Housing remains, by far, the main concern of Catalans, while the Government looks for ways to get out of the current crossroads. Increasing supply, streamlining construction procedures and expanding the affordable housing stock are some of the recipes proposed by experts and agents in the sector, in a debate that confronts visions on the role of regulation.
UPF professor José García Montalvo recalls that the housing problem is structural and, therefore, short-term solutions are not enough. To increase the supply of social rentals, the academic advocates establishing an incentive system for developers that allows them to build at a sufficient scale and speed. One way to do this would be to offer public land in exchange for generating more housing with regulated prices in the long term. Initiatives such as the Plan 50,000 of the Salvador Illa executive to build this number of affordable apartments or the conversion of offices to residential use can also alleviate the market.
The president of the Catalan promoters, Xavier Vilajoana, is more forceful in his assessment of the current regulations and directly asks for a reversal. “We must put order in all the measures that have been approved,” he claims. In his opinion, the best proposal of the Generalitat in recent years has been the draft law to reduce bureaucracy in urban planning procedures. The initiative proposes a battery of modifications with the objective, among others, of reducing deadlines and ensuring that construction licenses are granted in one month, compared to the between nine and twelve months that this process currently takes. Regarding the reduction of bureaucracy, García Montalvo also proposes resorting to new technologies such as BIM (Building Information Modeling, in its acronym in English), a digital methodology that allows optimizing construction and reducing deadlines and costs.
Both Vilajoana and Guifré Homedes, from the Col legi d'Agents de la Propietat Immobiliària, warn of the need to urgently approve the state Land law in Congress. This is a pending reform that aims to prevent urban plans from being canceled due to minor formal or procedural errors. Even so, its detractors, such as Podemos, criticize that the rule could open the door to endorsing speculative operations. "The licenses take a long time, but the problem is above all in the generation of land. An issue like this cannot be a political bargaining chip," says Homedes.
For the spokesperson for the Llogateres Union, Carme Arcarazo, the first measure that should be approved imminently is the reform of the Urban Leases Law (LAU) to regulate seasonal and room rentals. In addition, it proposes moving towards permanent contracts, something that other places such as the Netherlands have already done. “We need more stability in contracts,” demands Arcarazo. Likewise, it asks to recover the properties that have been “kidnapped” by the market for uses that are not residential. “Before starting to build without knowing how much housing is missing, we must ensure that the existing stock is at full capacity,” he adds.
But for any of these solutions to come to fruition, Homedes recalls, another element will be essential: consensus. “We are applying measures and we all intervene, but we have to sit down, agree and each one of us gives up something, or we will never get out of this,” he says. In fact, as a result of the brake on the speculative purchasing law, Foment del Treball and spokespersons for the sector have asked to open dialogue to agree on the steps to follow to face the crisis.
