Spain has a housing crisis, and it’s not just the hundred of thousands of renters struggling to find a well-priced flat who are affected.
Official statistics show that the rate of homelessness in Spain has risen by 24 percent since 2012 to 28,000 people.
A recent Bank of Spain report also revealed that around 45 percent of people living in rented accommodation are at risk of poverty or social exclusion, the highest proportion in Europe.
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More than 60 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds still live at home with their parents, the fastest rising rate of young to do so in Europe between 2008 and 2022.
Keeping in mind that there are half a million new homes in Spain that have never been lived in and countless derelict and abandoned homes that add up to a total of 3.8 million empty properties in the country, it may seem hard to believe that what Spain needs to do is build more housing units.
But it does, in particular social housing.
According to figures from Spain’s Land and Housing Observatory, in 2020 just 2.5 percent of total constructions in Spain were for social housing.
Reports from the Bank of Spain show that Spain’s current social housing stock is even lower – just 1.5 percent of all homes compared to a European average of nine percent.
Spain is one of a small handful of EU countries that have surprisingly low social housing provisions. Spain ranks 18th in the EU overall and is joined at the bottom of the table by countries such as Romania (1.5 percent), Estonia (1.7 percent), Croatia (1.8 percent) and Portugal (2 percent).
For decades now, Vienna, the Austrian capital, has increased its stock of price-controlled social housing and has stood out for its housing policy. By increasing social housing and limiting rent, the value of housing has also been limited and prices have been regulated.
Spain has begun to look towards the Viennese model in order to tackle its housing crisis.
READ ALSO: Why Spain is looking to Vienna to fix its housing crisis
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On July 24th, the Spanish government gave the go-ahead to a plan to allocate 50,000 Sareb homes to bolster its dwindling social housing stock.
Sareb, also known as Spain’s ‘bad bank’, was created eleven years ago to buy real estate assets from banks that went bankrupt during the 2008 financial crisis, and it has been state-run since 2022.
Spain’s Minister of Economy, Commerce and Business, Carlos Cuerpo also announced that Sareb’s board of directors had approved the so-called ‘Vienna Project’, “which will allow the construction of some 10,600 homes for affordable rental.”
“We are talking about more than 130 plots of land that will allow the construction of some 10,600 affordable rental homes,” he explained in an interview on RNE.
This ‘Vienna Project’ is part of the objective already announced by the Minister of Housing Isabel Rodríguez of building more than 180,000 state-owned homes for affordable rental.
Cuerpo hopes these homes will become available in the next two to two and a half years.
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In addition to this project, the Spanish government’s junior coalition partner have been trying to come up with their own solutions to the problem.
Sumar’s economic spokesperson, Carlos Martín, recently proposed the construction of 500,000 public homes with a rent of €400 per month in ‘stressed’ rental areas, more than double the amount of housing units set by their Socialist partners.
“They should be built on public land and be financed by EU soft loans,” Martín argued, arguing that Spain’s public-private housing model had “failed” and that “private real estate companies should be excluded from the project”, as “millions” of social housing units in the country had already ended up in the hands of the “speculative market”.
‘Stressed’ rental areas are defined as those that exceed the Consumer Price Index (CPI) of their respective province by five points and where families dedicate more than 30 percent of their salary to paying the rent.
Martín believes that putting empty homes back on the market should be the first step, followed by step two – build a staggering 500,000 public housing units.
Whether or not this proposal will be approved is yet to be seen; the half a million figure certainly seems fairly unattainable in the short term, especially in a country famed for its painfully slow bureaucracy and construction work.
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Other actions that Spain has taken to try and solve its housing crisis include scrapping its golden visa, whereby non-EU nationals can gain residency by buying a property worth at least €500,000.
Some see this is a political move, as these wealthy foreign buyers do not represent enough of a high number to warp the housing market.
Many cities and regions have also introduced measures to try and curb the proliferation of tourist rentals, which are more widely blamed for reducing the number of rental properties available, as landlords opt for more remunerative Airbnbs than long-term rentals.
Proposed measures include putting a stop to the issuance of tourist licences, slapping VAT on landlords’ profits, giving communities of owners the power to decide whether to allow holiday lets in their buildings, and in the case of Barcelona – eliminating them entirely within the next four years.
The hope is that fewer tourist rentals will put many more properties back on the market for locals and will also help to regulate rental prices.
READ MORE: Why controlling Spain’s Airbnbs may not lower rents
Numerous protests against mass tourism have been held across Spain in recent months, with residents’ main gripes being the impact the industry is having on housing prices and the ensuing gentrification, rather than tourists themselves.