In recent weeks, Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia have hosted loud demonstrations denouncing the tension in the housing market that overwhelms so many people, limiting their life expectations. The truth is that, despite the prosperity of some macroeconomic data, we face the risk that the living conditions of significant layers of society will be conditioned depending on the percentage of income that they must dedicate to covering housing costs. .
This housing supply and housing shortage crisis that the entire West is going through – and particularly the European metropolises – has been placed in the news spotlight and is meriting a great display of opinion and analysis as well as fervent political activity. This same Wednesday, without going any further, the Minister of Housing and Urban Agenda appears before the plenary session of Congress to report on the measures that the Government of Spain is adopting in multiple fields. However, it is very likely that the minister will have to face in the debate approaches that insist on a classic identification of the policies attributable to the ideological right and left, depending on whether they address the problem from the perspective of supply or demand.
When we are asked if the policies carried out have failed in Euskadi, there are experts who assure that they have not, although it is evident that, despite all the efforts, the increase in demand has exceeded all expectations. Rivers of ink are flowing about the reasons that have led to this enormous tension in the real estate market, but there is consensus that the increase in demand has been generated as a consequence of accelerated demographic changes: smaller residential units, greater longevity, increased migratory flows .
The supply, however, has not grown in the same proportion, and surely we are still indebted to the great economic recession of 2008, which had the real estate sector as the epicenter of all evils. The deep-rooted identification of housing as a financial asset and not as a basic necessity does not help either. Exponential increase in demand for housing – without this representing a significant increase in population – in the face of a scarce and rigid supply of free and protected housing. Here is a rudimentary but easily understandable summary of the current housing crisis.
I think that we would not be adequately focusing our work if we limited ourselves to acting exclusively on demand or supply, and it is time for us to assume that, faced with the housing problem, all the available firepower will be necessary if we want to obtain results. different from those obtained so far. The Basque model of housing policies acts on demand when it makes the constitutional right to decent housing a right enforceable before the administration, which entails helping with specific economic benefits to people who cannot afford to pay the rent for a home in the country. free market. We also act on demand when we invite city councils to request the declaration of a stressed residential market, which makes it possible to stop runaway increases in rents. And we act on demand when we design a unique tax system that mitigates the heavy burden that paying a mortgage or rent represents on families’ disposable income.
But Euskadi acts decisively on the supply when it proposes to increase the stock of subsidized rental housing, which is our main infrastructure in the country, and increase it by up to 7,000 new homes in the current legislature; or when we agree on truly incentivizing fiscal policies for owners to place their homes on the market, including a public intermediation service. We act on the offer by asking City Councils to approve and implement three-year plans with which to plan new residential developments, adapt ordinances that facilitate the conversion of fish markets into housing, mobilize private land to expedite the construction of free or protected housing, and even when We urge the application of the decree on uninhabited housing to encourage their release onto the market or fiscally penalize those who persist in keeping them empty without reasonable justification.
From the Basque perspective, the state and regional laws in force can be put at the service of the same cause with two aspects: the protection of housing seekers and the increase in supply. That is why we want to give scope and depth to the figure of the stressed areas, so that they do not remain a mere statement that limits the increase in rental prices, which is no small thing. We want to associate this figure – which implies the express recognition of the municipality that it suffers a serious problem with the housing market – with measures to encourage supply whose main objective is to get out of this situation of tension sooner rather than later.
We must advocate without ideological prejudices to implement comprehensive policies that know how to take advantage of the broad prerogatives that the laws confer on us at the different institutional levels in which the complex competence of housing, land and urban planning is distributed. In the Basque Government we are clear that we must act on all fronts, because the problem affects society as a whole in one way or another and long ago ceased to be a phenomenon exclusive to the most disadvantaged classes. It is a problem that has a solution, as have other enormous problems that Spain has faced in recent decades. But if we allow its approach to end up being fueled by partisan flames and simplistic confrontation strategies, it will have serious economic implications that can hamper our competitiveness as well as the shared desire for a cohesive society in which affordable housing is understood as a robust backbone. of the Welfare State.
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