During his investiture speech, Pedro Sánchez announced that two of the first housing measures that the new Executive will take will benefit young people: raising the youth rental bonus and opening a line of guarantees for 20% of the mortgage loan. when buying the first home, two measures included in the government agreement signed with Sumar.
The youth rental bonus today is an aid of 250 euros for those under 35 years of age with the aim of contributing to youth emancipation, and the Executive intends to turn it into a long-term measure and expand the financing. The bonus is aimed at young people under 35 years of age, with incomes of less than 24,000 euros per year and who pay less than 600 euros in rent, although communities with stressed areas can raise it to 900 euros.
The guarantees, for their part, will bring to the entire State an initiative that has already been launched by communities governed by the PP, such as Madrid and Murcia, although its low budget allocation has made it almost symbolic. The Government, however, plans to open a new line of ICO guarantees with a budget of 2,500 million euros that will facilitate the purchase of some 50,000 homes and the beneficiaries will be young people under 35 years of age for the acquisition of their first habitual home.
José García Montalvo, professor of Economics at the UPF, questioned the effectiveness of continuing to provide assistance for purchases “when all the studies show that the housing problem in Spain is concentrated in rent, and especially in that of people in the two lowest income percentiles, who must allocate more than 50% of their family income to housing.” “The access problem is also very localized in capitals and tourist areas, in cities like Madrid, Ibiza or Malaga,” he added.
Likewise, he explained, studies indicate that direct income aid such as the youth bonus can end up contributing to the increase in rents. “There are more appropriate and more economical formulas, such as arranged rentals, in which the State rents the property and pays the owner the difference between the rent that the vulnerable family can pay and the market rent. If the State signs a long-term rental for these properties, public aid does not cause an increase in rental prices,” he noted.
In his investiture speech, Pedro Sánchez committed to creating a park of 183,000 public affordable rental homes, as he already announced in the previous legislature, and the new minister, Isabel Rodríguez, reported an “ambitious medium and long term” so that the public affordable rental housing stock is 20% of the total housing stock, when today it is barely 2%.
Ferran Font, director of studies at Pisos.com, recalled that to reach these levels “1.5 million homes are missing. Today in Spain the visas to build homes are barely 100,000 a year, so it takes more than a decade to get there. And a large budget allocation. It implies a political and long-term consensus. And today we are not there.”
Gerard Duelo, president of the General Council of all the associations of real estate agents in Spain, also demanded that the speeches be accompanied by a greater budget allocation. “Not including European funds, the State budget for housing is about 1,000 million euros per year, and to match it to the average of neighboring countries it should be 0.6% of GDP, that is, 8,000 million.”
