Since we have distracted attention, there are few of the many statements made in the media that stick with us, and that is fortunate for people in public affairs. If they limit themselves to saying unremarkable banalities, they can survive decades without causing any scandal. There are people who nail it and retire like that. Minister Isabel Rodríguez was going a bit down that path. She managed to get through the previous legislature, as Government spokesperson and head of Territorial Policy without getting into too many puddles. Now, however, she is Minister of Housing, just at the moment when this issue finally occupies the place on the media agenda that she already occupied in private conversations. It has become evident that the absolute disparity between what you earn for working and what you are asked for for a house generates unsustainable anxiety.
In the midst of this collective a-ha moment, the minister of the sector said two words in an interview in Ser that will haunt her as long as she works: there is business. With them, she intended to reassure real estate developers, promising them that they would continue making money by building subsidized housing. Both with and without context, putting those two words together right now when talking about housing seems somewhere between provocative and suicidal.
The PSOE likes to boast of being “the party that most resembles Spain”, a slogan with which they titled a self-aggrandizing documentary and which Pedro Sánchez often resorts to. It is not understood, then, not even from a political point of view, this intention to align oneself with the developers, the rentiers and even the owners, when day after day we are seeing that the heart of the issue is in the rent, in those people, that they are no longer young, they are no longer dispossessed, that they fight for the few houses that come onto the stable housing market and have to try to pay for them with a local salary, not that of an expat or an investor. It has also become clear that buying, that is, getting a mortgage, does not guarantee any housing security either. With these realities so widely assumed, it is almost exotic that parties that aspire to centrality continue to speak for that minority figure (and antisocial behavior). The person who hears “housing” and thinks “business.”
