A bombing, in the opinion of Moncloa, to respond to one of the main concerns of citizens, and particularly of young people, at the gates of the municipal and regional elections on May 28. Pedro Sánchez announced yesterday that the Council of Ministers will approve tomorrow a plan that will allocate up to 50,000 homes from Sareb, the Asset Management Company for Bank Restructuring, for social rental. And the objective of raising the number of public flats in Spain from the current 3% to 20% was set.
“We, instead of causing problems, with resounding failures such as the Popular Party’s housing policy, what we do is build solutions,” warned the President of the Government at the closing of the municipal conference that the PSOE held in Valencia at the prelude to the electoral contest.
After the parliamentary agreement reached last Friday with ERC and EH Bildu to unblock the first state housing law, which among other issues will cap the rise in rental prices at 3%, Sánchez yesterday certified his determination to “go further”, by mobilizing up to 50,000 homes for rent at an “affordable price”, below the market price. In this way, the Government plans to make 21,000 flats available to municipalities and autonomous communities, it will also boost social rental with the 14,000 already inhabited homes in that park, and will promote the construction of up to 15,000 public homes on available Sareb land.
Sánchez thus situates the promotion of access to housing in Spain, one of the main concerns of citizens according to the CIS, as a great electoral proposal of the PSOE before the 28-M.
The Chief Executive celebrated the future Housing Law as “a great milestone and a great achievement.” And he launched his commitment to increase the number 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 up to “absolutely unacceptable ages”, much higher than the European average, and which “segregates society by neighborhoodsâ€.
Sánchez used studies that prove that “70% of inequality in Spain is the product of the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of accessing decent housing.” And he raised 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 EU states, Spain is the fourth country in which families commit the most financial overstrain to be able to pay the rent. The evolution of the average price of the square meter, between 2014 and 2021, increased by 11% in owned apartments, but shot up by 45% in rent. In addition, he warned that Spain is the third country in the EU with the most empty homes and, on the other hand, it is one of the countries with the smallest public housing stock, barely 3% of the total, when the European average is 9%. and in some countries it reaches 20%.
This is the objective that Sánchez set for himself, by assuming the commitment that Spain reaches a public housing stock of 20% of the total. This increase, he assured, would guarantee greater accessibility to housing, especially for young people, and therefore would lower their average emancipation age. 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 described as a “resounding 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 land, which in his opinion only served to “stir up the real estate bubble and speculation, in addition to the little envelopes,” he said, alluding to the corruption that he attributed to the PP. Also, the tax credit policies that he, in his opinion, only benefited real estate developers. And finally, he challenged the privatizations of public housing that he blamed on the right, to sell it to “vulture funds.” “The same thing always happens with the right: profits are privatized and, when they are badly given, losses are socialized,†he lamented. “That’s what neoliberalism is about,” warned Sánchez.
In the absence of knowing the details of the proposal, communities such as Valencia, Catalonia and Castilla y León could be the most benefited by this government initiative. 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 real estate. “We have a three-year management contract that can be extended to five years and we are complying with a business plan approved by the Sareb board. The impact will depend on the number of homes available and the locations in stressed areas,†a spokesperson for Aliseda/Anticipa explained to La Vanguardia. This servicers, owned by the investment fund Blackstone, currently manages 100,000 assets, valued at 19,000 million, of which 11,000 million are owned by Sareb.
Another problem in sight could be the location of the Sareb properties. In 2012, when the entity was created, 78% of its assets were unpaid financial loans 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 in the sector, is that “the homes that remain are the most difficult to sell, developments in sparsely populated and poorly communicated areas that were left unfinished in their day and that needed to be completed for their sale, or in the event After they were finished they need reforms to adapt their habitability after a decade in disuse â€. Sareb hired experts in this management to try to dispose of those properties. And it remains to be seen what the central government will propose to do so.
