Housing policies in Spain: from ownership to precariousness

Abstract

Housing is a basic pillar of the welfare state, as it is a necessary condition for the development of other fundamental rights, such as privacy, education, human dignity or health. The global financial crisis of 2007 continues to have a serious impact on the citizens of our country, which is now combined with the effects arising from the COVID-19 (2020-2021) and inflation (2022) crises. Indeed, the constant process of urbanization, coupled with the process of rural depopulation and the lack of social and affordable housing, has contributed to making housing unaffordable in the main urban areas of our country for less well-off families. Multilevel public housing policies, however, have been erratic in recent years without providing real alternatives to ownership (which excludes young people and low-income families) or rental housing (which is still not considered a truly desirable alternative to ownership), while attempts to increase the stock of social and affordable housing (for example, through expropriations or penalties for owners of empty homes) have had limited success. This has led to an increasing precariousness of tenure and the increase and, even, its promotion by public authorities, fostering hidden homelessness situations, such as squatting, shared housing, overcrowding or substandard housing, without the State Housing Law 12/2023 having implemented any structural measures to cover the existing gaps in the development of the right to decent and adequate housing, a function that corresponds to public authorities and not to private owners. This article analyzes this problem and possible structural solutions to the housing problem, such as territorial cohesion or the diversification of housing tenures.