The Minister of Public Works, Housing and Mobility of the Government of the Canary Islands, Pablo Rodríguez, announced this Tuesday in Parliament that his department is "on the verge" of approving a program that will allow part of the empty homes in the Canary Islands to be put on the rental market, some 211,000 in the archipelago.
"We have been announcing for months that we are going to review the empty housing program", but "it is not ready yet", the Minister acknowledged in a parliamentary appearance.
That revision of the program, he explained, is because in the previous legislature the Canarian Housing Institute (Icavi) commissioned a program to Social Housing and Infrastructure of the Canary Islands (Visocan), both public companies of the Government, but it was "a resounding failure" because eight million euros were allocated and only one home was put on the rental market.
To remedy this, Icavi has commissioned Visocan to revise the program. Although the revision is not finished, Visocan, with the advice of the Provivienda Association, has already submitted a proposal to Icavi, announced Pablo Rodríguez.
He did not give details, but pointed out that the program will give legal certainty and guarantees to the owners, while tenants will be able to rent "a decent home at affordable prices", he assured.
He stressed that the purpose of the program will be to encourage owners of empty homes to put them up for rent because it is necessary to increase the supply, the lack of which is the main problem of the rise in prices of both sale and rent, he said.
The housing problem affects all segments of the population in a cross-cutting way and the causes are diverse, said the Minister, who recalled that in order to mobilize the supply, the Government approved a housing emergency decree.
According to him, the decree is already obtaining results, as detected by an increase in requests for provisional qualifications of protected housing.
The housing emergency will not be solved only with the construction of public housing, but also with the construction of protected housing for affordable rentals by the private sector and free housing, in addition to the mobilization of empty housing.
Pablo Rodríguez indicated that the state housing law has not managed to encourage the increase in supply after one year of validity, although there are positive articles, such as the one that indicates that in the face of a lack of supply, the use of endowment land for the construction of public housing is an option, as does the Canarian decree.
