2023-10-26 00:10:09
Thursday, October 26, 2023, 00:10
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The supply of housing at an affordable price, both for sale and rental, is not capable of satisfying the existing demand in Euskadi. This lack of apartments contrasts in many cities with a landscape full of empty commercial premises. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in transforming these markets into regular homes.
This is a change of use that, however, is constrained by increasingly demanding regulations, and which is the responsibility of city councils. These may deny the work due to exclusion conditions related to the location of the premises, or due to its characteristics and those of the building that houses it.
The first step to take before starting the work is to find out about the general plan of the corresponding town hall. A regulation that may have some common points, but that in practice is very diverse. “Each municipality has a different vision of how these premises should be used or how they should be regulated,” explains Amaya Vildósola, architect at MKR Soluciones.
«For example, there are some, like Bilbao, that prefer that there be no housing in the city center. That they do not open on ground floors because they harm commerce, or that they be taxed. That is, it has a limited price to avoid speculation,” he adds.
Furthermore, municipal urban planning plans often have to be adapted to regional regulations. This is what happens in Euskadi, which in June of last year approved a decree that regulates the habitability of homes.
The conditions for converting a premises into a home change continuously and the need to adapt regulations at different levels makes them very complicated to comply with in many cases.
«For example, in Bilbao they require that the premises be 50 centimeters high from the sidewalk, so that they cannot see you from the outside. And the windows, at the height of the gutter, are one and a half meters high,” says the architect from MKR Soluciones.
If the premises have access through a portal, accessibility criteria will not be required. «But if you want access at street level, those 50 centimeters of height are an impediment to meeting the accessibility requirements that are requested in this case. That is why this type of conversion is increasingly complicated in Bilbao,” he adds.
Neighborhood community permit
A question that usually arises in these cases is whether the community’s permission must be obtained. The generic answer is no, unless that prohibition expressly appears in its statutes. Another thing is that the work affects common elements of the building. In this case, a request for permission would be mandatory.
Once it is clear under what conditions a premises can be transformed into a home, a change of use license must be requested, which requires a project by an architect. Then you have to pay municipal taxes, which obviously vary in each municipality. “For some, they may represent a significant extra expense,” warns Vildósola.
Another fundamental step is for the town hall’s urban planning department – or the municipal architect in the case of small towns – to certify that the conversion of the premises into housing has been carried out in accordance with the project.
It must also be taken into account that this transformation must be carried out in accordance with the Technical Building Code, common to the entire national territory, and which regulates how homes must be built with respect to a series of parameters: acoustic and thermal insulation, energy efficiency, security, structure, etc.
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