I.- The origin of the disastrous housing situation in certain regions of Spain could be summarized in one sentence: a fundamental right cannot be left in the hands of the market or private initiative, that is -say businesses. About ten years ago, I wrote an article entitled “Expulsions”, in which I tried to demonstrate that a person or family without housing saw ten fundamental rights violated: moral, if not physical, integrity ; freedom or security; personal and family privacy; the inviolability of the home; secrecy of communications; the freedom to choose one’s residence; child protection; participation in public affairs; effective judicial protection; the right to education. The conclusion was, and remains, quite obvious, that housing is not only a fundamental right, but the primary material basis for the exercise of all rights. And may I emphasize that our current problem did not fall out of thin air. This is the consequence of an entire real estate and financial “development” project promoted by an ultraliberal right and not corrected by the left. The chaotic liberalization of land; the granting of massive and exorbitant mortgages without guarantees, the construction of millions of officially protected, downgraded housing units, which went onto the free market; a disastrous urban rent law that discouraged rental and encouraged land ownership. All this led to an insane bubble, the cause of the 2008 crisis, which eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs – an unemployment rate of 26% – and part of the population ceased to be “proletarian and owner », according to the famous phrase of this Minister of Housing of the dictatorship who wanted a Spain of owners and not of proletarians. In the end, our unrestricted liberals managed to ensure that a good portion of the population was neither. This is the most flagrant failure of an ultraliberal policy applied to a fundamental right. Can you imagine what would have happened if the same thing had been done with health, education or pensions? We would not have the social democracy that defines the 1978 Constitution, the only democracy that, in my opinion, deserves the name. Well, let’s be careful, because this is what is happening, silently or loudly, in the LACC governed by the right, and the result has been that Spain finds itself, in terms of social housing stock, at the bottom of the European Union.
II.- What is striking and paradoxical in this affair is that millions of officially protected housing units have been built in Spain over the years. As a recent CCOO CS study points out, the social housing stock could reach, today, 4.7 million housing units, if the regulation of protected housing had not allowed its downgrading and transfer to the free market. Demonstration that a predominance of the market and the completely private real estate sector has not improved accessibility to housing in Spain, quite the contrary. The black holes in this mess must be located in the scarcity of social housing construction since 2000; the absolute liberalization of the territory with the land law of 1998, which laid the speculative foundations of the biggest real estate bubble that Spain has known; the development of “tourist residences” in full explosion of this sector in certain areas and cities – the INE counted 350,000 in this rental regime -; the existence of 3.8 million empty homes, including 1.1 million in large cities, without tax and/or expropriation consequences. In any case, it must be taken into account that the consequences of the shortage and shortage of housing, whether in terms of rent or home ownership, are very different depending on the regions of Spain . The situation in the big cities, on the coasts or on the islands is not the same as in emptied Spain, which would indicate that the same treatment cannot be given in different places. All this is obviously the result of the uneven development of capitalism, and much more when it is allowed to act as it pleases, without minimal planning in the distribution of productive sectors or adequate incentives.
