A bombshell, in Moncloa’s opinion, to respond to one of the main concerns of citizens, and particularly of young people, in the run-up to the municipal and regional elections on 28 May. Pedro Sánchez announced yesterday that tomorrow the Council of Ministers will approve a plan that will allocate up to 50,000 homes for social rent from Sareb, the Asset Management Company from Banking Restructuring. And the goal was set to increase the public housing stock in Spain from the current 3% to 20%.
“We, instead of causing big problems, with resounding failures like the housing policy of the PP, what we do is build solutions”, warned the president of the Spanish Government at the closing of the municipal conference that the PSOE celebrate in Valencia in the antechamber of the electoral contest.
After the parliamentary agreement reached on Friday with ERC and EH Bildu to unblock the first state housing law, which among other issues will limit the increase in rental prices by 3%, Sánchez certified yesterday his determination to “go furtherâ€, as it mobilized up to 50,000 homes for rent at an “affordable priceâ€, below the market price. The Central Government therefore plans to make 21,000 flats available to municipalities and autonomous communities, it will also promote social renting with the 14,000 homes already inhabited in this park, and promote the construction of up to 15,000 public homes on land available from the Sareb .
Sánchez thus places the boost to access to housing in Spain, one of the main concerns of citizens according to the CIS, as a major electoral proposal of the PSOE before the 28- M. The head of the Executive celebrated the future housing law as “a great milestone and a great achievement”. And he launched his bet to increase the stock of public flats. Access to decent housing, he justified, “is a constitutional right, but it is not a real right”, which prevents the emancipation of young people until “absolutely unacceptable ages”, much higher than the European average, and that “segregates society by neighborhoods”.
Sánchez cited studies that prove that “70% of inequality in Spain is a product of the difficulty, or the impossibility, of accessing decent housing”. And he referred to other data on the situation, in his opinion, “very eloquent of the drama that housing means for many families”. Thus, he warned that among the 27 states of the EU, Spain is the fourth country in which being able to pay the rent means more financial overexertion for families. The evolution of the average price per square meter, between 2014 and 2021, rose by 11% in owned flats, but soared by 45% in rent. In addition, he warned that Spain is the third country in the EU that has the most empty homes and, on the other hand, is one of the countries with the least public housing stock, only 3% of the total, although the European average is 9% and in some countries it reaches 20%.
This is the goal that Sánchez set, after assuming the commitment that Spain achieve a public housing stock of 20% of the total. This increase, he assured, would guarantee more effective accessibility to housing, especially for young people, and therefore lower the average age of emancipation. In addition, he pointed out that increasing the supply of public housing will serve to “cushion and control” the evolution of the price of flats.
Sánchez criticized the housing policy of the PP governments, which he called a “total failure” for “turning a constitutional right into a commodity, as they did with healthcare”. The president thus denounced “the old mantra of neoliberalism”, as he called it, of liberalizing the land, which, in his opinion, only served to “grow the real estate bubble and speculation, in addition to envelopes â€, he said, referring to the corruption he attributed to the PP. Also, the policies of tax credits which, in his opinion, only benefited real estate developers. And, finally, he challenged the privatization of public housing that he attributed to the right, to sell it to “vulture funds”. “The same thing always happens with the right: the gains are privatized and, when things go wrong, the losses are socialized”, he lamented. “This is what neoliberalism is all about”, warned Sánchez.
In the absence of knowing the details of the proposal, communities such as Valencia, Catalonia and Castile and Leon could be the most benefited by this initiative of the Spanish Government. Of the 47,600 homes that Sareb currently has in its portfolio, 26% are in Valencia, another 21% in Catalonia and 16% in Castilla y León. Or maybe not, since the president’s announcement could affect the agreement that Sareb has just signed with the companies specialized in real estate management (servicers, in the jargon of the sector) Hipoges and Anticipa/Aliseda, in which it ceded the marketing of their properties. “We have a management contract for three years that can be extended to five years and we comply with a business plan approved by the Sareb council. The impact will depend on the number of homes available and the locations in stressed areas”, a spokesman for Anticipa/Aliseda explains to La Vanguardia. This servicer, owned by the investment fund Blackrock, currently manages 100,000 assets, valued at 19,000 million of which 11,000 are owned by Sareb.
Another looming problem may be the location of Sareb’s properties. In 2012, when the entity was created taking over the toxic assets of the banks after the bursting of the real estate bubble, 78% of its assets were unpaid financial credits and only 22% real estate. Now the situation has been reversed: 60% are real estate and only 40% are toxic financial assets.
The reason, they explain to the sector, is that “the homes that remain are the most complicated to sell, developments in sparsely populated and poorly communicated areas that were once left unfinished and that in order to sell them had to be completed, or in the event that are finished, they need renovations to make them habitable after a decade of disuse”. Sareb hired experts in this management to try to get these properties out of the way. And it remains to be seen what the central government will propose to do so.
