The Local Committee of Nueva Canarias-Bloque Canarista (NC-bc) in Arrecife has asked the Arrecife City Council to prepare a municipal census of empty homes, in order to have accurate and updated information that allows measuring the real impact of this phenomenon on access to housing and designing appropriate public policies.
The party recalls that the absence of systematized data on the number and location of unoccupied homes in Arrecife constitutes a limitation for urban and social planning.
According to the Canarist spokesperson, Sheila Guillén, "an official census would allow quantifying the stock of empty homes and their causes (inheritances, second homes, disuse due to lack of maintenance, etc.); identify the territorial distribution of unoccupied housing in the municipality; and design specific intervention strategies, adapted to the local reality."
"Objective knowledge of the situation is an essential requirement to establish measures that favor the use of these homes and, consequently, improve the available supply," Guillén explained.
Likewise, the census is proposed as a tool to support the municipal housing policy, since it would allow articulating incentive measures aimed at owners (such as tax breaks, rehabilitation programs or mediation for social rental) that facilitate the incorporation of unoccupied homes into the market.
NC-bc has stressed that this proposal is part of the constitutional principle of the right to decent and adequate housing (Article 47 of the CE) and responds to the guidelines of the regional and state housing plans, which urge municipalities to have sufficient statistical information to combat substandard housing, the cost of rent and the lack of residential accessibility.
"The Arrecife City Council must equip itself with diagnostic and planning instruments that allow it to act with technical rigor and efficiency in the face of a problem of the first social and economic order," said Sheila Guillén, who recalls that it is estimated that there are about 3,000 empty homes in the municipality of Arrecife according to the latest INE census of 2021.
On the other hand, NC-bc views with "good eyes" the proposal announced this Tuesday by the president of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, that the City Councils can intervene in the housing market of their municipalities, but they recall that this intervention can already be carried out through the declaration of Areas of Stressed Residential Market, which would put temporary caps on rental prices, in addition to other powers assigned to local entities.
"We have been asking the Arrecife government group for two years to initiate the procedure to declare the capital a Stressed Residential Market Area, with a prior study that clearly diagnoses how the housing market is in Arrecife in order to, subsequently, send the information to the Government of the Canary Islands to act," commented Sheila Guillén, who has lamented "that both CC and the PP do not want to apply any real measure in terms of access to housing, but simply launch smoke screens announcing construction licenses without ensuring that these homes will be destined for the affordable housing market."
"The housing policy of this government group is to encourage the real estate bubble that sooner rather than later will burst on all of us," concluded Sheila Guillén.
