BarcelonaA few days ago, the European Commission presented the first housing plan in its history. One of their demands is to increase the social and affordable park, which has traditionally been associated with public housing. However, in Europe there are currently 25 million social and affordable rental flats, the equivalent of almost all of the State’s housing stock, which is 26 million, but these homes spread across the continent are not necessarily only public. If there is no administration behind it, who manages them?
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“There is no specific model, each area or European country has its own typology: the Scandinavians, the French, the British, the German… In all of them, there is basically a type of voluntary private entity that agrees to promote and manage housing in a regulated market in which it will have fewer profits, but it will have them safely,” explains Javier Burón, managing director of the public housing company of Navarra and author of The housing problem (Arpa Editores). “When you look at those 25 million homes, you see a lot of investors putting money into private partnerships,” he adds.
These are known as housing associationsa central part of housing policy in much of Europe that is just making its way to Spain, where it does not have a specific regulatory framework. The administrations’ recent commitment to create sheltered housing on a large scale now opens the door to its deployment, especially because it solves one of the great weak points of this regime: the financialization and, therefore, long-term viability of the promotion and management of rental housing. At the moment, a series of entities from all over the State, also in Catalonia, are working on a legislative proposal to regulate them. But what do these entities consist of? Why do they not exist in Spain?
Social housing providers
In general terms, the housing associations they are entities of the third sector, of mixed capital or solely private, specialized in the provision, management and development of social and affordable housing. They differ from a traditional estate developer or manager because they are private non-profit organizations that generally operate within a highly regulated framework and usually benefit from direct public funding – such as subsidies, priority access to land or credit guarantees – or indirect – such as tax incentives.
“THE housing associations, which in France are called social housing provider entities, are organizations that clearly play a complementary or substitute role for the public sector in the provision of social housing. We don’t have one here because we haven’t had a history of social renting, here we have 118 foundations around Cohabitat, also cooperatives, and there are figures that resemble what is called that in Europe”, explains the president of the Metropolitan Housing Observatory, Carme Trilla, also president of Hàbitat3, a social housing manager driven by the third sector that works with social entities and public administrations to guarantee the right to a home. worthy of vulnerable people.
In Spain as a whole, most of the promotion of sheltered housing has been for sale: any developer company would build flats at inflated prices and then sell them, and this was where their intervention ended. “The promoters are very used to this, when you put on the table that there should be rent, the traditional promoters are not interested, and we are reduced to the public, who are few, and other non-profit promoter agents, who are also few”, details Trilla.
An own regulation
The commitment to public rental housing by the Spanish government and the Generalitat, focused on solving the deficit of houses and flats in Catalonia and Spain as a whole, is what has motivated the need for a legislative framework of its own that allows the deployment of these entities. “We need a law of housing associations which provides anti-speculative guarantees and limits its profits. A legal framework is needed so that capital and public and private professionals can build and manage sheltered affordable housing in the long term”, defends Burón, who in his book collects some European examples of this model.
The key lies in a new legislative framework that encourages this model, that is to say, if you are a social housing developer and provider, you have more advantages. At the moment, entities from Catalonia, the Basque Country and Madrid have drawn up a proposed law that they will send to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda for the parliamentary process. “They want more fiscal and financial aid to further encourage these figures, because they are non-profit, because we can do this complementary work to these administrations, both town councils and autonomous communities,” adds Trilla.
Despite the parliamentary division in Congress, which already came from the antagonistic policies of the Spanish government – which has deployed the housing law and the price ceiling – with the autonomous communities governed by the PP – which refuse to apply it -, Burón is hopeful: “There is already a sufficient number of operators with years of experience to tell the State that if it wants them to be bigger, a certain context must be created”.
