The country’s leading housing experts have begun to appear at the Congress of Deputies for offer solutions to a problem that is already the third concern of the Spanish. 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 public University of Tarragona Rovira i Virgili, This round of appearances opened this weekcoinciding with the monographic debate carried out in the chamber by the Minister of Housing, Isabel Rodriguez. 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 it doesn’t stop them from shooting 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 Roger. For this specialist, the structural solution would come within two generations and it is none other than the “direct public promotion and management” of two million homes.
It would be built annually 50,000 homes (25,000 the State and 25,000 the autonomous communities) for forty years, something possible considering that currently they are done annually between 80,000 and 100,000according to data from Bank of Spain. Roger sees in 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”assured this expert, who in the 80s directed the urban planning of Almeriain the 90s the one of the Valencian Community and has drafted numerous plans, projects and urban planning laws. Likewise, he 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) They would return to administration in thirty or forty yearsthrough 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 and nor in that of “public-private collaboration”, 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, in accordance with the rule of not allocating more than 30% of income to the payment of a house.
“Mileuristas do not get there. That can only be resolved with direct public management, creating public promotion societies in the State and the autonomous communities. There is no “I have no choice but to do this so that the mileuristas don’t go to hell,” This specialist alerted the deputies of the Housing Commission.
17 years of “erratic” laws
The parliamentarians have 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 it all started”, 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 the last seventeen yearsin Brussels, in this house and in the regional parliaments. Every time they make a rule they 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 increasingly concentrate more on investment funds than on 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 promote the two new routes to ownership without over-indebtedness that already exist in Catalonia since 2015, but which 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 take chapter 6 of the Government’s plan “Spain 2050” “seriously” on territorial development. And in their guide, also a warning: “regulating tourist and seasonal rentals will only create more black markets.”
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