The European Commission is preparing a regulatory framework to allow municipalities to restrict tourist rentals and the purchase of second homes, with the aim of combating the housing access crisis affecting the continent. Faced with the thousand-and-one recipes applied by member states to curb what is already the main concern of the community's citizens, Brussels will present the affordable housing law on Wednesday. The regulation will set the conditions under which local bodies will be able to apply these restrictions and will offer a common methodology to provide the measures with legal certainty.

93 apartments available. This is the initial offer from Casa 47, the state housing company, in Catalonia. This Monday, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda launched the portal where the available properties managed by the public entity will be offered. For the moment, it has an initial offer of 800 apartments across the State, 93 of which are in Catalonia, distributed between Barcelona, Girona, Lleida, and Tarragona, as ARA has been able to verify through the web portal.

Catalonia recorded a 10.1% increase in housing purchase costs between April and June 2026 compared to the same period last year, according to the housing price index, updated this Monday by the National Statistics Institute (INE). The increase, although it is slowing down slightly compared to figures recently recorded –with rises above 11% in some quarters of last year–, remains among the highest since the COVID-19 pandemic, and has chained rises above double digits since the end of 2024. In fact, the increase between April and June is the third highest in the historical series, only surpassed by the second quarters of 2007 (+10.3%) and 2025 (+11.6%).

Miquel (a fictional name) is 36 years old and is about to buy an apartment in Barcelona, in the Sarrià neighborhood. His mother "has paid quite a bit more than half of the apartment" and he will take out a mortgage to secure the rest of the financing. "Without my mother's help it wouldn't have been possible, and we had to have many meetings with the bank to see exactly how we would do it," he explains to the ARA.

The housing crisis affects all of Europe, especially in large cities and the most densely populated areas. According to a study by the Technical University of Vienna (TU Wien), 44% of Europeans with an average income level can only afford to buy a property of less than 50 square meters, that is, the equivalent of a one-bedroom apartment or a studio.

The twelve-month daily Euribor, the reference for variable-rate mortgages, closed August at an average of 2.952%, close to the 3% level it reached on some days of the month that is ending and which had not been seen since September 2024. On the last session of August, the one-year daily Euribor reached 3.003%. As a consequence of this trend, those whose mortgage loan review is this month will see their monthly installment increase by an average of 80.32 euros, up to 936.76, and about 963 euros annually.

I'm reading a news item on ARA that interests me so much, about the most expensive house in Catalonia: a villa in Roses "with 1,202 square meters built and 970 square meters of usable space, distributed in eight bedrooms and seven bathrooms, in perfect condition of preservation". It is the "most expensive house for sale in Catalonia on the Idealista portal": it costs 22 million. It has a guest house, the old servants' quarters, a garage for cars and a garage for a boat. From the photos, I would say that any bathroom is the size of your dining room, and the dining room is the size of your entire apartment.

In housing matters, the media regularly publish messages or replies between developers, academia (very divided, by the way), social movements, and a succession of governments that are too erratic regarding investment in affordable housing. These are very confrontational positions that constantly make us doubt the capacity of democratic governments to guarantee and expand the welfare state. Everyone agrees that the goal of 50,000 social housing units in Catalonia is a good initiative, but the results achieved so far give rise to all sorts of contradictory messages. What is preventing the promised volume of production from being achieved? Amidst these tensions, the narrative of the harsh reality of today's cities emerges, which authors such as Llucia Ramis, Javier Gil, Paulina Flores, Jordi Amat, and Marta Jiménez Serrano describe with cunning and, at the same time, sadness.Of the many readings that can be made of Thomas Piketty's work, there is one that has to do with the deconcentration of power and property, the power relations that confront tenants and landlords, and their respective narratives. A good contribution from Piketty is that he emphasizes the inequalities generated not only by the concentration of ownership of the means of production (the focus of classical Marxism), but also by housing ownership. The unequal life prospects that tenants may have compared to the options of owners (who, for the most part, are such by inheritance) call into question the deconcentration of power and property that had been achieved since the French Revolution. The poorest 50% of the population has a tenth of the average wealth of the total population and remains too exposed to the dynamics of the market housing price. Piketty refers to feminist authors who have for years argued that the household economy is a very important part of urban family economies and that, added together, they affect the functioning of national economies. It makes me think that the way cities solve the housing issue will have very important macroeconomic implications in the coming years.Spain is one of the wealthy countries that leave half the population without access to affordable housing out in the cold. It is a rich state in the sense that it has companies that accumulate many properties, but with the paradox that it has a dwindling public heritage. And in housing matters, only 2% of homes are public property.

More than half of the municipalities in the Barcelona metropolitan area have not generated any protected housing (HPO) in the period between 2020 and 2025. This is indicated by the Association of Developers of Catalonia (APCE), which, according to data published this Tuesday, warns that the presence of HPO in the demarcation continues to be "insufficient and territorially very unequal in the metropolitan area". The APCE expresses particular concern about this point in the Catalan geography, as it is the area with the highest residential demand in Catalonia.

