I see with joy the massive demonstrations that are being held again throughout Spain demanding the regulation of the housing market in the face of prices that are impossible for the majority of the population to pay. At the same time, I recognize that it makes me bitter and indignant to remember the long history of disappointments that the PSOE has brought to the movement for the right to housing in Spain over the years.
In my specific case, one is already old: first as an activist and then as Mayor, I have accumulated almost two decades of interpellations, meetings and unfulfilled commitments with the highest socialist leaders of each moment. Whether at the local, regional or state level, the same thing has always happened: the PSOE has acted as the party of the real estate employers, legislating practically the same as the right, facilitating speculation, promoting the real estate bubble that ruined hundreds of thousands of families. and injecting public money that, even if it is disguised as aid to young people or rent, ends up in the pockets of the rentier sectors, increasing their profits and raising prices. After 50 years of democracy (see if they have had time), Spain is one of the EU countries with the least social housing: only 1% of the total housing stock.
The PSOE has only partially moved when strong citizen mobilizations have forced a public debate (the neighborhood movement, VdVivienda, the PAH, the 15M and now the tenant unions), or when they have lost electoral support and have been forced to govern in coalition with new political forces, such as Unidas Podemos or Sumar. And yet, today Pedro Sánchez maintains a Housing Minister who shames any progressive soul who even remotely believes in the right to housing. A minister who should already be dismissed, after stating that the rental housing emergency can be resolved by appealing to the “solidarity” of the owners and with a little help to the young people who will end up in the hands of those owners. A minister who is not an exception, but rather the norm among the socialist ranks.
It must be remembered that Pedro Sánchez himself committed to me as Mayor, in 2018, to regulate rents, something that our political space subsequently imposed in the PSOE coalition pact with Unidas Podemos, but that Sánchez himself delayed until May 2023. Five years lost with rents rising like crazy, with the also socialist and former mayor of Barcelona, Joan Clos, pressing against the law in his position as representative of the large Spanish real estate companies (ASVAL). The law ended up being approved due to social pressure and our presence in the government, but… the socialist party refused to include seasonal rentals in the regulation, even though we warned them privately and publicly that it would become the back door through which large landowners would avoid applying the law. And so we are, surprise, in October 2024 with the PSOE – again under social pressure – saying that perhaps something needs to be done with seasonal rentals. But nothing to regulate, eh? They say that a mandatory official registration would be enough. Surely the idea comes from the real estate sector itself, because we have been like this for decades, with a socialist party that says it will make housing policies for the people, but, in the end… where does the ball fall? Always in favor of the rentier and speculator sectors.
However, I want to continue this article positively because, no matter how much the economic and media elites want to silence us, the housing problem in Spain can be solved. I want to claim with great pride the housing policies that we promoted in Barcelona between 2015 and 2023, and point out that, if these same policies were scaled up to the regional and state level, we would be close to guaranteeing the right to housing, so well explained in the sacrosanct Constitution and so trampled by the PP and the PSOE.
Despite the fact that the majority of the budget and legislative powers and the creation of social housing belong to the Autonomous Communities and the State, in Barcelona we showed that much more could be done than what we had been told. We were the first administration to warn of the rental bubble and demand price regulation in 2016, but we did not limit ourselves to putting pressure on the central government. Learning from social movements and other international experiences, in 8 years we not only managed to almost double the public housing stock that we found when we arrived, but we also changed the paradigm of housing policies.
We did more social housing than the Generalitat and the State and we made sure that municipal land would never be privatized again nor would property be built with public money that later ended up on the speculative market. We innovated and made many policies that, when we demanded them from activism, the PSC responded that they were impossible due to competition problems or economic viability. Excuses that were denied when we made a municipal mediation service a reality that, together with the movements in the neighborhoods, managed to stop the eviction of 90% of the cases of vulnerable families that contacted the City Council, negotiating alternative solutions such as a rental. social. Or when, in 2015, there was not a single cooperative in transfer of use and yet today Barcelona leads an agreement with the Federation of Cooperatives that has made possible in 8 years more than 1,000 apartments under cooperative regime in transfer of use (users enjoy of stability, they pay a monthly payment similar to a rent, but the land remains public and you cannot speculate with those homes). Or when we created a new municipal department of real estate discipline to put an end to the abuses of large property owners. Or when we closed thousands of tourist apartments so that they could become residential again and we faced Airbnb, something that several European cities ended up imitating. Or when we fined real estate agencies that harassed tenants or carried out illegal evictions. Or when we use urban planning regulations to have preference in the purchase of buildings in central areas and thus expand the public park not only with direct construction, which is very slow. Or when we introduce the concept of co-responsibility of the real estate sector by forcing them to offer 30% of the apartments in new buildings or renovations at a protected price, a measure that the socialists now want to dismantle due to pressure from the sector.
If all these measures, and many others that I cannot detail here for reasons of space, were scaled up to the regional and state level, the speculative sector would receive the clear message that in Spain you cannot speculate wildly with housing as has been the case. done so far.
Today the socialist Mayor of Barcelona lives on income, taking photos and inaugurating the apartments that we left under construction. But he refused to approve an urban planning regulation that we prepared to prevent seasonal rentals from circumventing the law that regulates rentals. That is why we have recovered it as an essential condition if you want us to vote in favor of your budgets. And that’s how the socialist party is: if it leads the institutions, it bends to the elites to avoid conflicts with whoever really rules. On the other hand, if the correlation of forces places them as a minority partner in a progressive coalition, as happened in Barcelona in the last two terms, they are forced to consider real measures to regulate the housing market. And basically, the most resounding truth of all: only if society mobilizes, can the enormous speculative business in this country be confronted. Much of what we did in Barcelona provoked a dirty war of fakenews and lawfare against several of us. But no matter how much they invented that I had bought luxurious houses (I take this opportunity to remember that I don’t have any property, I live rented in the same apartment as always and I have donated part of my salary all these years), or that they took us to declare to the court with complaints that later end in nothing, we did not hesitate for a second because we knew that there was a strong and mobilized citizen movement to defend the right to housing. So long live the demonstrations that we have seen grow in recent months, and may there be many more.
#PSOE #housing #scandal
