The difficulty of accessing housing has become one of the central issues in the promises of political parties. But the initiatives do not come only from them. The civil society organization España Mejor is registering this Wednesday in the Congress of Deputies a proposal aimed at affordable rental housing.
Concretely, what the association founded by the lawyer proposes Miriam Gonzalez is the construction of some 700,000 apartments under a social rental regime, which should arrive on the market within a period of three to eight yearsTo achieve this, Spain is better defending the collaboration of private entities with the public sector as a more “realistic” solution to create this housing stock in the medium term.
“The State alone lacks resources necessary to solve the rental housing problem. To solve it, we would need to allocate the 5% of GDP just for these 700,000 households. In other words, it would represent almost the entire budget we allocate to education and more than double what we spend on defense. It is currently unaffordable,” says Miriam González.
To defend this idea, Spain would do better to submit a 27-page document this Wednesday to the Housing and Urban Agenda Committee of the Congress of Deputies, which will decide whether to take into consideration any of the points of the program.
In recent weeks, the PP and Sumar have presented their own proposals in this regard. Specifically, for the match of Yolanda Diaz Housing policies are the first concern of their proposals for next year’s hypothetical budgets, whose approval is doubtful due to the government’s lack of parliamentary support.
Sumar proposes the construction of 500,000 new homes during the remainder of the legislature, request to set rent limits between 400 and 600 euros in tense areas and the granting of public land for real estate development. However, in a document presented a week ago, they only speak of a public initiative and not a private one.
The PP, which is finalizing a bill on housing, is indeed having an impact on the public-private collaborationeven if, due to the lack of knowledge of the final document, it still does not mention a precise number of apartments under social rental regime that it wishes to put on the market.
The Bank of Spain has warned that At least 600,000 homes are missing to meet current demand and not continue to increase prices continuously. Furthermore, the latest survey by the Sociological Research Center (CIS) places this problem as the sixth most worrying concern for Spaniards, while two months ago it was the second in the order of priorities.
Taxation and legal security
Better Spain also proposes another series of legislative initiatives to improve access to housing. First, it talks about fiscal measures, such as VAT reduction on the construction of new housing to rent at a regulated price, the reduction of this tax – currently 21% – on the purchase of second-hand apartments or even the tax assimilation of tourist residential rentals to hotel activity.
As for the tourist rentalsOne of the main battle horses of local governments at the moment, Spain is better defending “greater control, not only to improve the supply of affordable housing, but also to defend a certain model of city.”
The association of Miriam González, a specialist in European law, also defends the application of measures that grant greater legal certainty to tenants who rent their home.
And finally, it calls for the adoption of urban planning measures such as amending the land law to streamline urban planning, vetoing the privatisation of public land by allocating it to social rental or making changes of use more flexible so that a development can go from free sale to rental at regulated prices.
The document that will reach Congress also includes tax incentives for individuals who wish to renovate their homes in order to allocate them to social rental and work with other entities to promote access to these for people who are more vulnerable or in situations of social exclusion.
According to Spain Better, social housing represents a third of the European Union average, which is “a consequence of bad policies, present and past.” They therefore propose “a great pact in the long term” beyond the governments in place.
The association, in which different civil society actors are represented, already presented a tax proposal to the Congress of Deputies last March and presented a proposal last July code of ethics clearly regulate the exercise of power by members of the Government and their families.
