Javier Lizon / EPA
Pedro Sánchez, Prime Minister of Spain
Pedro Sánchez announced 12 measures to try to improve access to housing. “It’s not fair” what’s happening.
The Government of Spain presented 12 measures which aim to improve access to housing. The measures were announced this Monday by the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, and by the Minister of Housing, Isabel Rodríguez.
The two rulers considered that previous experiences of simply increasing and facilitating the supply of houses in the sales and rental market, without intervention in rental prices and others, they didn’t work and they did not control prices; on the contrary.
Sánchez stressed that Spain currently has a public housing stock which is only 2.5% of total houses and argued that it should increase to levels similar to other European countries, such as 14% in France or 34% in the Netherlands.
The Spanish government allocated two million square meters of public land for the construction of houses that will be rented to affordable prices. The two million square meters of State land were transferred to the custody of a new Public Housing Company created by the Government, which over the next few months will also manage around 30 thousand homes that are currently in the hands of an entity known as “bad bank” in Spain, for having in its possession assets that belonged to failed banks and rescued during the previous financial crisis.
These houses were being sold by the State, which stopped putting them on the market months ago and now transferred them to the new public company with the aim of renting them at affordable prices.
Both the new houses that will be built on public land and the 30,000 that were in the “bad bank” will be leased by the State and will not become private property, according to the Spanish Government.
The Spanish Government – a left-wing coalition led by the Socialists – also announced more aid for people who want to rent houses or for the rehabilitation of properties committed to being placed on the market lease.
In parallel, he wants a tax reform to give more benefits to owners who rent houses and to increase taxes on local accommodation and housing purchases in Spain by non-resident foreigners who are citizens from outside the European Union.
The proposal will be to apply a rate of 100%. That is, the price of a house will double if the measures are approved, indicate the .
“It’s not fair that those who have three, four, five apartments for short-term rental pay less taxes than hotels”, said Sánchez in relation to local accommodation, arguing that it must be taxed “like a company”. The idea is that the tourist properties will be taxed as businesses.
“Our obligation is to give priority given to residential use over tourist use”, stated the prime minister, who recalled another number: the non-resident foreigners buy around 27,000 houses per year in Spain, “mainly for speculative purposes”.
The Government also announced a bottom for autonomous governments and local authorities to strengthen the means of inspection of local accommodation.
Spain is a country organized entirely into autonomous regions, so the application of measures related to housing depends, almost entirely, on regional executives, who are currently mostly in the hands of the right.
Measures that are included in the first housing law of Spanish democracy, approved in April 2024 by parliament, had few consequences at a regional level and did not control the rise in housing prices in Spain.
The creation of a public housing company and several of the measures now announced are a way for the government to try to control autonomous protection, to respond to resource limitations in some regions and to achieve some intervention in the market.
Pedro Sánchez considered that There is a serious problem with access to housing in Spain and highlighted that during the period of the “real estate boom”, at the beginning of this century, 600 thousand new houses were built in the country annually, while today there are only 90 thousand. In parallel, 300 thousand “new homes” are now created annually (there were 400 thousand in the 2000s).
For the Spanish Prime Minister, the current situation is due to neoliberal policies adopted by right-wing governments after the 2008 financial crisis, without any market regulation and which placed thousands of properties, including public ones, in the hands of real estate funds.
