The government wants to increase the housing supply. This includes encouraging new home construction, among other issues. Sector minister Isabel Rodríguez announced a regulatory change to “facilitate urban management” and grant fast-track licenses to developers at a meeting with industry representatives yesterday. The big question the proposal leaves behind is… Is new construction really a solution to access to housing in a country with more than 3.5 million vacant apartments? Where exactly is the bag of unused flats? Could new construction help lower prices?

In short, is new business the answer? Is it a myth that we already have the key to facilitate access to housing, and that we have a stock of empty houses? Is there more demand for flats than flats going vacant?

More housing offers. This is what the government proposes: increasing the housing supply in Spain; this includes at least strengthening the rental market stock so that there will be 28% less housing available than four years ago; as well as making the job of licensed promoters easier.

“We agree on the goal of increasing supply to guarantee the right to affordable housing,” Rodríguez said in a statement after a meeting with real estate industry representatives yesterday. said. To achieve this, the Government proposes to regulate construction permits or facilitate the financing of new industrialized construction.

But… Isn’t there an empty house? That’s it. Providing a “photograph” of the state of the national park in 2021, INE’s latest housing census shows that there are 3.8 million empty houses in Spain, almost 14% of the total. Additionally, INE estimates there are 2.5 million temporary uses. With this data in the table, there are groups and parties that see this stock of unused homes as a tool to facilitate access to housing – and this is not something unique to Spain.

So where are those houses? The key to the discussion. Although INE identified three to four million vacant homes in 2021, these structures are not evenly distributed across the country. Moreover, a significant part of this package of 3.8 million unused housing units was concentrated in small municipalities with real estate markets that had little relevance to the most stressful cities such as Madrid, Barcelona or Malaga.

INE itself reflects that approximately 45% of these homes are located in municipalities with less than 10,000 inhabitants. Or in other words, 45% is concentrated in areas where only 20% of the total population resides. Photography is the opposite in the most crowded city halls. Only 10.5% of vacant homes are in major cities with a census population of more than 250,000 and where 24% of the country’s population resides.

Housing in Tías or Mos, not in Madrid. INE data allow us to go a little further and evaluate the imbalance in the availability of vacant housing at the municipal level. The 2021 study found that small towns such as Tías in Las Palmas; Mos in Pontevedra; or Monforte de Lemos; In Lugo, 40% of homes, or even a higher percentage, were vacant; In the country’s major metropolises, availability was minimal, well below 10%, with more strained markets and difficulties accessing housing. For example, the proportion of unoccupied houses in Madrid was only 6.3%, in Barcelona 9.3%, in Malaga 6.4% and in Zaragoza 4.6%.

What does the government propose? To increase housing supply, Rodríguez advocated Thursday for “strengthening” public-private collaboration and “facilitating processes to increase affordable housing.” real estate valuation and financing In Moncloa they have already activated the administrative mechanism to adapt the regulations and thus comply with two well-defined objectives: first, “to facilitate administration”; Second, to introduce new construction techniques into the scheme, as in industrialized construction. houses.

More agility for the industry. With the change, the Government wants to introduce norm formulas already used in councils, including “shortened licences”. Economist. “Such licenses that are more agile are not included in the standard, which creates problems for promoters in terms of access to finance. That is why this standard needs to be clarified, in which we also include industrialization and new sustainability criteria,” Rodríguez explained after the sector summit.

No bottleneck. The government’s aim is to amend legislation to speed up the issuance of urban planning licenses, ending the bottlenecks that developers and construction companies currently struggle with and making it easier for the sector to seek financing. With the changes to the 2003 order, the Administration will now “clarify” aspects that may slow down management.

The measure adds to other measures Moncloa has already activated, such as amending the Land Code. Yesterday Rodríguez also assured that the Administration wants to “provide certainty, legal security and guarantees” to private landlords so that they can “offer more homes for affordable rent”.

Pictures | Andrew Bezuhlyi and INE

in Xataka | There are thousands of empty houses in Brussels. So he will start confiscating them and renting them at a social price.