The new Basque Government places housing at the center of its agenda and plans to increase the supply of protected housing, the pace of renovations, and activate the declaration of stressed areas to cap rents throughout this legislature in Euskadi, an autonomous community with 2.2 million inhabitants, equivalent to the population of the Canary Islands.
The autonomous executive has committed to carrying out several measures throughout this legislature, including promoting protected housing through the launch of 7,000 new protected homes available to citizens in the next four years, half of them for young people.
This was explained by Denis Itxaso González, Minister of the Department of Housing and Urban Agenda of Euskadi, during a conference organized by the Notariado Foundation, held in San Sebastián, according to the news portal of Idealista.com.
Itxaso highlighted in his speech that "access to and the right to housing, its construction, its renovation, its financing, or the rental situation are issues that are today at the center of social interest and the public agenda in the political agenda. And it is logical that it is so, because access to housing, especially for young people and people who present some type of vulnerability, has become a challenge for public authorities and also for society as a whole." And he insisted that "offering a response to this challenge is at the center of the priorities of this new Government that has just started."
In addition, the Basque Government will go to the market to buy homes to allocate them to VPO, although the minister has detailed that "for this, we will have to specify and establish the precise mechanisms to go to the public market."
Another of the housing policies that Itxasco has confirmed for this legislature will be the declaration of stressed areas in the residential market, which will allow the application of the cap on rents included in the Housing Law and that for the moment is only active in Catalonia. In the previous legislature, the autonomous community had already left the door open to limiting rental income and had estimated at 41 the municipalities that met the conditions to be considered stressed markets.
"There is usually a lot of debate about the effectiveness of this figure in stressed areas. We think that the fact that a city council detects that it has a problem, prepares the corresponding plan complying with the requirements established by law and finally declares the stressed area, is a way of having a tool in which the problem is recognized, which is not little, and from there we could use and give content to that figure of the stressed market in that municipality to take more measures or to deepen public initiatives."
According to the Minister of Housing of Euskadi, three-year plans will also be drawn up to increase the supply of housing in these stressed areas and fiscal measures will be studied.