A month and a half after the Rental Reference Price Index came into effect, only Catalonia has declared areas of stressed residential market, while in the rest of Spain only 12 municipalities have requested this declaration, which refuse to activate the governed communities by the PP.
The towns that have officially requested it so far are Alcorcón, Fuenlabrada, Getafe, Parla and Ciempozuelos (Community of Madrid); Rentería (Basque Country); Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Adeje, Granadilla de Abona and La Orotava (Canary Islands); Gijón (Asturias) and La Coruña (Galicia). However, none of them have obtained it, since the PP, the PNV and the Canarian Coalition, the parties that govern these communities – and that voted against the housing law – reject the policy of intervening in prices. Along these lines, the PP has promoted several appeals before the Constitutional Court against this law, one of them from the Andalusian Government, which assures that it has not received any petition.
Meanwhile, in Asturias, where the only city council that has demanded it has been Gijón – the largest city in the community -, for the neighborhoods of Cimadevilla and La Arena, the autonomous government of the PSOE has chosen to commission a study from the University of Oviedo to define the stressed rental areas of the region.
The declaration of a stressed area, which can only be carried out by the autonomous communities, allows municipalities to establish restrictions on rent increases and limit the income of large property owners to what is set by the Reference Price Index.
The requirement for a municipality to be declared a stressed residential market area is that the average cost of the mortgage or rental plus basic expenses and supplies exceeds 30% of the average household income or that the purchase or rental price has increased at least three points above the CPI in the previous five years.
According to sector data, the Community of Madrid, Catalonia, the Basque Country, the Balearic Islands and the Valencian Community are the communities with the greatest number of stressed market areas, but only the Catalan Government (chaired by ERC) has enabled this instrument.
Last August, three months after the Law for the Right to Housing was approved, the Government declared 140 municipalities – where 80% of the Catalan population resides – as areas of stressed residential market and has now begun the procedures to add another 131, covering 90% of the population.
In the rest of Spain, the PP refuses to do so and, although it governs in 11 of the 17 Spanish communities, it is in Madrid – at the head of the communities that exceeded their maximum prices in March -, where it champions the political conflict with the socialist town councils for this matter.
The mayors of Alcorcón, Getafe, Fuenlabrada, Coslada, Parla and Ciempozuelos, which have almost a million inhabitants, want their cities to be declared tension zones, but the government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso does not allow it, so the PSOE councilors They will take a municipal legislative initiative to the regional Assembly.
To resolve this situation, Sumar has registered a non-legal proposal in Congress that urges the Government to reform the housing law to establish that “local entities can subsidiarily request the declaration when the requirements are met and the autonomous community has not done so.” declared six months after the request.”
The socialists, who ruled out that option during the negotiation of the housing law with Podemos last term, were then confident that the pressure from their voters would lead the PP to change its mind.
In the Basque Country, another of the regions with the highest housing prices, a report by the Basque Housing Observatory – which depends on the regional government – has calculated that 41 of its 252 municipalities meet the conditions to be declared stressed areas, the entire municipality or some of its neighborhoods.
Of these, there are already around twenty who have announced their intention to request the declaration and several have already approved it in a municipal plenary session, but in practice, only one official request has so far reached the Basque Government, along with the corresponding report that the justifies, which is that of the Guipuzcoan municipality of Rentería, with a mayor from EH Bildu.
Meanwhile, the Balearic government of the PP, which also rejects the declaration of stressed areas, because it considers that it would cause a reduction in supply that would further increase the cost of housing, assures EFE that it has not received any requests from city councils. The Balearic Islands, mainly Ibiza and Mallorca, are experiencing a constant rise in prices, both in sales and rentals, and there are studies that indicate that 85.5% of their areas are stressed.
In the Valencian Community (PP-Vox), the corresponding Department does not offer data, but Alicante and Valencia are among the provinces with the most stressed residential market in Spain. The Valencian socialists and Compromís wanted Valencia to be declared a tense city, when both governed in coalition in the City Council, but the current municipal Executive of the PP and Vox, with María José Catalá at the helm, has ruled out applying a measure that it considers “failed.”
In the Canary Islands there are four municipalities that have requested the declaration of a stressed area, among them, the largest city in the archipelago and one of its two capitals, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, which approved the formal request in plenary this week, hand in hand of its mayor and former socialist minister Carolina Darias.
The other three municipalities correspond to Tenerife and are located in areas of significant tourist demand: Adeje and Granadilla de Abona, in the south, and La Orotava, in the north.
The Government of the Canary Islands (CC-PP), which has repeatedly expressed itself against regulating the rental price, has announced that it will approve a protocol to define the procedure that municipalities that demand this figure must comply with and the reports that must be presented to justify it.
In the case of Galicia, only La Coruña has submitted the request to declare a stressed area, arguing that it is the third city in Spain, after Madrid and Barcelona, ??with the greatest increase in prices, while the Santiago City Council Compostela has announced on several occasions its intention to do so, but has not yet presented it.
The Xunta, however, alleges that the request was incomplete and has established a procedure in which it requests numerous technical documentation, which at the moment no Galician city council has completed.
