A first stone and a project of 3,500 homes. 1,123 will be public. The president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has come on Tuesday at the beginning of the urbanization works of the future Retamar neighborhood, in Alcorcón (Community of Madrid), in which he will be “one of the largest land developments in the entire region.” He has done it accompanied by the Minister of Housing, Isabel Rodríguez, on whose agenda they have been repeating in recent months inaugurations and deliveries of protected housing keys; The Secretaries of State of the Branch, David Lucas and Iñaqui Carnicero, who on Monday claimed at a high -level meeting with the EU ministers their involvement in the fight against speculation; and the director of Sepes, the basis of the new public company, Leire Iglesias.
The act has become a staging of the government’s impulse to public housing policies, which the president has referred as “a paradigm shift.” “In seven years we have done a lot, it is true that insufficient, but we have multiplied the investment in housing for eight and 80,000 affordable rental homes have been built,” he defended.
The evolution of the production of public housing or with some type of protection has been unequal since there are records, in the early 90s. As the following graph shows, it has only dropped from 10% of the total in the 2000, 2002 and 2017 years, but the differences between the first exercises and the last are notable. 9% in early millennium were 47,000 homes, while 17 years later that same rate represented just over 7,000.
In 2024, administrations have given an investment impulse and from the central government resources have been injected to increase the production of protected housing to 18% of the total houses that began. One in five. The total figure continues to be shy at a time when the sector tries to take off, but they suppose almost 24,000 homes, compared to 12,300 in the previous year. From the construction sector they demand greater availability of finalist land and less bureaucracy to encourage the works and new promotions in a context of cheap demand and credit for the cuts in interest rates.
The data collected for the graphics that accompany this information refer to homes with provisional rating, which is given at the beginning, in order to analyze the evolution without the decalage of the process, which can be extended for years. In total, 14,371 definitive qualifications were granted, more than 10,000 were promoted by private promoters and almost 6,000 were sold to families as usual residence. Only 3,700 were allocated for rent, according to housing statistics.
This difference by housing typology marks a tendency to property in front of the commitment to the Public Rental Park. It allows the middle classes to access housing at an affordable price in property, but also limits the capacity of administrations when having the rental lever. “It should be increased, above all, the Social Housing Park, but also the Official Protection Housing (VPO), mainly for rent, since the property prevents its rotation towards the most needy population,” says the expert in housing and doctor in Sociology of the Rey Juan Carlos University, Almudena Martínez.
“The VPO had its boom in the 80s and 90s. They were, above all, homes that were bought and then disqualified to sell them in the free market and obtain surplus value,” explains the consultant and doctor of economic sciences from the Complutense University, Alejandro Inurrieta, which indicates that this dynamic has left the volume of this type of houses in historical minimum attractive to construction companies ”. “Now VPO begins to be made, although we start from numbers so low that any increase looks like a world,” he clarifies.
In any case, Into agrees that “the vpo in purchase remains an error.” “The only public aid should be to the construction and generation of a public housing park always for rent and that can never be sold. Nor purchase, nor rent with option to purchase. Only Vpo for rent, how it works in the rest of European countries,” he insists. Precisely, the new state housing plan includes a help of 30,000 euros for young people up to 35 years that access a protected housing rental with a purchase option.
But one of the keys is not so much in the number of homes that are built with some type of protection, but what happens later with those houses. According to the Ministry of Housing, the current public park is around 3.4% of the total main homes, compared to 2.5% of 2018. According to Eurostat data, 596,693 social homes would be, understood as those designed to provide affordable homes to working, young people, older, older or vulnerable groups and ensure that a majority of society has access to decent conditions of habitability worthy and safe. The rate is well below the European average, in 9.3%and very far from countries such as the Netherlands (29%), Austria (24%), Denmark (20%) or Sweden (16%).
“The low VPO rate has been key in the current crisis. The existence of a public housing park for rent, as in other European countries in the north, would have, at least, damping the price scale and the growing financial speculation of the house,” Martínez considers. Different analysts come to point out that controlling from the public 10% of the total park, the increases in the free market can be limited.
The manager of the Public Housing Company of Navarra, Javier Burón, wrote in his essay ‘The housing problem’: It is easily understandable that cities with 20% of the supply of public and private housing affordable (Paris, London, Berlin and Stockholm), 30% (Copenhagen and Helsinki), 50% (Amsterdam) or even in the 60% environment (Vienna) they have more capabilities to deal with the speculation that Madrid, Barcelona and the rest of the Spanish cities exceeds 2%.
Despite the meager Spanish public park, as can be seen in the following graph, only in the 1991 to the year 2000 more than 760,000 were built and, until 2010, another 746,000.
Without counting the testimonial data that left the following years to the outbreak of the real estate bubble, in the previous two decades more than one and a half million protected homes had risen. But until these days they would only have arrived with that qualification more than 600,000. According to the data handled by the Minister of Housing, Isabel Rodríguez, if homes built with money or public land during democracy would not have been confiscated, now there would be a public park of 2.5 million houses in Spain.
A report by the Superior Council of Colleges of Architects of Spain, published last week, indicates that “there is a huge deficit of public housing, derived from the systemic disqualification of the protected housing built in the past, and the disinterest shown in recent years by the promotion of housing with some protection regime, both by the administration, and by private promotion.” According to this work, “if protected homes had not been disqualified in Spain, we would currently have a 38%protected housing park.”
That figure seems bulky, but if the analysis is back to the second half of the twentieth century, of the 5.4 million homes that were built between 1960 and 1979, 63% —3.4 million – were at limited prices, as indicated by the researcher Jaime Palomera in his book ‘The kidnapping of housing’. The housing policies of Franco, which sought to make proletarians in line with the idea attributed to Franco himself that “one more owner, one less communist”, went through lifting floors with public aid, guaranteeing surplus value and ending up in the free market at a few years. A model that, as Palomera indicates, “the governments of all colors have continued to cultivate.”
This public exit to the private market that has occurred in recent decades is “a structural problem” that “has generated a speculative process around the VPO for its expectations of revaluation,” says Martínez. Many of those homes ended in the free market, without any rating, after a few years, which vary depending on the autonomous community, but other thousands went to private funds, known as vulture funds, which acquired them at the balance price.
The most popular cases of these public resources diversion to private funds were the 1,860 that the municipal housing and land (EMVS) company of the Madrid City Council misafed with Blackstone for 72.8 million euros. Or the 3,000 floors that the Community of Madrid sold to Goldman Sachs-Azora for 201 million euros.
This Thursday, the Minister of Housing has summoned the Autonomous Communities to a Sector Conference to address the State Housing Plan 2026-2030, which includes the requirement of shielding the public park to perpetuity, to avoid that homes built on land or with public money end up in private hands and to be able to reach that European average of 9% of the total park to which the PP counselors arrive with the script marked from Genova. of “passing over the communities, invading their powers to impose their recipes of failure.”
Sánchez, meanwhile, has defended on Tuesday the intervention of the sector, compared to those who bet “for a market liberalization, which is what we have been doing 40 years.” The change, experts neighborhood, will be slow. As indicated by Inurrieta, who was director of the public rental company created by President Zapatero and fulminated Rajoy, “the counterweight of public housing becomes more and more necessary, but until we reach a 30% rate over the total, many decades and many generations will pass.”
Source: www.eldiario.es
