The housing problem goes by neighborhoods or, rather, by Functional Urban Areas (AUF), which are those in whose municipalities more than 15% of the population works in a large reference city. According to a study by UVE Valaciones presented yesterday at a press conference, two large cities, Madrid and Barcelona, ??cause with their magnet of economic activity the two largest housing deficits in Spain, where there is an abundance in contrast to the regions where this precious good exceeds the needs. of the population. If housing is scarce in 13 provinces, there is plenty in 39.

The UVE Valaciones study is full of counterintuitive elements, among them the fact that in Spain, where access to housing is presented as an endemic problem, there is no deficit, but the other way around. The country registers an excess of 433,000 homes: if 327,000 are missing in 13 provinces, in the rest there are more than 780,000 left over.

“It is not about building more housing, but about where to do it. The results reflect the existence of areas with strong construction needs compared to others in which, probably, the most reasonable thing would be to do nothing in the next ten years,” said Germán Pérez Barrio, the president of UVE Valoraciones, yesterday in the presentation. of the study.

To reach these conclusions, the appraiser has taken into account the inventory of homes available in each municipality, the number of families and second homes, which are those that are used at least fifteen days a year and of which it is possible to carry out a survey. census thanks to consumption information from electricity companies. The average occupancy rate in Spain is 85%, with levels ranging from 95% in Madrid and Barcelona to just 60% in Lugo and Ourense.

The functional area of ??Madrid – which includes some municipalities of Guadalajara or Toledo – is the one with the greatest housing deficit, with 107,465, ahead of the 84,934 of Barcelona – it does not cover even half of the province, but it does cover a small area. from Tarragona – and 64,593 from Valencia. These three agglomerations, added to the deficit of 46,413 in the Balearic Islands, explain almost the entire shortage phenomenon in the country. By province, the one with the greatest shortage is Barcelona, ??with 85,371, followed by Madrid, with 76,982.

Pérez Barrio, who acknowledges the surprise of the report’s own authors upon discovering that the thriving Málaga is among the provinces with a surplus, explains that, exceptions aside, the price of housing correlates with two variables: the residence deficit and the housing rate. use. The rise of both is automatically transferred to the market.

In his opinion, the problem can be solved with the offer, but it is not that easy. “On the one hand, there is a lack of land and, on the other, construction capacity has been greatly reduced and there is a bottleneck. In Spain it is difficult to build more than 100,000 homes a year,” he says.

Apart from Madrid and Barcelona, ??the rest of the provinces that make up Spain’s housing deficit are found mainly in the Basque Country, on the coast and in some large cities in the country.

In the province of Valencia, 53,181 residences are missing, compared to 46,413 in the Balearic Islands, 26,989 in Murcia, 19,780 in Vizcaya, 7,656 in Álava, 4,344 in Valladolid, 2,765 in Zaragoza, 2,134 in Alicante, 946 in Guipuzcoa , the 516 in Las Palmas and the 144 in Navarra.

The rest of the provinces have a surplus. Those with the least are Albacete (1,793), La Rioja (2,312) and Huelva (2,557), and those with the most have Galicia at the top, with the exception of Ciudad Real, which leads the classification with 59,750.

In A Coruña there are 57,377 left over, in Ourense 56,696, in Toledo 51,979, in Lugo 42,374, in Pontevedra 41,628, in León 40,090, in Cuenca 26,288, in Guadalajara 24,366 and in Málaga 24,302.