The new government of the Barcelona City Council, headed by the mayor, Jaume Collboni (PSC), will address, from September, the reform of the urban regulations promoted by his predecessor, Ada Colau, and which obliges developers to allocate 30% of the floors of buildings of more than 600 square meters to social housing (whether new construction or large renovations). Both sources in the real estate sector and the opposition in the City Council take it for granted. And it matches the rhythm and intensity with which Collboni talks about the need to reform a rule that he voted for when it was approved in 2018, but which he considers does not work because it achieves “very modest results”, while recalling that it was a compromise electoral. The promoters’ association, APCE, assures that since it came into effect, licenses have hardly been granted for 53 social flats, while the municipal government spoke before the elections of some 120, in process or under construction (plus 500 that are lost due to the moratorium on applying the rule). The mayor also points out that he could have political support, and recalls that municipal groups such as Junts bet on their program to review 30%. The PP wanted to repeal the rule.
Since the pre-campaign, the now mayor argues that “if the rule seeks to increase the supply of affordable rentals and it does not work, and slows down investment in housing, it must be changed.” His recipe involves “monetizing” the obligation for developers to build public housing: instead of building 30% of it in the same building where they build free-market flats, they should contribute money to the City Council to do so. He assures that Paris or New York have done it. The commons, Collboni’s partners in the past term, raise their hands to their heads: “30% cannot be diluted, it is effective and useful to build affordable housing in any neighborhood of the city. The idea of monetizing and having developers pay the City Council to build dismantles the philosophy of making the private sector co-responsible”, laments the person in charge of Urban Planning in the past term, Janet Sanz. The first eight flats resulting from the 30% purchased by the City Council were located in the Congrés neighborhood of the Sant Andreu district. “Collboni has to decide if he is the mayor of the people who need housing or of the pressure groups”, he adds and assures that the developers would benefit doubly if the rule were made more flexible, because precisely “by 30% the price of the land has cheapened”.
The monetization formula, explain sources in the sector, arises from conversations between the Colleges of Architects, Surveyors, APCE and the Hàbitat 3 Foundation, which manages social housing for entities. In fact, it has been insinuated in recent times by both the dean of Architects, Guim Costa, and that of Quantity Surveyors, Celestí Ventura. From the APCE employers’ association, its president Xavier Vilajoana, exposes the requests of his sector: “Eliminate 30% in large rehabilitations, increase the minimum meters so that it is applied from 600 to 2,400 square meters, and that the cost of build these apartments, taking into account the market of each district of the city, and contribute it to the City Council in exchange for not building them in the same building”. On behalf of COAPI, its director of the legal area and spokesman, Carles Sala, sees “it is extremely urgent to eliminate 30% in rehabilitation and, in a context of the need to make buildings more sustainable, not to persecute developers but to stimulate comprehensive actions to face climate change”. In the case of the promotion, Sala affirms that “the data public data point to an absolute failure” and I add that “the problem is not the cost of housing but wages.”
In the case of renovations, the former municipal executive opened three files that could end in million-dollar fines for promoters of reforms in the Eixample whom he accuses of not having reserved 30% of the floors for subsidized housing, cutting up the requests for license to cover up that it was about comprehensive reforms.
The entities that promoted 30%, a formula that comes from squeezing the Catalan Law on the right to housing, approved by the progressive tripartite in 2007, have been very critical of the PSC’s position of making the rule more flexible. When the PSC, still in the municipal government, put a proposal in this regard to a vote (in March 2023), they accused the Socialists of “supporting the interests of the promoters” and of not speaking with the entities (PAH, Union of Tenants and Observatori DESC). They understand that if developers could avoid mixing public and private housing “it would further segregate citizens by their income, because the few available land or buildings are found in the most peripheral neighborhoods.” The entities also recall that in 2018 “the PSC conditioned its favorable vote on not suspending the granting of licenses until it entered into force, for which reason many promotions were exempt.” “Collboni’s proposal is unacceptable, ineffective and classist,” they conclude.
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Beyond the reformulation of 30%, in his electoral program, in terms of housing, Collboni promised a “Plan Vivir en Barcelona” to increase the stock of subsidized housing and go from the current 32,000 affordable homes to 50,000 in 2030 and 100,000 in 2050 The forecast is to make 1,500 a year. To finance them, the idea is to demand that the Generalitat resolve the deficit of 163 million with the Barcelona Housing Consortium and that of the 10,000 that he plans to build, 2,300 are in Barcelona.
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