He First Vice President of the Regional Government, José Luis Martínez Guijarrodemanded from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) the need to incorporate the “rural prism” into housing access policies.
Martínez Guijarro, who participated in the working day in which, before representatives of the OECD and the regions of Canada, South Korea and Romania, he presented the measures and results of the Castile-La Mancha Depopulation Law three years after its approval and indicated that the challenge facing depopulated areas is housing, as the Council stated in a press release.
During the session, hosted by the OECD researchers Marc Bournisien de Valmont and José Enrique GarcilazoThe vice president stressed that the problem “is that homes in rural areas are not available to enter the real estate market because they need to be rehabilitated and they need owners to mobilize them.”
A problem that, as became evident during the working day at the OECD, is repeated in the depopulated regions of Canada, Romania and South Korea, with whose political representatives he compared the policies applied in each of these territories.
In this context, Martínez Guijarro, accompanied by the Commissioner of the Demographic Challenge, Jesús Alique; and the Director General of Coordination, Diana Asín, transferred the measures implemented by the Autonomous Executive in matters of housing, such as the Pilot housing rehabilitation program which has allocated more than 1.1 million euros from the Territorial Cohesion Fund of the Ministry of Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge to rehabilitate a total of eleven properties spread across seven sites in the region. These are municipal buildings that were disused and have been rented out in order to increase the rental supply in municipalities where an increase in demand has been detected.
In addition, The Government of Castilla-La Mancha is working on the “Castile-La Mancha Rural Housing Program”a project to strengthen the supply of rentals in rural areas, which includes individuals and to which 2,268,865.59 euros will be allocated from the Territorial Cohesion Fund of the Ministry of Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge.
Added to this is the increase in aid from PRE5000 Program for the rehabilitation of private housing in municipalities with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, the budget for which has been increased for the fourth time and already reaches almost 60 million euros in aid from the Recovery Plan funds, from which 1,250 people have benefited to date.
Depopulation in the OECD area
The OECD organised this event with the aim of regions sharing their measures and solutions to address the demographic challenge, a topic that has been on their agenda since 2019, when the organisation launched the workline “Preparing regions for demographic change”, which presents thematic reports on access and costs of service delivery, as well as country and regional case studies, to help policymakers at all levels of government address demographic challenges and adopt integrated, innovative and flexible approaches to seize opportunities.
The OECD project “Shrinking Smartly and Sustainably” (2023-2025) aims to develop a framework and associated guidelines for managing demographic change in regions and cities experiencing strong and sustained population decline.
