announcement of a new investment. This Tuesday, the Catalan executive has authorized the Institut Català del Sòl (Incasòl) to allocate an additional 251.8 million euros to the promotion of affordable public homes, a figure that comes from the treasury reserves of the 2025 fiscal year and can be used throughout 2026. "This measure should allow for an increase in Incasòl's contribution to address the housing market situation, as well as the need to expand public housing stock," specify the Government agreements published this Tuesday, which also indicate that the executive is working on "other avenues" to expand the current housing supply.

The State Housing Plan 2026-2030 represents a break with the previous one and, in general, with the tradition of Spanish policy for the promotion of affordable housing. Swings usually respond to confusion, but moreover, this particular change has not pleased the minority partner of the Spanish government –Sumar–, which is betting on a different third way. Can we shed some light on the darkness?Traditionally, policy had consisted in aiding the developer by facilitating and subsidizing financing, but the much more aggressive 2022-2025 Plan started from the principle that the problem was the price and the inability of many modest families to cope with it. Consequently, the focus shifted to aiding the tenant: 40% of the rent for low-income families; €250 per month for those under 35 for two years; up to 100% of the rent for vulnerable groups (victims of gender-based violence, homeless people, etc.).This approach was bound to fail, because if the problem is a lack of housing, helping some families access the little that exists only serves to transfer the problem to others, who will now be left without. The 2026-2030 Plan starts from the principle – much more sensible – that the problem is a lack of supply, and therefore, what it does is create an incentive for private developers to build. The incentive is generous: a subsidy of between 85,000 and 110,000 euros per dwelling. Taking into account that the construction cost is around 1,200 €/m², the subsidy is equivalent to the entire cost of a dwelling of 80 or 90 m², so that for the developer to make the numbers work, the rent only needs to cover the cost of the land. This approach will work because it will boost construction, but it has two problems. Before addressing them, however, we must examine why Sumar dislikes it and what this party prefers.Sumar does not like taxpayer money being put into the pockets of private companies. It is an understandable concern, but we have already seen why it cannot work – in fact, why it has not worked – putting it into the pockets of the most needy individuals. Aware of this problem, Sumar is committed to the fight against speculation; that is, against those who charge high rents, hence the insistence on freezing rents and limiting “large landlords”. We will talk about speculators later, but what matters now is that this approach has exactly the same limitations as direct aid to the most disadvantaged tenants: in the case of freezing, for example, it helps those who already have a contract, but it does not help those who do not have one at all.If we set aside the aesthetics, then, the 2026-2030 Plan is better focused than the alternatives: it will promote construction, which is what needs to be done now. Another thing is that it is also entirely opportune to limit the extraordinary profits that owners are obtaining due to a situation of scarcity. We are not talking about the remuneration that an idealized market grants to effort or risk, but about an unearned and sterile remuneration that comes exclusively from luck. However, I have already advanced that the scheme has two problems. The first is that –sooner rather than later– all aid will be captured by landowners through an increase in their price. It is a mechanism that most academic economists ignore, but which was accurately described by the fathers of their discipline –Adam Smith and David Ricardo– more than 200 years ago. As long as land is scarce, all aid will end up in the pockets of its owners.This brings us to the second problem, which is none other than the growth in demand. It is good to boost construction, because that is what is needed now, but without forgetting the origin of the problem, which is none other than excessively high immigration, an irresponsible commitment to urban tourism, and a successful policy of attracting foreign students by public and private educational institutions.

