The reform of the controversial norm approved in the first term of Ada Colau that obliges to reserve 30% of the promotions of new construction or great rehabilitations to subsidized housing, an issue that Jaume Collboni is willing to address in agreement with the promoters And with enough political support, it’s not going to be an easy task. The mayor announced this Thursday in Foros de Vanguardia that he will make the measure more flexible by monetizing it so that private companies contribute funds through this channel so that the City Council can buy land and build affordable apartments. The employers of the sector, the APCE, sees the change as positive, but warns that it is not enough, that the conditions of the current regulation must be further softened, which came into force in December 2018 and has obtained poor results so far.
The mayor assured that the changes that he intends to apply have been discussed with the sector and that it views them favorably. The promoters respond that the question must be addressed in a much broader way. “If only the measure is monetized, what will happen is that the price of free housing will increase, and it is already very high,” warns Xavier Vilajoana, president of the PACE, who recalls that the proposal, accompanied by other Some of them are the result of work with, among others, the professional associations of architects and surveyors, and not the newly constituted municipal government. “From the first moment we have opposed the 30% rule -he recalls-, but if it is not repealed, we have proposed a broad review that allows us to achieve the objectives we had, which is to increase the supply of affordable housing ”.
The first question that promoters raise is to exclude large renovations from the norm. “It does not make sense that these actions are being encouraged with aid from Next Generation funds and that later, when the building license is requested, 30% has to be allocated to official protection, thus it does not help to make these improvements” . Therefore, these integral reforms of buildings should, according to the PACE, be left out.
Another workhorse for promoters is raising the area from which promotions are required to apply the 30% reserve. Now it is 600 square meters (400 square meters in Gràcia). “We defend that the minimum be 2,400 square meters,” Vilajoana specifies, to exclude the smallest buildings with the fewest number of homes, in which, in his opinion, it does not make sense to make this reservation.
At this point, in which the conditions of application of the 30% reserve have been softened with the two modifications explained, the PACE proposes that the promoters can transfer the surface that they must allocate to official protection to plots of their property in the same district to be able to concentrate this type of offer. Now this transfer is possible, if a series of conditions are met, within the same neighborhood. Lastly, this organization proposes that the measure –the formula announced by Collboni– can be monetized by calculating its value, basically subtracting the free sale price from the protection price, and that these amounts be contributed to the City Council so that it can allocate them to the promotion of public housing.
The only official data on the impact of the standard can clearly be improved. The APCE estimated 52 subsidized homes generated in the first four years of application and the City Council at 150 because it included the building permits in process and the apartments that were initially fraudulently released to the free market and that gave rise to fines. In both cases there are very few, since the municipal government estimated some 400 units per year.
The promoters insist that allocating 30% of the homes in the same promotion to official protection makes marketing and access difficult, since there are areas in which the cost of living is unaffordable for the majority of the recipients of these apartments, as They must meet minimum and maximum income requirements. “Many do not consider going to live in them –explains Vilajoana– and end up in the hands of the children of the families in the same neighbourhood; perhaps that was not the objective of the measure”.
