Four autonomous communities have not started any social rental housing since 2014, either publicly or privately promoted, according to data collected in a study by the APCE-UPF Housing Chair presented this morning in Barcelona.
In the nine years that the study analyzes, barely 12,000 social flats were started in Spain. And while in Murcia, Aragón, Asturias, La Rioja and Ceuta none were started, practically half of this figure was concentrated in Madrid (42%, with more than 5,000 flats), followed by the Basque Country and Catalonia with close to 2,000. in the whole period. In some years, such as 2018, up to 16 communities did not start any social rental housing.
Carles Sala, a professor at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili and one of the authors of the study together with the UPF professors Josep Maria Raya and José García Montalvo, attributed the abandonment of the promotion of social housing to the disappearance of soft loans to promoters from the Housing Plan 2013-2017, when in the previous plans these had reached up to 34,000 million euros. “Direct subsidies have also plummeted, and in the last three plans they are 1,443 million euros (for four years), when in the previous one they had been 10,188 million.”
Raya pointed out that “there is a consensus between the political parties and between sectors” that more affordable housing is needed, but that “economic policies and instruments are lacking: think about who will do them and with what financing”. Thus, he pointed out, in Spain only half a point of GDP is dedicated to housing issues, when the EU average is 1%, and in countries like France it reaches 1.5%. Sala, for his part, regretted that the state has been reducing tax deductions in personal income tax, which came to reduce his income by 6,000 million euros a few years ago and now they are residual “and that money has been saved, instead of to allocate it to housing policy”.
The need to give developers soft loans to build VPOs is greater now than it was a decade ago, Sala said. “When VPO purchases were promoted, the families that acquired them were subrogated to the credit and the financial entities distributed the risk and expanded their commercial base. If it is for rent, on the other hand, the bank’s risk is not distributed. In addition, the new Housing law has increased the difficulties to recover the apartment if there are defaults, so it is more necessary to have some endorsement or guarantee from the state so that the banks give credits.
Until 2013, the State signed agreements with financial institutions to grant credit to developers who made VPO, and also subsidized the interest rate or fee. In the latest housing plan, acknowledges Sala, public aid has been increased, but with “many programs of an exclusively welfare nature”, and there is only direct aid for the promotion of housing for the elderly or disabled.
Sala highlighted the lead that Madrid has in promoting affordable rental flats and attributed it to the fact that there the qualification was of short duration (between 7 and 15 years), while in other communities such as Catalonia it is permanent, a measure that now makes the Housing Law mandatory. The public-private collaboration model chosen by Madrid has also been more agile, since the Catalan entity Habitatge Metropolis (a mixed company) has not yet laid the first stone in any of its projects.
The study analyzes the impact of Next Generation funds in the promotion of social housing and points out that they are insufficient. Thus, in Catalonia alone, city councils have submitted applications to finance more than 10,000 homes, when the non-refundable grants from the plan only cover 2,500 units. The study asks that the administrations complement the aid from the EU to finance all the applications presented, and warns that even the 2,500 that the Next Generation foresees could not be built if there is no financing for the promoters. Sala demanded “flexibility” from the administrations and to negotiate with the EU the transfer of aid for energy rehabilitation -which is hardly requested- to the promotion of energy-efficient social housing. “It would be a shame, with the housing needs we have, if in June 2026 we had to return the money to the EU because we have not known how to spend it.”
