The number of people residing in rented housing is around 9 million, which is 3.3 more than in 2007. This increase in demand in Spain has been barely absorbed with the incorporation of more than 1.3 million homes to the marketbut phenomena such as seasonal rentals or tourist apartments reduce the supply.
This lack of apartments is the reason why rental prices are at maximum levels (they have risen between 7% and 10% annually in the last decade), which makes access to housing one of the problems that most worries citizens. This has been especially contributed to by the fact that the production of subsidized housing (VPO) has plummeted after the bursting of the bubble, which has generated a deficit of social apartments for rent that experts estimate at around 350,000 units. The reason for this lies in political inaction in the last ten years.
This has caused a critical situation for the population that faces an increasingly inaccessible housing market. The solution to this problem is not in interventionist measures that have failed in Europe, such as the cap on rents that further reduces the existing meager supply by expelling landlords from the market.
Nor in electoral promises that are impossible to keep, such as the 184,000 apartments that Pedro Sánchez announced last year and of which only 224 have been built. Quite the contrary, the only answer to the rental problem is through eliminate bureaucratic obstacles and reach agreements between political parties and between the central government and the autonomies. Only in this way will the ridiculous public housing stock for social rental, which represents only 1% of the total, be promoted once and for all. stocks total apartments compared to 7% in the OECD.
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