The second term of the Government of Pedro Sánchez has opened with signs of a profound change in the housing policy that was implemented in the previous term, which has opened new hopes in the real estate sector and has already led to the first criticism from politicians and social movements. linked to Podemos. From the emphasis on rent control (“Capping the price of rents is indeed progressive,” the previous minister, Raquel Sánchez, once proclaimed), the new Executive has gone on to prioritize increasing the supply of housing and recognizing the role key that the owners must have in this.
“We know that we still have a lot to do, following a very simple premise, which is to help tenants and small property owners,” said Pedro Sánchez in his inauguration speech, when he marked housing policy as the third priority of his Executive.
And the new minister of the branch, Isabel Rodríguez, had an even greater impact on her inauguration. “I also want to have a message of tranquility and hope, of sensitivity towards small landowners. Peace of mind because this Government is on the street and we are aware that in Spain many people, especially older people, dedicated all their effort, all their work, all their savings to the purchase of a second home that today complements their income. We are also going to protect them,” she said, in addition to emphasizing that “we are not going to look for culprits now, but rather to provide solutions.”
“This is continuing to feed the rentier social bloc,” the leader of Más País and Sumar deputy, Íñigo Errejón, immediately replied, while along the same lines the Madrid Tenants Union criticized that “the minister decides to start by ensuring that “The small rentiers do not see their assets damaged.” Gerardo Pisarello, deputy of Sumar for Catalunya en Comú, also criticized that this desire to protect small property owners “is not going in the direction in which a minister committed to the right to housing should go.”
For Gerard Duelo, president of the General Council of all the Associations of Real Estate Agents in Spain, the new minister’s speech “sounds good” and leaves “room for hope” that “the errors of the last legislature will be rectified.” ”. “We are waiting,” he added.
“It seems that we are going to an important paradigm shift towards what some of us have always defended: that it is necessary to increase the supply of housing,” said José García Montalvo, professor of Economics at the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF). “Price control only makes sense in monopoly situations, which do not exist here.” In his opinion, the executive’s policy was based “on a diagnostic error, or simply on an ideological bias that attributed housing problems to evil beings, instead of seeing that the price was simply rising because it has become a very scarce good.”
“The government’s actions until now put all the emphasis on tenant protection,” recalled the director of studies at Pisos.com, Ferran Font. “Also protecting small owners is a positive change, but we will have to see how far this category of small goes, because we are setting the same level, considering large owners and equating those who have ten homes and the funds that have thousands. Segmentation would be desirable.”
Juan Antonio Gómez-Pintado, president of the Association of Developers and Builders of Spain (APC Spain), congratulated himself that “housing will be one of the fundamental axes in the new legislature, as the promoters and builders have been demanding. for years”, and recalled that “one of the main challenges is that we are able to provide young people with access to housing.”
Pedro Sánchez has decided to recover the Ministry of Housing 13 years after the previous president of a socialist government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, decided to suppress it after having created it upon his arrival to the executive, in 2004. During those six years, they held the portfolio of Housing María Antonia Trujillo, Carme Chacón and Beatriz Corredor, and since their disappearance their powers had been integrated into the Ministry of Development and later into the Ministry of Transport.
However, now housing is once again one of the axes of the political debate, as it was during the years of the real estate bubble. “It cannot be that the main problem for Spaniards is access to housing,” the new minister acknowledged at her inauguration, following the words of Pedro Sánchez, who recognized its impact “particularly on young people.” .
Real estate sources attribute the change of focus of the Executive to the loss of weight of Podemos within the Government, where it no longer has any minister. “Adding is not Podemos,” point out these sources, who recall that the government agreement signed by the two parties included the objective of increasing the public stock of affordable rental housing so that it reaches 20% of the total, “through purchase mechanisms.” or rental of existing homes, with newly built homes and mobilizing empty homes.”
The pact was described by the Llogaters Union as a “toast to the sun” and contradicts two axes of Podemos’s housing policy: the refusal to rent existing homes and the construction of new ones, since, according to the Union, they defend a “degrowth approach, not continuing to build increasingly polluted and less connected megacities.”
Podemos’s refusal to compensate the current owners, precisely, frustrated in the last legislature a project of the executive to rent 30,000 homes in stressed areas to large owners, with a rental for 25 years with a 20% discount compared to the value of the area, to increase the stock of social rental housing.