We suffer from an excess of bureaucracy, especially now that almost everything has to be self-managed, impersonally and virtually, from the computer and the smartphone. But bureaucracy, an instrument of power, is as old as the Egyptian empire, as explained by Lewis Mumford in the book The Myth of the Machine. Like the neoliberal ideology of capitalism, its essence is to impose on us that there are no other possible worlds than that of the existing rules, applications, and contractual conditions.The difficulties in having papers or crossing certain borders, days full of kafkaesque dealings with large energy and communication companies, or regrettable situations, like when you go to the post office to collect a package for someone who is not there and they demand their authorization, even from the grave, are an example of this.Also the quality of urban life is marked by regulations and watched over by restrictive officials. Streets and public spaces, homes and school classrooms, everything is previously defined by laws, ordinances, modules and subsidy conditions, written by jurists who have no knowledge of the qualities of spaces, of people's real lives, or of what the culture of care is. Too many bureaucrats do not leave their country, because otherwise they would see the diversity of rules in each city and society, and that it is healthy to evolve them.

Less housing supply and, therefore, rising prices. These are the forecasts for the housing market made by BBVA Research (the research service of the blue bank) for 2026. Thus, the bank forecasts that purchase and sale transactions will fall by 7.3% in the State as a whole, while prices will rise by an average of 12% in Spain.

We have serious problems in Catalonia and Spain. And we have arrived where we are because we have not mobilized identified solutions. Planning problems does not solve them, but it creates hope for a solution; it changes the perception of them. Let's list the present problems:Housing: price and accessibility. Education: deterioration of quality and conflict with teachers. Commuter rail: poor service and unresolved management problems, excessive unionism and lack of investment. Environment and agriculture: climate change, fires, outdated food supply chain, excessive bureaucracy. Distribution of public funding between autonomous communities and the central government: insufficient resources for autonomous communities with the largest part of current expenditure. Judiciary: in conflict with the executive and legislative branches. For these problems there are solutions.Housing. Municipalities should be able to transfer land to autonomous communities for 30 years, with the possibility of purchase at the end of the transfer. A public-private company (50%) builds and rents. Public capital provides a 30-year loan at 3%. Private capital, an investment with a 5% indexed remuneration. An 80 m² or 100 m² dwelling built on land transferred by a municipality costs approximately €150,000. The annual costs of a property under these conditions would amount to €7,500: €1,250 for loan interest; €2,500 for capital repayment, and €3,750 for the private investor's dividend.The annual income of a low-to-middle income family, after deducting income tax, is €25,000. Housing costs should be less than 30% of income: €7,500/year. It fits. This is the solution adopted in Austria – 100 years ago – and in the Netherlands – 40 years ago.Education. Resolving the conflict requires management and direction, not bureaucratic practices. The problem is not money – there has been an increase in teacher remuneration – nor the reduction in teacher-student ratios, which have decreased. The problem is the management of schools and the improvement of teacher training: the scientific component must be increased to promote an increase in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) vocations. Today, these studies represent 18% of university students, when they should represent at least 21%, to maintain harmonious development with R&D policies and the modernization of the economy. And students decide what to study while they are in secondary school.In the 2024-2025 academic year, there were approximately 39,000 primary and early childhood teachers in Catalonia, and around 43,000 in secondary and post-compulsory education. After the agreed-upon reforms, this represents an annual expenditure of 5.9 billion euros, to which 2.2 billion must be added for subsidized education. The problem is not economic: there has never been so much money. The negotiation has been union-based and not professional. The authority of school principals is reduced while the selection and promotion of teachers becomes more rigid; the opposite of what is needed. Having teachers as civil servants, and discontented, is a mistake. We are harming ourselves on an issue that is our future. The strength of Catalonia, Spain, and Europe lies in its people, and not excelling in education has a high cost. We are seeing it.Rodalies. The service is bad. In Catalonia there are two networks, with two different gauges that facilitate disintegration: the UIC gauge – which, in communicating Catalonia with Spain and France, must be the responsibility of the central government – and the Iberian gauge. Only commuter and regional trains (and freight that will cease to run in the future) run on this second network. There is an investment deficit of 15,000 millions of euros in this network over 40 years. If we add the new coast line – the current one is precarious – and the garages and workshops, the necessary investment is 20 billion euros. An expense of 2 billion euros over ten years is affordable.Renfe and Adif must be eliminated from Commuter and regional services. They are public companies of the central government, controlled by a corporate union, and in which the maintenance of union power will always be superior to the improvement of the service. This has been seen in recent months. This union, which defends its interests to the detriment of citizens', has fewer than 1,000 members in Catalonia. Overcoming this resistance to establish a new company to manage regional and commuter trains is feasible, despite union opposition. It is better to hire new staff than to "convert" the current ones. Those who do not wish to can stay at Renfe and Adif.An easy and urgent initiative is a train traffic information service that reaches users' mobile phones and allows them to know, in real time, the actual train schedules for that day. It would save thousands of hours for citizens and reduce the annoyance of not knowing when trains will arrive at stations. With current technology, the cost is practically nil.Environment and farming. We need a change in food production to improve efficiency and reduce the impact on the environment. We must increase plant production over animal production, which consumes more water and pollutes more. Eating habits cannot be changed suddenly, but they can be changed progressively with a 20-year policy.Financing. The new financing plan for the Autonomous Communities, pending approval, involves a transfer of €21,000 million per year from the central government to the communities. It is not enough, but it is a step in the right direction. If we don't do it, it will be for reasons of "narrow path" policy.Judiciary. There are more than 5,000 judges in Spain. How is it possible that there are almost no sanctions for inappropriate conduct? Although the majority are competent and carry out their activities professionally, it is not possible for everyone to always do everything well in a group of this size. A reform of the system is necessary, which, today, is politically impossible.I will leave for another article the issue of healthcare – a high-quality but overloaded and unsustainable service, a future problem that needs to be addressed now – and tourism – excessive concentration in peak months, need to reorient the offer towards less quantity and higher quality–. For the rest, it is clear that in many areas – not all – what needs to be done can be done. Politics must serve to solve problems, not to argue. Voters must be clear about this.

