The country’s leading housing experts have begun to appear in Congress to offer solutions to a problem that is already the third most important concern for Spaniards. Their recipes range from direct public management of a park that would take 40 years to build to reducing social policy oriented towards rent.
The architect and urban planner Gerardo Roger and the professor of Civil Law Sergio Nasarre, founder of the UNESCO Chair of Housing at the Rovira i Virgili public University of Tarragona, have opened this round of appearances this week, coinciding with the monographic debate that he starred in at the Chamber the Minister of Housing, Isabel Rodríguez.
Among their few coincidences: the need for a housing pact and the conviction that rental price control makes them go down a little at first, but then does not prevent them from skyrocketing again.
“The most you can do by capping prices is to lower them a little, from 1,000 euros to 900, but what we need is for them to drop to 300 euros and caps cannot achieve that,” said Gerardo Roger.
For this specialist, the structural solution would come within two generations and is none other than the “direct public promotion and management” of 2 million homes.
It would be about building 50,000 homes annually (25,000 by the State and 25,000 by the autonomous communities) for forty years, something possible taking into account that currently between 80,000 and 100,000 are built per year, according to data from the Bank of Spain.
Soil “through a tube”
And since – as he said – the best housing policy is a good land policy, Roger sees endowment lands (those that are intended for public uses or services, such as streets, parks, schools, health centers, sports facilities, cultural centers and administrative buildings) the “great niche” untapped to build those houses.
“There is a lot of land available for immediate action,” said this expert, who in the 80s directed the urban planning of Almería, in the 90s that of the Valencian Community and who has drafted numerous plans, projects and urban planning laws.
Roger also pointed out that the 5,000 million annual investment that this large park of social housing would entail (2,500 million for the State and 150 million for each autonomous community) would return to the administration in thirty or forty years, through rents of between 300 and 600 euros per month that the tenants would pay.
Three promotion models
These tenants would fundamentally be “mileuristas”, even “dosmileuristas”, who with their salaries cannot access housing in the free market or in the “public-private collaboration” market, where rents range from 900 to 1,100 euros per month. .
In his opinion, this model, by which the public powers give free land to private developers who build and operate the homes for several decades until they return to the administration, “solves the problem of the middle class,” but not that of those who earn less than 3,000 euros, following the rule of not allocating more than 30% of income to paying for a house.
“The mileuristas do not get there. This can only be resolved with direct public management, creating public promotion societies in the State and the autonomous communities. There is no choice but to do this so that the mileuristas do not go to hell,” he warned. specialist to the deputies of the Housing Commission.
17 years of “erratic” laws
The parliamentarians also received a reprimand from Professor Sergio Nasarre, the second expert to appear, who explained the conclusions of research work carried out in the last thirty years and tried to demonstrate that the current situation is the result of the global financial crisis of 2007, “when started it all”, plus an “erratic” policy at all levels during the last seventeen years.
“From an academic point of view, nothing is understood of what you have done in the last seventeen years, in Brussels, in this house and in the regional parliaments. Every time you make a rule, you increase the price of housing,” he reproached the legislators.
Their thesis is that the laws of the last seventeen years have been excluding middle and lower class families from access to home ownership.
“Do we really want private property to be increasingly concentrated in investment funds than in families? Do we really want a society of rich owners and poor tenants,” said this expert.
Shared and temporary ownership
Among its proposals, in addition to repealing the housing law, stands out the “diversification of the forms of ownership” of a house, “from the most humble and subsidized to the one hundred percent private.”
It would be about promoting the two new ways to be an owner without becoming over-indebted that already exist in Catalonia since 2015, but are not used: “shared ownership” and “temporary ownership”, as an alternative to buying and renting.
His list of recipes includes reviewing the surcharges, sanctions, expropriations and other “intrusive” measures of communities and city councils and taking chapter 6 of the Government’s plan “Spain 2050” on territorial development “seriously.”
And in their guide, also a warning: “regulating tourist and seasonal rentals will only create more black markets.”
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