2023-05-11 13:54:09
After a three-year delay, almost at the end of the legislature and in the midst of an electoral pre-campaign plagued with announcements and promises regarding housing, on April 27, the Housing Law was finally approved in Congress. For “the right” who voted against, it is a rule that “it only favors the squatters”. For the PSOE, we are before “a paradigm shift”. For UP, which boasts that this Law was possible, thanks to its inclusion in the government, this law also represents, «an electoral weapon for progressive candidacies».
By Corriente Roja – Spanish State
But the reality is that after years of struggle and social mobilization since the 2007 crisis and the bursting of the real estate bubble, resulted in the daily drama of evictions for non-payment of mortgage or abusive rents and that millions of people continue to see their right to decent housing impeded, this law is an electoral maneuver or as the Tenants Union says, “a farce and a brutal propaganda campaign by the PSOE-UP coalition government)”
We are facing a law, in which almost the only progressive measure that goes without cheating, is that it ends the million-dollar scam that now allows real estate companies to charge tenants for the service they provide to landlords.
And it is that the new law is a mockery of the pressing social need for housing, as we have been denouncing in other articles. As the PAH and other social groups say: “With it, housing will continue to function as a market good with which to speculate, instead of being guaranteed as a right within the reach of all people.” It is a patch, whose apparent measures focus only on rent and which, in truth, do not solve anything.
It does not prohibit evictions, it only lengthens up to two years the process until the eviction. The law only obliges the owners to submit to mediation, whose resolution they do not have to respect. The large owners will be able to continue evicting because no one forces them to offer a social rent before the eviction.
LThe declaration of stressed areas or what is considered a large holder (reducing ownership from 10 to 5 properties) will remain in the hands of the Autonomous Communities and Town Halls, which are the ones who have transferred the powers in housing. It is curious that on the one hand Sánchez says that thanks to this government progressive, housing will stop being a problem to become a right and then leave its effective application in other hands, even knowing that in some places like the Community of Madrid, Ayuso has already said that if he continues to govern, he will not apply it in any way.
And where, thanks to pressure and social mobilization, a progressive measure is achieved, there is always the option of paralyzing and annulling it via the judicial system. As was done with the Catalan Housing Law, appealed to the Constitutional Court by the coalition government, which Although it is limited, compared to this State Law it is better, because at least it included that a large holder could not evict the tenant without offering him a social rent. Although in practice, they have continued to do so without problems, because there is no sanctioning regime and they have not temporarily “expropriated” empty homes due to the judicial appeals of real estate funds.
On the other hand, the new State Law has numerous strainers for which the approved measures may be breached and the control of rental prices can be avoided in different ways (alleging minimal reforms, including the IBI, through the figure of “seasonal apartments”…). Because it does not have, it does not even have a sanctioning regime, which would be absolutely necessary in case of non-compliance.
Meanwhile, the Law does not include the obligation of measures that are urgent here and now, as they are, to bump into the effects of the Euribor in mortgage reviews throughout the State, as the groups in the fight for housing have been demanding for some time. The Bank of Spain itself calculates that 380,000 families are going to become vulnerable, due to the rise in mortgages after the various rises in the Euribor.
Despite the fact that the origin of inflation is not in a high level of consumption, but in the increase in the profits of large companies, which are transferred to price increases, the European Central Bank continues with its policy of rate hikes that it impoverishes families and small businesses, benefiting only the banks and that large companies and multinationals can avoid. Suffice it to take the example of Banco Santander, which achieved a net profit of 2,571 million in the first quarter of 2023, discounting the amount of the new rate imposed by the government (224 million).
It has been clear for years that the fundamental solution to remedy the serious housing crisis that we are suffering involves having a powerful public social housing park, in which the Spanish State is at the bottom of Europe.. And that is when Sánchez relies on this reality, to boast at his rallies, that the PSOE’s plan is to increase the public housing stock to 20%. But it hides that it has no planning or economic memory in this regard and that it is talking about at least 20 years! Just to reach 9.3% of public housing, which is the European average, it would take 1,400. 000 more properties forming part of this public housing park. Furthermore, to achieve this objective, it is not a question of building more houses on a massive scale, as happened in the years prior to the bursting of the real estate bubble, but above all of putting under public management, the use and adaptation of empty houses that ALREADY exist.
At this point in the article we can affirm, then, that the vaunted measurements of this Law, which the progressive bench in the government approved with so much merriment and hubbub, has two main objectives. On the one hand, to deceive the impoverished sectors of the working class with false electoral promises and, at the same time, maintain the electoral support of a social base, of small and medium-sized owners, who have made rent-seeking a way of life. On the other hand, this Law is part of a broader plan, whose pillars have already been put in place, whose purpose is to pave the way to legitimize a new construction cycle by the real estate sector, as we will analyze in another article on the subject.
That is why we need to continue fighting, until access to decent housing is guaranteed, as a universal right. This happens by effectively prohibiting evictions without a housing alternative. For capping the rental price to ensure that spending on housing, including basic supplies, does not exceed 30% of the average salary. And above all, it involves creating a large public housing stock, expropriating the empty flats in the hands of vulture funds, large landlords and banks, and which includes flats, unfinished homes and land in the hands of Sareb, removing them from the clutches of the vulture funds that now manage them.
Housing as a public good. Not to do business or to be used as an electoral weapon!
If the SAREB’s debt is public, its houses are too!
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