While in the Canary Islands, tourism-phobia is growing and there is a desire to change the economic model of mass tourism, ideas mostly encouraged from the left but with considerable permeability towards the entire sociological spectrum, the reality is that the political elite of the islands is playing with fire and not fixing this problem in time could bring serious social, political and economic consequences for our archipelago and for Lanzarote in particular
Although the hyper-critics of the current economic model start from a completely wrong diagnosis of what the root problem is, which in the end is the lack of supply of something as essential as housing, political leaders with sufficient agency at all levels of administration should understand that we are in a situation of absolute emergency, which could forever destabilize the peaceful political and social climate of the islands.
The Bank of Spain warned last April that 600,000 homes are needed nationwide to balance the supply side. This figure would mean about 2,000 homes only on the island of Lanzarote, but according to my calculations, taking into account that the Canary Islands is the autonomous community where citizens make the greatest effort to rent housing with respect to their salary and that in Lanzarote this metric is the worst in all of the Canary Islands in "an Ibiza-style crisis", on this island 15,000 homes are needed not to keep the price stable, but to sink them and that the social mass can access decent housing at a reasonable price.
The political elite has to solve not the problem that people think they have (mass tourism, vacation homes) but the one they really have. Failing here will mean that the wrong diagnosis is transmuted into an even worse way of voting, choosing increasingly populist parties and making the political-social climate not only unbreathable, but also producing a degrowth ideological drift, tourism-phobic and very far from the progress that is the general interest of the majority of society.
In another example of how the housing policies of the Sánchez administration are an economic cancer, it has already been verified this May how the supply of rental housing has contracted by 39% in Catalonia (sic), only with the entry into force of the new decree law that requires limiting prices and publishing them in advertisements.
Limiting prices or prohibiting vacation homes is useless. It has been shown that they do not substantially affect the level of housing prices or even worsen it. To solve the problem of housing supply, on the one hand, the legal certainty of owners must be improved and since the current government of the nation is not willing to do so, the only practical solution is the emergency construction and in record time of 15,000 homes. Everything else simply will not work unless there is a major regulatory change and in the opposite direction to the current one.
On the island there are, according to the National Institute of Statistics, 76,597 homes, so creating 15,000 homes barely means increasing capacity by 19.58%. Only in the most populated part of Lanzarote, Arrecife and surroundings, there is more than enough space to locate all these homes and there would be space left over without affecting any environment of greater landscape quality.
Either the political elite of the Canary Islands takes measures now, promoting and forcing the massive construction of housing, or the social mass, sooner rather than later, will end up exploding, making everything worse. The 20A was a warning. There is still time, but time is running out. Without decent housing, society corrodes.
