The Government of the Canary Islands and the Canarian Federation of Municipalities (Fecam) have agreed this Tuesday to create a working commission to establish the necessary instruments so that the city councils can control, in their municipality, access to housing to favor its availability and set the population or limit its purchase by foreigners.
These tools must be introduced, after modification, in the State Law of Local Regime Bases, "for which it is required to prepare a consensus document in the Canary Islands, which can be elevated to the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and from there to Congress," explained this Tuesday the president, Fernando Clavijo, after a meeting with the executive committee of Fecam.
Limit acquiring resident status
In this line of action, "which continues after the decisions taken at the Conferences of Presidents in which the demographic challenge and the problem of access to housing were addressed", the expansion and deepening of municipal powers that could contribute in each municipality to the improvement of these challenges is promoted, establishing possible limitations to the acquisition of residence, through the modification of the scope of competence that the State and the Canarian Autonomous Community is assigned in matters of local regime.
With this change of the Law, said Mari Brito, "we seek to expand the powers of the municipalities in matters such as planning, tourist activity, tax and registration, as well as in any other that within the respect for local autonomy is considered that can contribute to the objectives set, weighing the Canarian local entities the convenience or not of its application, according to the reality of each municipality and act, in this sense, through ordinances".
Both Clavijo and Brito, stressed that local entities can contribute "in an ideal way to solve the problem of population residence, although it is up to the State to design the basic model of the local regime in the substantial aspects that refer to the aforementioned matters, in the same way that it is to the Autonomous Communities to which the matter of territorial planning is attributed".
From Bilbao, to Amsterdam or Malta: the model experiences
As a starting point, to propose this modification, the president of the Canary Islands has pointed out that there are already some experiences in other Spanish and European cities.
The Government of the Canary Islands has given as an example the case of the Basque city of Bilbao, which has granted tourist use housing the qualification of equipment use instead of residential use. Or Amsterdam, which has established that if six months pass without occupation in the house, sanctions are foreseen in case of non-compliance and has a period of two months to determine how to reintroduce the house in the market.
Also in Amsterdam, the rental of newly acquired homes with a value of up to 623,000 euros is prohibited for four years, with exceptions and exemptions to this rule in the case of renting it to a family member, sharing the home while residing in it or if it is rented for reasons of social interest. This is the case of Hamburg where a policy of expropriation was established in its municipal legislation for residential properties that had been vacant for more than four months, or that of Berlin, which launched a pilot project with the aim of temporarily expropriating vacant homes.
At the state level, Malta has established a period of five years of residence to empower the free acquisition of secondary residences. And in Denmark, in order to buy a property (both first and second residence), it is necessary to have permanent residence or have lived in Denmark for a consecutive period of five years.