Between 70 and 80% of households in Lanzarote are in municipalities where the effort to pay rent exceeds 30% of families' income. The figure is the same for the Canary Islands as a whole, according to figures published by the research service of La Caixa, CaixaBank Research.
La Caixa researchers have also calculated how wages grew much more slowly than rents between 2017 and 2023. In the Canary Islands, during that period, rents increased by 24.9%, while wage costs increased by 11.9%.
The Law for the Right to Housing, recently approved in the Congress of Deputies, includes several measures to reduce prices such as giving protected housing an indefinite character, which will no longer pass to the free market after a few years.
Catalonia, the first to request the declaration of stressed areas
It also provides for the possibility of limiting rental prices. For that to happen in Lanzarote, the Canary Islands Executive would have to request the central government to declare a residential area as stressed.
The law provides as a stressed area one in which either the average rent plus supplies exceeds 30% of the income of an average household, or the price has grown at least 3% above the percentage of accumulated CPI growth in the last five years.
Catalonia was the first community to request the declaration of 140 Catalan municipalities last June as stressed areas in which it is intended to apply these containment measures provided for in the state law.
