The Minister of Housing, Isabel Rodríguez, assured that the Executive will not transfer to the autonomous communities “neither a euro nor state land for housing in which public perpetuity is not guaranteed”. In an interview published Monday in La Vanguardia, Rodríguez stressed that the government would condition “all these efforts on the protection of the public park.” “There will be no circumstances in which state lands could be used or transferred to other public administrations that have not accepted that they be maintained on a permanent and perpetual basis,” he said. he insisted.
Rodríguez already demanded that the autonomous communities protect the social housing stock “in perpetuity” during his appearance in Congress last week. This is an idea that we have been insisting on for several months but for which, in practice, the Central Executive has no direct competence. Indeed, as the minister recalled this Monday, “the Government has already tried it through the Housing Law, certainly qualified by the Constitutional Court”.
This nuance refers to the judgment which indicated that the article of the state regulation which sought to extend the duration of protection of sheltered housing invaded regional competences. According to experts on the subject consulted by elDiario.es, the key for the Executive is to negotiate on a case-by-case basis the conditions for transfers of funds or transfer of land to communities or municipalities. “I hope we can reach all this through an agreement,” Rodríguez said.
The lever on which the Ministry of Housing relies is the National Housing Plan, which is due to come into force in 2026 and on which it is already working. “It is a new instrument to respond to this policy. Not so much in the design of à la carte programs as in the definition of objectives,” Rodríguez emphasized in La Vanguardia.
During the meeting that the ministry held with the ministries, within the framework of the Sectoral Conference in early October, Rodríguez already declared that the Housing Law allows the government to apply “extraordinary” measures in areas in difficulty, where rents are skyrocketing. . Sources from his department explained that the Executive would take into account that the communities activated all the resources of the norm for the distribution of these funds through the State Plan. From now on, the Executive also requires that these resources be protected in perpetuity.
According to housing data, around 70% of funds budgeted by communities for housing between 2021 and 2024 were transferred from central government.
In recent weeks, the ministry has shown itself to be proud of Operation Camp, the urban project which will allow the construction of 10,700 housing units in Madrid. They will be built on land that the ministry itself purchased from Defense and on which it has guaranteed that the properties will always have affordable prices, even those sold to individuals. What has not yet been indicated is the mechanism that will be activated for this purpose.
“We already know what didn’t work: the confiscation, the free sale of social housing to individuals and even to vulture funds; resources that must serve the general interest. If they had not been sold on the open market, we would have 2.5 million social housing units in Spain today. The formula must be the opposite and this is what the government is proposing: guaranteeing with these public resources that housing always serves a general interest, that it is the response to a fundamental right,” Rodríguez explained in an interview with elDiario. is .in September.
The minister insisted on this idea last Wednesday in Congress, where she said that the construction of social housing in the past had meant a “social elevator for millions of people”. However, he also pointed out that the other side of the coin is that “the disqualification of the protection of these houses means that today we cannot count on this park with these resources that have been paid for by everyone.” “It is important to take this into account when deploying public policies. It is necessary to protect the real estate stock, the public domain and the efforts we make so that they forever serve the general interest,” he said.
