The price of housing has soared in Barcelona due to the lack of supply and the disinterest of investors due to the obligation to allocate 30% of new developments to public protection flats. The rent has increased by almost 13% in the last year and the average has been more than 1,100 euros per month.
The housing problem in Barcelona is evidence, although it is, for different reasons, a global problem that all large cities suffer from. There are exceptions, such as Vienna and Tokyo. The Austrian capital enjoys the consequences of more than a century of a determined sheltered housing policy, to the point that today 60% of Viennese live in subsidized housing. In the Japanese metropolis, with more than 40 million inhabitants, although it may be hard to believe, housing has affordable prices because the Japanese have dedicated themselves to construction in recent decades. Experts talk about the loop being affordable because Tokyo is huge, and it’s huge because it’s affordable.
In Barcelona, ??two ways are indicated to attack the problem. The most liberal defense is that it is only a question of putting more on offer and that the market itself regulates price containment. Others propose intervention measures from the public sector. The solution is probably a combination of both: injecting more free-price housing into the market and building more public housing.
It seems to be true that the obligation for developers to allocate 30% of new flats to official protection has paralyzed the market. The reason is simple. An investor who builds a 12-storey residential building, for example, must allocate four to official protection, and the value of these must have an impact on the remaining eight, which makes the price of those for free sale more expensive. Conclusion: he loses interest in investment and prefers to wait for the regulations to change, as Mayor Jaume Collboni has said he will. His team is working on the study of a measure that some European capitals have already begun to apply. It is a matter of monetizing directly from the promoter the value of 30% that it would be appropriate to allocate to official protection. It would be a kind of tax that would feed a public fund.
If we apply the previous example, the developer would allocate the 12 flats to the free market in exchange for paying the public sector the value of four for protection. In this way, 16 flats would be added to the market at the same time, 12 for free sale and four at an affordable price. The overall fleet would be increased, while an intervention element would be introduced that is judged to be more effective than the 30% obligation. It seems like an acceptable measure for everyone, a win-win for the real estate sector, public and private. Because Barcelona is not Vienna or Tokyo. His model is unthinkable today in Barcelona and in any other Western metropolis, but starting with a 30% turn seems like a good idea.
