The Minister of Public Works, Housing and Mobility of the Government of the Canary Islands, Pablo Rodríguez, participated this week in a forum of the Association of Real Estate Developers of Madrid (ASPRIMA), at the Telefónica Foundation Space, where he detailed the islands' strategy to unlock land" that has been paralyzed and unused for years and are essential to face the housing emergency.”
“Canary Islands joins this forum because, in these two years of legislature, we have launched numerous instruments and tools that allow us to promote land development in the Archipelago with the aim of responding to the housing emergency, guaranteeing that citizens can access a decent home and develop their life project in this land”, he stressed.
In addition, the councilor explained that, in the Canary Islands “we have had planned land for decades that can respond to the housing emergency without the need to occupy new spaces. The challenge, therefore, is not to expand the developable territory, but to implement effective tools that allow us to unlock these lands and transform them into real plots and homes. Only in this way can we turn that planning into homes for Canarian families, meeting the enormous current demand for both rent and sale”.
In this sense, he highlighted that the Canary Islands has opened new possibilities with Decree-Law 1/2024, which allows allocating land for protected housing for endowments, equipment or general systems, encouraging municipalities to identify these lands to transfer them to the Canarian Housing Institute or put them out to public tender.
Rodríguez also detailed the short and medium-term measures implemented through the Decree Law of urgent measures regarding housing of February 2024 and the Decree Law for the streamlining of the processing of urban planning licenses and the promotion of housing construction of April 2025.
The first, approved as an urgent response to the housing emergency, focuses on three areas of action: increasing the availability of land for housing, facilitating the use of existing buildings as housing, and streamlining administrative management. Among the most relevant measures are the possibility of transforming tourist land into residential with mandatory reservation for protected housing, the change of use of premises and tertiary buildings to housing, the rehabilitation of unfinished buildings or the simplification of administrative procedures with positive silence.
The second, for its part, delves into these lines, extending deadlines for rehabilitation, facilitating the early execution of land destined for protected housing, allowing the passage of tertiary land to residential and, above all, regulating for the first time in Spain the incentivized affordable housing, intended for rent for intermediate incomes. In addition, it enables that the technical reports necessary for urban planning licenses can be issued by collaborating entities, reducing processing times.
“The Canary Islands is taking brave and pioneering steps in terms of housing and territorial planning. We have assumed that the housing emergency requires extraordinary measures and, therefore, we have deployed an agile, innovative and national reference legislative framework”, concluded Rodríguez