Spain: risk of disappearance of own housing, shift to social renting, threat of GVA.

Previously, 90% of families in Spain could afford their first property of their own thanks to the government's protected housing program (VPO). Today, however, housing is becoming a first necessity that fewer and fewer families can afford, and protected apartments are in danger of disappearing.

The rapid increase in real estate costs in line with wages, the lack of an active public housing policy and the liquidation of public real estate have led to a real housing catastrophe: by 2023, buying an apartment is not only difficult, but for many people renting is simply unaffordable.

The housing crisis in Spain

In Spain, 1.3 million families have to spend more than 40% of their income on rent. They are joined by 400,000 applicants for sheltered housing, 1.6 million victims of judicial evictions, 648,300 families without any income, more than 20,000 homeless people and 2.2 million young people aged 25 to 34 living with their parents, according to a report by the Alternative Foundation.

In such a situation, the state is changing its strategy in the fight against the housing disaster: in 2023, Spain is closing the VPO programs in ownership, and the new approach is called social renting.

History of housing policy in Spain

For many years, the state has relied exclusively on public housing, providing subsidies for construction and purchase, leaving renting in the background. "Public measures in this area have been aimed at incentivizing access to property through sheltered housing," indicates the report of the Foundation for Alternatives, signed by Carme Trila Bellart and Jordi Bosch.

From 1952 to 2016, more than 6.8 million sheltered apartments of different types were built, according to the College of Architects and the Ministry of Construction. Most of them were VPOs for sale, which explains why Spain has always been a country of owners with an insufficient rental market.

While Central and Northern European countries have dealt with housing shortages by building large public housing complexes for rent, Spain has chosen to encourage ownership. However, this purely proprietary direction had a downside - VPOs had a limited lifespan.

Social renting as a new approach

In recent weeks, the government has been putting all its resources on the table, mobilizing a historic amount of land and administration assets to improve access to housing, in addition to billions of euros in aid and redevelopment incentives to increase supply in the market.

In the coming years, however, most of the government's resources earmarked for housing will be devoted to the creation of a public rental housing park. Currently, public rental apartments account for only 2.5% of the housing stock.

"To create all this housing we need to build 300,000 social and affordable housing every year, when now we are building at least 150,000 freehold," says Toribio.

Bearing in mind that less than 10,000 social apartments are currently built per year, including rented and buy-to-let protected, reaching the 20% target is "difficult to imagine", predicts the report published by EsadeEcPol, as it would require that for each year until 2043 Spain adds as many dwellings to the social housing stock as it currently has.

The idea is to respond to the coming crisis. Spain will have 217,000 new households in the next 5 years. The problem is that only half that amount is built each year. If access to housing is already difficult now, it could be a real problem for the state in a few years.

"Some social housing can also be protected in ownership, but the main reliance is on social renting," points out Roger.

And the situation can only get worse, the report adds. Assuming the same conditions, costs and incomes in the real estate market, of the expected 5.7 to 6 million new households, "we estimate that between 2.3 and 3.6 million will require some form of public assistance, whether social housing, rental assistance or buy-to-let sheltered housing. "