“I still can’t buy a house and I can barely pay the rent.“, confessed the actress Irene Escolar in the program ‘La Revuelta’ of TVE, presented by David Broncano who ventured into prime time on public television to denounce that “housing is the biggest problem that our generation suffers” and that “it must be solved at some point.
A drama, or rather a quagmire, in which a high percentage of young people and Spanish families find themselves immersed in a situation in which the real estate market, both for buying and renting, continues to show a historic increase. So much so that renting an apartment already costs 83% more than the mortgage payment, even though the small print indicates that to buy a house, on average, it takes 48,000 euros in savings.
This is the main conclusion of the latest report published by the Idealista portal, which places the average rental price of a two-bedroom house in Spain at 1,042 euros per month, while the monthly mortgage payment is around 570 euros. In the case of the city of Valencia, the percentage difference amounts to 113%since a rental already costs 1,042 euros and the mortgage would remain at 490 euros, requiring an initial saving of 43,110 euros.
An extreme situation that, according to Idealista spokesman Francisco Iñareta, shows that “in almost all markets, families could more easily face the payment of the mortgage than the monthly rent, but in many cases they cannot take the step due to not having the necessary savings.”
“Unfortunately, high rental prices prevent them from generating the savings needed to be able to buy a home and access a situation of greater stability and financial relief. Given that it does not seem reasonable to ask the financial system to relax its risk criteria, the only solution to this problem vicious circle “seems to involve the adoption of measures that allow for an exponential increase in the supply of rental housing in order to reduce prices and generate a healthy real estate market,” says the real estate expert.
New bag of earth
For the Valencia City Council, as explained by its mayor María José Catalá this Monday during the Debate on the State of the City, access to housing for young people has become “a obsession“, he therefore advanced that the pending urban developments have been “unblocked” to establish the strategy for the urban future of the capital of Turia.
For this reason, he announced that the municipality, “given the worrying lack of housing in the city”, will “immediately” promote a “new bag of land” that will be located in the Benimamet neighborhood. Thus, he specified that it is a new area of 402,675 square meters with a buildable area of 461,266 meters of ceiling, where more than 4,600 homes of which nearly 1,000 will be intended for public protection.
The first mayor stressed that “in terms of housing and urban regeneration, measures must be taken in the short, medium and long term”. In this context, he indicated that in 2025, 16 PAIs will be managed in Valencia, at different stages of processing and which involve the construction of 13,966 new homes, of which 11,156 are rent-free and 2,810 are public protection.
At the same time, the “popular” leader addressed another of the main derivatives of the housing problem, as illegal tourist apartmentsfor which he announced a series of control measures such as cutting off the water and electricity supply, and that he will request the powers of the Generalitat to be able to undertake inspections and issue sanctions.
In another order, a second report from Idealista revealed that the P-zoneCentral-Hort Arc of Trenor de Torrent (Valencia) is the district with the greatest demand pressure on housing supply, in which the Benimaclet district also stands out in third position nationally, alongside others such as Jesús and Quatre Carreres.