The Generalitat has determined that there are 118 municipalities that must continue to be included in the stressed residential market area (ZMRT), a classification that establishes, among other things, where rent caps apply. However, according to the Chamber of Urban Property of Barcelona, "only" in 33 of these towns do families have to dedicate more than 30% of their income to paying rent and utilities.

Catalan society is engaged in a battle of uncertain outcome against the housing shortage. Access to decent housing is one of the most acute social pain points. Owning property or not is, today, the element that most marks the difference in social status. And in life's peace of mind.

The Consorci de Bombers de València (València Firefighters Consortium) has acted in a housing fire on Andrés Montalva street, in the Valencian town of Alberic, following a notice received at 2:56 AM this morning.

While access to housing is consolidating as the main concern for Catalans, sales continue at all-time highs. Between January and June, 57,349 transactions were formalized: it is the first semester with more activity since 2007, just before the real estate bubble burst.

For years, Barcelona has been pursuing an objective that is as necessary as it is unquestionable: to confront the climate crisis by reclaiming space for green areas. Superblocks, new green axes, park expansions, green roofs, and the renaturalization of streets are part of a strategy that seeks a healthier, more resilient, and livable city. The benefits are evident: less pollution, lower temperatures during heatwaves, more biodiversity, and a better quality of life.

Compromís at the Diputació de Castelló has denounced that the provincial government of the Popular Party continues without promoting any of its own housing policies, despite access to housing having become the main concern of citizens and one of the major obstacles to combating depopulation in the province's municipalities.

The tourist appeal of Platja d'Aro, where more than half of the 15,712 homes in the municipality are second homes or tourist apartments, has caused housing rental and purchase prices to rise exponentially in recent years. This has led many young people from the town who wanted to become independent to move to other municipalities. So that these residents "can return home", the City Council is working to expand the public "affordable" housing stock, and one of the formulas it is committed to is asking the owners of the 374 homes in the municipality registered as "empty" to make them available to the municipal rental exchange. The City Council considers them empty homes because in the last four years they have not generated any electricity or gas bills. They do pay taxes such as IBI, which can be doubled or tripled from January 2026, and that is why the City Council gives them this warning: "Owner, do you have an empty home? It may be costing you money".

Within the World Capital of Architecture, the exhibition presenting the official city proposal by the current City Council is Barcelona 2035, at the Architecture House. What strategy and model are behind it? The exhibition is divided into four concepts similar to the parts into which rationalist urbanism of the CIAM, almost 100 years ago, divided the urban organism: to live, to work, to coexist, and to move. And it is organized into Major Transformation Areas, a version of the New Centrality Areas from 1987, at the end of Pasqual Maragall's term. But if then it was an open and successful strategy for the pre-Olympic restructuring, today it is incomplete and does not respond to the needs of the entire city. The exhibition presents the entire stretch of the Barcelona waterfront, without clarifying that Barcelona Regional has been working on it for decades. It focuses on four poles of health, innovation, and knowledge: the Ciutadella del Coneixement, next to Ciutadella Park; the BioClúster d’Innovació i Salut, around Bellvitge University Hospital and the Catalan Institute of Oncology; Porta Diagonal, where the new Campus Clínic will be located, and the new buildings at Vall d’Hebron Hospital, taking advantage of the platform of the Dalt Ring Road cover. It highlights the new Montjuïc, with the restructuring of the Fira's industrial buildings and a poorly defined new neighborhood in Poble-sec. The state of the three major transformation areas is presented: the classic 22@ and its northern part, citing the 2018 revision but without going into detail; the Marina del Prat Vermell, which contributes housing construction, and Sagrera, its station, the housing on the margins, and the 4-kilometer metropolitan linear park, which had a magnificent project by the renowned Catalan teams RCR Arquitectes and Alday/Jover, and which has been authoritatively decided to be suspended. And it ends with the controversial Catalunya Media City at Les Tres Xemeneies.