The supply of social rental housing in Catalonia is around 1.6% of the total number of first-residence homes, when the average in the European Union is 15% and reaches, in socially advanced nations such as the Netherlands , 29%. The public budget for housing policy in our country is equivalent to 0.1% of GDP, compared to the average of 0.6% of GDP in the European Union.
Home purchase transactions in the Spanish market have been highly variable in the last twenty years (between 350,000 in 2013 and more than one million in 2005). Also the percentage between new and second-hand housing, with a prevalence of new construction in periods of strong growth and second-hand in times of recession or uncertainty. All in all, an absorption capacity of around 400,000 homes per year in the Spanish market and around 80,000 per year in the Catalan market can be adopted as a prudent order of magnitude.
With these magnitudes, it is difficult for the public offering by itself to modulate market prices. A second context factor is that demand is preferably located in large metropolitan areas. Finally, it can be seen that in recent years, the percentage of family income available to pay mortgages has been increasing (above 30% is not a desirable volume) and especially since the rise in interest rates.
This context has generated a housing emergency situation that is not resolved with the political actions recently announced by the Generalitat and the State Government, given their insignificant role in relation to the market and accumulated need. In the case of the State Government, moreover, the option of allocating Sareb flats to social rentals does not seem very appropriate, since their locations are not, for the most part, in the areas with the greatest need.
The historical inability of the free market to meet the demand for affordable rental housing has been exacerbated in the last five years with almost zero production in areas of high demand. The main cause of all this is the lack of a stable legal framework that favors the investment of capital in this type of operation, especially for those areas of greater economic activity in which there is also a greater concentration of population.
The situation is well known to the Administration. On March 3, President Pere Aragonès announced the construction of 10,000 new social rental flats in three years. He himself recalled that access to housing is not a luxury, but an essential right of citizenship.
Giving an adequate and effective response to the needs created in this area would generate social and economic benefits for our country. Socially, housing constitutes a basic right, and when this commitment is not met, it becomes a source of inequalities among citizens, vulnerability of people and a decline in social cohesion. It is one of the determining factors of the demographic evolution of the population, of the formation of homes and the emancipation of young people, of the birth rates and of the territorial balance.
As regards the economic orbit, construction provides a very important driving effect in terms of occupation and tax collection: for each house that is built, 2.4 jobs are generated, of which 1.6 are direct (workers for employees and self-employed) and the tax return between the different administrations (state, regional and local) exceeds 20% of the sale price of each home.
The solution to this problem should be based on three foundations: first, an increase in public administration investment for this type of real estate development. The policy to provide a public housing park for affordable rental requires a strategic plan of at least eight or ten years, given the accumulated delay. In addition, it must be taken into account that this money does not generate a current deficit, an effect feared by public administrations, but rather it means increasing assets at the service of citizens and allows a certain rotational nature for young people who become emancipated and increase their income. After a few years. Secondly, it is essential to adapt the regulations to favor the production of this type of social housing. And, finally, public-private collaboration is essential to provide adequate and efficient responses to existing needs because only with public investment would the effort be, surely, unapproachable by public accounts or the change in the percentages of the tenure regime would be It would take too many years.
The construction sector in Catalonia is committed to the definition and application of formulas that reverse the current paralysis in the production of flats that stop the housing emergency that we are experiencing. It is an urgent need to establish a regulatory framework and mechanisms that facilitate the creation of a stable rental park at regulated prices by public administrations, with the aim of facilitating access for the population, as provided for in article 47 of the Constitution, to decent housing.
We need the public powers to definitively assume that they must plan a long-term housing policy that involves allocating more public resources that will allow, little by little and in a progressive but sustained manner, to reduce the gap that separates us from the European average. Undoubtedly, this measure would be more effective than voluntarist market intervention (legal limit to rent increases) which could have a retraction effect on the global supply of flats for rent, which in itself is part of the problem.
Mateu Tersol Andols is president of the Catalan Federation of Industry, Trade and Construction Services (Fecocat)
