“The difficulty of accessing housing is already the first problem in Spain, not only for people at risk of social exclusion, but also for the middle classes, and if measures are not taken, it will get worse” , summarized Javier Faus, president of the management company Meridia Capital, one of the speakers who participated yesterday in The District, a fair that brings together 10,000 professionals in the sector at the Barcelona Fair.
In an edition marked again by the protests of a group of activists against evictions, who threw paint at the attendees, the managers agreed that there is a great interest in investing in housing. “Residential and logistics are the sectors in which all investors want to grow – pointed out Borja Godoy, CEO of Servihabitat – and the central government cannot build the more than 100,000 social housing units that are urgently needed, in two or three years , all alone, without the support of the private sector”.
“There is a lot of money ready to be invested to build affordable housing, and the conditions just need to be created so that they have flexibility,” said Oriol Barrachina, president of Cushman
Eduard Mendiluce, CEO of the Anticipa and Aliseda real estate companies, pointed out that these measures should be to speed up the land management procedures and establish a maximum period of 90 days after which the administrative silence would be positive and the real estate companies could promote under your responsibility, especially housing for rent or social housing.
“The big problem with access to housing in Spain is rent – confirmed Xavier Vilajoana, president of APCE – and to solve the housing crisis, builders and developers are the good guys, not the bad guys of the film. Without us, the high cost of housing has no solution”.
Complaints against the housing policies of recent years were widespread. Mendiluce pointed out that “Catalonia has been left alone in the purpose of applying rent limits”, a measure, he recalled, “which was already implemented between 2020 and 2022 and worsened the situation”. Faus remarked that “we must do what has already been seen to work” in cities around the world, especially to enlarge the metropolitan area by expanding the metro network. “Between Sitges, Terrassa and Mataró, we live 5.2 million people. We need to get everyone in this area to live 15 minutes from a metro stop… And build more houses there, because there are large parcels of land where this is possible.”
