Sánchez announces another 43,000 affordable rental homes in the middle of the pre-campaign

2023-04-19 09:37:58

The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, announced this Wednesday in Congress that he is going to create a line from the Official Credit Institute (ICO) of 4,000 million euros of European funds to build and rehabilitate up to 43,000 homes for rent with a affordable price. This announcement joins the 50,000 homes mobilized by Sareb, an agreement approved by the Council of Ministers yesterday.

As Sánchez has specified, all the financed actions must meet two conditions: energy efficiency and destination of the action for social rental or at an affordable price or assignment in use for at least 50 years. In total, as the President of the Government has calculated, there will now be 340,000 social rental homes in Spain, which is one of the countries with the smallest public housing stock in all of Europe. Of the 50,000 Sareb homes, it should be noted that there are 14,000 already inhabited and 15,000 are yet to be built. There are only 21,000 ready to be inhabited.

“It is a fair and correct measure because a decade ago the PP spent 58,000 million to rescue bankrupt banks and we have only recovered 20%,” said Sánchez, in a new barrage against the banking sector and against the PP. “We are going to repay part of that debt to society by converting these houses into public housing for the people who need it, which are young people,” he added.

With these measures, Sánchez turns to housing for the electoral campaign on May 28. In this sense, he has also ordered to speed up the processing of the housing law so that it is ready by the middle of next month despite the complaints of many groups because they consider that a “parliamentary outrage” is taking place. Regarding this norm, Sánchez also wanted to issue a warning to the PP, because the popular autonomies are not willing to apply the cap on prices due to the negative consequences that it may have: “The housing law will be complied with in each of the territories of our country. The laws of this democratic parliament are complied with”, warned Sánchez, who has made an appearance in Congress to give an account of the last European Council, relations with Morocco and the war in Ukraine.