Housing policy does not give votes. What requires time, effort and money, with little immediate political return, tends to be lacking in planning government objectives. Perhaps this is what explains why Catalonia and Spain have their homework to do in terms of housing. In recent decades there have been many patches and many headlines, but there have been few effective solutions. The reality is that rents, despite the public initiatives that have been undertaken, have not stopped rising and record figures have been reached.
The average rental price in Barcelona in the third quarter of 2023 reached 1,171 euros per month, 11% more than a year ago, growing at a much higher rate than salaries. In Catalonia as a whole, the average rental price is 830 euros.
With these prices, the options for having decent housing plummet, especially for young people who want to emancipate themselves. It is no coincidence that we are on the podium of countries in which children take longer to leave their parents’ home, nor is it a coincidence that we find ourselves with one of the lowest birth rates in the world, with the consequences that this entails. The causes are multiple, but one of them is, without a doubt, the exorbitant price of housing compared to salaries. With these prices, no one lives here.
Housing policies cannot be improvised. From urban planning and land management, which in the dense area of ??Barcelona is very scarce, to the construction and allocation of housing, meticulous work is required from the administrations, with very cumbersome procedures, and with a large number of resources that easily end up being allocated to more visible and immediate needs.
And that is without forgetting that in the last two decades we have gone from the Catalonia of six million to the Catalonia of eight million and, as is the case in most public services, in the case of housing the situation has also become tense. The only thing missing was the long economic crisis and the drama of mortgages and evictions, which paralyzed construction almost completely.
To combat the upward dynamics of housing prices, many measures have been taken. Some are legislative, with the regulation of housing under official protection, and others are promotion and direct aid, such as deductions for young people to access housing. These measures may have temporarily mitigated the problem, but it is clear that they have not solved it.
From the Generalitat, with the councilor Ester Capella, first at the head of Justícia, and now in Territori, the initiative was taken to limit the price of rentals in the municipalities with the most problems of access to housing. Considering an appeal from the PSOE government, the Constitutional Court struck down in March 2022 the articles of the 2020 Catalan law that limited the price of rentals. Finally, the central government, based on this battered initiative, is pursuing the idea of ??regulating prices and today is waiting for the BOE to publish the indices for 140 Catalan municipalities that are experiencing a tense price situation.
Housing is an essential good and when market rules play against the general interest, increasingly impoverishing families and depriving them of basic rights, it is an obligation to intervene. In the medium and long term, there is only one effective way to truly intervene in prices, which is to substantially increase supply.
To make up for the lost years, the president of the Generalitat announced a few months ago a plan to have 10,000 new social rental apartments in three years in Catalonia. If this objective is met, in 2026 the current 2% of public apartments would go from 7%. The progress is commendable, but insufficient; It is still far from the 15% public housing stock that the rest of European countries have, on average. It is a good change in trend that must be accelerated.
The fact that it is difficult, slow and expensive should not be a reason for not addressing the issue in all its dimensions and as a priority. The lack of affordable housing is a fundamental, structural issue. It probably will not help to win elections, but it is essential to transform society, and this is precisely one of the noble missions of politics, to think about the future of the next generations.