I find it hard to understand that Junts' proposals to tackle the housing crisis involve re-deducting mortgage and rent expenses, because it is uninspired. A good part of the ideas on which Catalan cities have been built was driven by Convergència i Unió, in the eighties, and they were much braver. For example, when Josep Maria Cullell was Minister of Territorial Policy and Public Works with Jordi Pujol, the Institut Català del Sòl was created, and legislation was enacted so that its function would be to “promote the necessary actions, both in organizational and functional aspects, to allow the use of land in accordance with the general interest and to prevent speculation and promote the effectiveness of the right to enjoy decent and adequate housing”. With this instrument, the Generalitat and some city councils that were of the same school bought large sectors of land to turn them into good neighborhoods today: Fontajau in Girona, the Eixample of Martorell, Mas Lluí in Sant Feliu de Llobregat, Parc de l’Alba in Cerdanyola... and so many others. Afterwards, in 1996, still with Jordi Pujol at the helm, the law on registration and deposit of deposits was enacted, intended to boost the urban rental market and provide adequate information on the situation of the rental housing stock. It was then determined that the deposit of deposits would be used for public housing construction without this having to compromise public budgets, solely relying on there being a consistently positive balance between cancellations and refunds. Taxes are the basic instrument for guaranteeing redistribution and, therefore, equity within a democratic society, but lowering taxes for everyone equally may not be egalitarian. Several studies show that providing incentives to further promote homeownership only helps to increase inequalities. The OECD, in a recent report on housing and taxes, concludes that the tax deduction for mortgage interest has proven to be regressive and ineffective, because those who own a home have access to capital and stability that renters do not have.

Thousands of people participated this midday in the demonstration called by UGT and CCOO in Barcelona for Worker's Day, the central event of the day of protests in Catalonia. The Urban Guard put the participation in the protest at 2,500 people, while the organizers estimated there were between 10,000 and 15,000. Workers have mobilized spurred by international geopolitical instability and the electoral calendar in the State.

Beyond petty politics and party strategies (in Junts they must be very sure of where they are going, voting what they vote), any debate about housing should start from this principle: people's right to decent housing is superior and must prevail over other rights, such as private property and its monetary exploitation. We can make it even broader: as a general principle, where individual rights collide with the common good, it is the individual right that must recede. Never the common good or society's interest. In a housing emergency, an individual —be it an individual, a real estate company, or an investment fund— does not have the "right" to speculate on rental and sale prices of homes. In a climate crisis, no one has the "right" to destroy the environment in the name of economic productivity, nor to question scientific evidence without valid arguments. In an epidemic, or pandemic, no one has the "right" not to get vaccinated, unless they assume that their decision endangers the health and lives of those around them (and they are indifferent to it). These are just a few examples.Some will call the previous paragraph communist, but it is not: it is simple social democracy and the welfare state, as we understood them not so long ago. The principle is simple: for societies to advance, they must do so collectively. If only a few benefit and many are harmed, there is no progress: there is regression. Illiberal, or turbo-capitalist, discourses are not an evolution of classical liberalism, but its degradation. The market, by itself, does not put everyone in their place, especially when the market is doped, inflated, and falsified in favor of very specific and describable interests. The retraction of democracy reveals another project, a new order conceived and commanded by global oligarchs with local servants in each country, imposing on rulers and populations a kind of natural selection based on money. This is nothing new in human history, but if for some decades we have prided ourselves on the West being the most advanced zone on the planet, it was precisely because we had worked in the opposite direction to all this.Trying to anchor this ideology in the figure of the good Catalan (or the good Mallorcan) who has worked his whole life like a beast and now has the right to do whatever he wants with the houses and apartments he has inherited from his grandparents, or that he has bought by speculating, is, to say the least, an indecent falsehood. Catalonia, precisely, has been a pioneer for having been a country built on the firm idea (and this one, indeed, liberal) of wealth distribution and collective improvement. In Mallorca, this idea has never existed, and that is why it is drowning in mass tourism with no alternatives in sight (and selling the grandparents' houses and apartments to the highest bidder, which curiously are vulture funds). The right to decent housing, let's repeat it, must prevail over the right to property.

The Spanish government was forced to divide aid for the war in the Middle East into two parts. The first, with tax rebates on fuel, among other aspects, had already been validated by Congress. But the opposition from Junts has derailed the second decree, the one on housing, which among other measures proposed extending rental contracts that were nearing their end by two years and a cap of 2% on rent increases.