During his investiture speech, Pedro Sánchez announced that two of the first housing measures to be taken by the new Executive will benefit young people: increasing the youth rental bonus and opening a line of guarantees for a 20% of the mortgage loan when buying the first home, two measures included in the government agreement signed with Sumar.
The youth rent voucher today is a 250 euro grant for under 35s, with the aim of helping young people emancipate, and the Executive intends to turn it into a long-term measure and extend its financing The voucher is aimed at young people under the age of 35 with an annual income of less than 24,000 euros and who pay less than 600 euros in rent, although communities with tense areas can raise it to 900 euros.
The endorsements, for their part, will bring to the whole State an initiative that has already been launched by communities governed by the PP, such as Madrid and Murcia, although their poor budget allocation has made it almost symbolic. The Spanish Government, however, plans to open a new line of guarantees from the ICO with a budget of 2.5 billion euros that will facilitate the purchase of around 50,000 homes and the beneficiaries will be young people under 35 years of age for the purchase of a regular first home.
José García Montalvo, professor of economics at the UPF, questioned the effectiveness of continuing to give aid for the purchase “when all the studies show that the housing problem in Spain is concentrated in the rental, and especially in that of people in the two lowest income percentiles, who must spend more than 50% of their family income on housing”. “The access problem is also very localized in capitals and tourist areas, in cities such as Madrid, Ibiza or Malaga”.
Likewise, he explained, studies point out that direct income subsidies such as the youth bonus can end up contributing to the rise in rents. “There are more appropriate and cheaper formulas, such as the agreed rent, in which the State rents the property and pays the owner the difference between the rent that the vulnerable family can pay and the market rent. If the State subscribes to a long-term lease for those properties, public aid does not cause an increase in rent prices”, he pointed out.
In his inauguration speech, Pedro Sánchez pledged to create a park of 183,000 affordable public housing units, as he had already announced in the previous legislature, and the new minister, Isabel Rodríguez, announced an “ambitious policy of “medium and long-term public investment” so that the public housing stock for affordable rent is 20% of the total housing stock, when today it is just 2%.
Ferran Font, director of studies at Pisos.com, recalled that to reach these levels “we need 1.5 million homes. Today in Spain the visas to build homes are only 100,000 per year, so it will take more than a decade to reach that number. And a large budget allocation. It involves a political and long-term consensus. And today we are not at that point”.
Gerard Duelo, president of the general council of all the associations of real estate agents in Spain, also demanded that the speeches be accompanied by a larger budget allocation. “Without including European funds, the State’s budget for housing is about 1,000 million euros a year, and to equalize it with the average of the countries around us, it should be 0 .6% on GDP, that is to say, 8,000 million”.
