I.- The origin of the dire housing situation in areas of Spain could be summarized in one sentence: a fundamental right cannot be left alone in the hands of the market or private initiative, that is, to business. About ten years ago I wrote an article titled “Evictions,” where I tried to demonstrate that a person or family without housing had a whopping ten fundamental rights violated: moral if not physical integrity; freedom or security; personal and family intimacy; the inviolability of the home; the secrecy of communications; the freedom to choose residence; child protection; participation in public affairs; effective judicial protection; the right to education. The conclusion was, and is quite obvious, housing is not only a fundamental right, but the primary material basis for the exercise of all rights. And may I point out that our current problem has not fallen from the sky. It has been the consequence of an entire real estate-financial “development” project promoted from an ultraliberal right and not corrected from the left. The chaotic liberalization of land; the granting of massive and exorbitant mortgages without guarantees, the construction of millions of officially protected housing, declassified, that went to the free market; a disastrous urban rental law that discouraged renting and encouraged property ownership. All of this led to an insane bubble, the cause of the 2008 crisis, which took away hundreds of thousands of jobs – an unemployment rate of 26% – and a part of the population stopped being “proletarian and property owners”, according to famous phrase of that Minister of Housing of the dictatorship who wanted a Spain of owners and not of proletarians. In the end, our unrestricted liberals managed to ensure that a good part of the population was neither one nor the other. It has been the most blatant failure of an ultraliberal policy applied to a fundamental right. Can you imagine what would have happened if the same had been done with health, education or pensions? We would not have the social democracy that defines the 1978 Constitution, the only democracy that, in my opinion, deserves that name. Well, let’s be careful, because this is what is happening, silently or loudly, in the CCAA governed by the right, and the result has been that Spain is, in public housing stock, at the bottom of the European Union.
II.- The strident and paradoxical thing about the matter is that millions of officially protected homes have been built in Spain over the years. As a recent study by the CCOO CS points out, the public housing stock could reach, today, 4.7 million units, if the regulation of protected housing had not allowed its declassification and its transfer to the free market. . Demonstration that a predominance of the market and the totally private real estate sector has not improved accessibility to housing in Spain, quite the opposite. The black holes of this mess must be located in the scarce construction of public housing since 2000; the absolute liberalization of the territory with the 1998 land law, which laid the speculative foundations for the largest real estate bubble that Spain has suffered; the development of “tourist homes” in the heat of the boom of this sector in certain areas and cities – the INE has counted 350,000 in this rental regime -; the existence of 3.8 million empty homes, of which 1.1 million are in large cities, without fiscal and/or expropriation consequences. In any case, it must be taken into account that the consequences of the housing shortage and dearth, whether for rent or ownership, are very different in different areas of Spain. The situation in large cities, coasts or islands is not the same as in emptied Spain, which would indicate that the same treatment cannot be given in different places. All of this is the result, obviously, of the uneven development of capitalism, and much more so when it is left to act at will, without the minimum planning in the distribution of the productive sectors, or adequate incentives.
#consequences #liberalism
