Derecho al Techo accuses the Canary Islands Government of "aporophobia and xenophobia" in access to public housing

Derecho al Techo, which represents homeless people, believes that the draft decree approved by the Canary Islands Government "to toughen access to public housing based on years of residence" on the islands, also incurs in "aporophobia and institutional xenophobia."

This was stated this Sunday in a statement by this organization, which emphasizes that the new formula, which replaces the lottery system with a scoring system based on socioeconomic and family circumstances and requires residence on the islands for at least 10 consecutive years or 15 non-consecutive years, "does not resolve the housing emergency."

In the opinion of Derecho al Techo, "conditioning the right to public housing on ten years of continuous residence or fifteen non-consecutive years does not address the real problem of housing in the Canary Islands, which is speculation, gentrification, the accumulation of housing in the hands of funds and large property owners, and the historical lack of sufficient public housing stock."

Instead, it believes that these new requirements "single out and punish those with fewer resources and less capacity for defense."

The group wonders what will happen to Canary Islanders "who were forced to emigrate to survive and who, upon returning, find themselves excluded from the right to public housing" or to students "who have gone away to study and return to their homeland without meeting the required years."

In their view, both groups of people "are penalized for not being able to stay when there was no employment or opportunities here."

Derecho al Techo considers that the measure promoted by the Canary Islands Government "breaks the principle of equality, fragments the population, and establishes a dangerous hierarchy of rights based on length of stay, rather than on real need" and emphasizes that "the right to housing cannot become a privilege conditioned on administrative ties, while a model that favors those who can pay, speculate, or invest remains intact."

This group insists that "making it harder to access something that barely exists," referring to "a decent and sufficient public housing stock, is not housing policy, but a cosmetic operation that shifts the Government's responsibility onto the most vulnerable population."

Therefore, it rejects "the use of the housing emergency to normalize exclusionary discourse and divert attention from those who truly benefit from the current real estate model" and stresses that "public housing should serve to guarantee rights, not to erect new social borders."