In Bicorp, in Valencia, there is an auxiliary health clinic, a community club for the elderly, a primary education center, a sports center and an ecomuseum, as well as 4G connectivity. There are few data, a priori, to decide on a change of vine, but relevant enough for someone looking for a home in one of the 180 municipalities at risk of depopulation, those that are part of the "AVANT Agenda" of the Valencian Community.
This is how the technicians working on the design of the Arrel strategy promoted by the Department of Housing for the reactivation of areas at risk of depopulation in the Valencian Community understand it. These filters -education, services or time in minutes to the municipality of reference, among others- are already part of a new web platform that seeks, in the long run, to connect residents who want to stay in their town and cannot find housing or those who wish to move but cannot find a housing solution with the owners.
"There are many people interested in going to these municipalities, but there is no offer, neither for rent nor for sale and this contrasts with the fact that we find many abandoned or closed houses," explain sources from the project, which develops the so-called Innovation Strategy for the reactivation of the housing stock in municipalities at risk of depopulation in the Valencian Community, presented two weeks ago at an event attended by the second vice president, Hèctor Illueca, and the regional secretary for Territorial Cohesion and Policies against Depopulation, Elena Cebrián.
The technicians have visited the total of 180 municipalities (85 in the province of Castellón, 65 in Valencia and 30 in Alicante) that participate in this network that seeks to meet the growing demand for housing to establish population, speaking with their people and political representatives. His fieldwork confirms the well-known population differences between the coast and the Valencian interior in a territory in which 40% of its municipalities have fewer than 1,000 inhabitants.
In the analysis that the technical teams are already doing, they have used as a reference the water consumption that is made in each house of the participating populations, to determine if they are abandoned or if they are used in a secondary way, as a second residence.
And in this analysis, they have found everything from closed houses because the owners do not unravel the inheritance, to others that have such a high sale price that they are more assimilated to the real estate market of the big cities and not to the rural environment in which they are located. And in this way, the house is configured as one more stone for the repopulation, which is wanted to be stopped.
At the moment work is being done on the diagnosis of the proposal and among the documentation, the Basque Country is one of the references, a territory that has housing policies that penalize empty housing. Since the 2021 decree, the real estate park has been mobilized with an annual fee of 10 euros for each useful square meter of the home per year, a figure that will increase by 10% for each year of vacancy – with a maximum of three times the initial amount.
In Catalonia, the housing registry also works to quantify the number of empty houses, another referential autonomous community for the Valencian strategy in development, which will have actions and policies in terms of housing activation defined in a participatory manner.
