"We did not need this Housing Law," says Juan Antonio Gómez-Pintado, president of the Association of Builder Promoters of Spain. He affirmed it yesterday in an act on housing emergency held in Valencia, the same day that the Upper House addressed the new regulations that regulate the housing market and that finds clear opposition in this campaign, including those of the real estate sector.
Gómez-Pintado, invited to the event by his namesake in Valencia, Antonio Olmedo, president of the association that brings together the promoters of Valencia (APROVA), did not avoid the political allusion in the middle of the 28M campaign. Thus, he assured that the Law has been parked for three years by the PSOE, "and now it has come out because it has been imposed by Bildu, Esquerra Republicana and Unidas Podemos. It is an absolutely ideological law," he affirmed.
The businessman assured that "there is no sector other than ours that supports this superinflation of standards" and ventured that the conclusions of this new Housing Law "will not be good." In fact, he promised to observe the market to quantify a posteriori how much product disappears - "as has happened in Catalonia, with the effect it has had" - and what its consequences will be on the market.
Fernando Cos-Gayón, director of the Housing Observatory Chair at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), also participated in a round table at the meeting. His latest x-rays of the housing situation in the Valencian capital and metropolitan area point to a large rise in sale and rental prices, another of the consequences that, the sector assures, will continue despite the new regulation of the central Executive.
"The star argument of the Law is that of the rent ceilings, but it is pointing exactly where it does not belong, because the problem is not demand, it is supply. There is no housing. The focus has been on the aid that can come so that the owners can become so and to see how prices are contained. And as an idea it is fine but it is fatally grounded, it has not worked in any country in the world", defends Cos-Gayón.
The also university professor defends that neither in Paris, nor in Berlin nor in Barcelona has this worked. "Not only do you put a limit on prices, but you create insecurity for the owner that if he defaults, he will not be able to activate anything, but rather he will have to negotiate with the tenant to see if he is in a vulnerable situation. That already happened years ago With the rentals of old rent, there were cases in which the landlord was more vulnerable than the tenant and the landlord had to find a home", defends the engineer.
Likewise, for Cos-Gayón one of the basic issues in the housing mess is the lack of public housing, whose need is labeled as "urgent" in the Chair that he chairs. In three years, if a serious public-private collaboration is carried out, it can be done, there are already examples in Navarra or the Basque Country...", he adds. The building specialist affirms that cities have land on which "you are not doing nothing and it would cost you a fortune to build with it out of everyone's taxes; Well, a promoter is given, the price of the exchange is set, which is set by law, and in the end you have land on which 10 or 15 public housing can be taken out at no cost".
In the initial speeches of the act, the president of APROVA had previously influenced the lack of public housing: "The housing emergency is being generated because there is no publicly managed housing. Construction is stagnant."
