The report by the Emancipation Observatory of the Spanish Youth Council warns that young people in the Canary Islands need to dedicate 105% of their salary to be able to become independent by renting a home, which takes each month, on average, their full salary and 54.29 euros more.
At a press conference, the president of the Canary Islands Youth Council, Brenda Rivero, explained that only one in five young people on the islands (19.1%) has been able to become independent and stressed that, although the figure has improved in relation to previous reports, "there are more people at risk of social exclusion and poverty".
According to the Council, "the figures do not correspond to the real situation" of the Canary Islands youth, who must dedicate "the full salary of 4.5 years" to pay the entrance fee for an apartment.
On the other hand, she highlighted that youth unemployment in the Canary Islands is still "the third highest in Spain" with 24.6% and that, in the case of those who do work, their rate of "overqualification" for the position they hold is higher than that of the rest of the autonomous communities and their salary, "the second lowest in the country".
For Rivero, "the reality of young people in the Canary Islands is one of the worst" in Spain, since "it does not allow them to develop".
In this line, she has demanded more "social dialogue" since the communities that implement it "have more improvements for their young people", as well as "addressing the situation of youth now" and in a "specific" way because "the Canary Islands cannot continue to lag behind Spain".
The same idea has been underlined by the research technician of the Spanish Youth Council, Rubén Díaz, who has detailed that this report shows that although the emancipation rate for the first semester of 2023 is the best since 2018 "it is still well below the figures of 2008", when it was around 24%.
In the Canary Islands, he pointed out, "the number of people per dwelling is higher, which means that it is not that young people in the Canary Islands have it easier, but that it is a community where they share flats more".
In general terms, "seven out of ten young people are still in the family home" despite having finished their training and, although the youth unemployment rate improves from 28 to 24%, it is still "the third worst figure". In addition, "the average salary rises slightly, but they still earn less than 1,000 euros a month net".
In this line, he warned that this increase in salary does not cover the rise in housing costs or the shopping basket, which has led to young people "losing their purchasing power".
The price of rental housing increases from 872 euros in 2022 to 1,000 euros in 2023, and the price of a room in a shared flat has also increased, from 320 to 380 and 360 euros in Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria respectively.
The cost of accessing a mortgage in 2022 was 60% of the salary and in 2023 it is already at 78.7%.
For his part, the vice-president of the Spanish Youth Council, Juan Antonio Báez, stressed that understanding the reality of young people in the Canary Islands "needs its own treatment" because although these figures improve at a national level "the situation is bad".
Young people, he warned, "must take out a mortgage to pay rent", dedicating more than 100% of their salary to it.
83.7% "cannot leave their parents' house, many are sharing a flat with people they do not know or in places where they do not want to".
In addition, he pointed out that there is a group that is now between 30-40 years old that lives "in an eternal unwanted youth", being "a generation forgotten in terms of employment and housing" and are forced to "live as if they were young people in their parents' house and cannot decide to have children" because of their economic capacity.
As he has warned, "the (most frequent) cause of death in the young population is suicide", which he values as a consequence of the damage to the mental health of a reality that "although it has improved, is far from being good" for the personal development of the person.
