Aren't 15,000 homes a lot? They are quite a few, but not many if one truly feels love and wants to help the vast majority of citizens of this island who are suffering severely from the housing crisis, paying more than 30% of their net income to have a decent roof over their heads. Or, even worse, not even having access to something guaranteed by Article 47 of the Spanish Constitution: decent and adequate housing.
15,000 homes are not intended to curb prices. They are not intended to make prices decline slightly. 15,000 is the amount of housing needed to sink rental and sale prices to a decent level for our fellow citizens and to allow the humblest layers of society not to be forced to live in substandard housing. It is a measure of real, lasting, and significant impact on the supply side.
While in Spain the political elite fills their mouths with retrograde measures that sound very good but that everyone with a brain knows do not work, such as limiting prices and tightening conditions for owners, the reality is that there is only one measure that works: increasing supply. That is, building.
As the following graph shows, since the bursting of the real estate bubble almost 20 years ago, new construction permits in Spain are sunk, in a technical coma. Today, fewer homes are being built than in 1992, a time far removed from the real estate bubble of the early 21st century.
In economics, prices generally function as an indicator of the equilibrium or imbalance that exists in a particular market. Thus, if the price of oranges skyrockets, other producers will immediately appear to take advantage of those high prices and obtain a profit. And, paradoxically, the fact that more people appear cultivating oranges to obtain a profit causes prices to decline sooner rather than later, benefiting everyone.
This does not happen in the housing market because it is a hyper-regulated market that evolves according to the different laws, ideologies, and macroprudential measures that exist in a particular era.
The problem in Lanzarote, as some "degrowth" political parties who love to say nice things that ultimately only make things worse want to make believe, is not that the island is saturated or that there is too much vacation housing. The problem in Lanzarote is the same problem as in all of Spain: lack of supply.
The population has increased to almost 50 million, but also more and more people live alone or with fewer members in the same home, which makes more homes necessary for the same number of inhabitants. Last year alone, the net Spanish migratory balance was positive by 700,000 people, the highest record in history. And they are people we need because the population of Spanish origin is contracting due to low local fertility. As we age, we need more foreign labor to help us.
The political parties that nowadays talk about the problem being in prices are authentic social terrorists who are playing with the lives of the most needy people in our society. Prices are never the problem, they are an indicator and here they clearly indicate that much more housing is needed.
The political parties that dedicate themselves to saying that we are on a saturated island, that no more can be built and that we have to degrow, do not care at all about the lives of our fellow citizens and the constitutional right they have to decent housing. They only care about taking their ideological agendas to the extreme to thrive within the structures of their parties based on beautiful but counterproductive slogans.
Only by building 15,000 homes will we solve this problem. Those hundreds of homes they are building in Maneje are like throwing two buckets of water on a fire. They are only a measure for electoral posing, but not a real measure to fix people's lives. The recent decree of the Canary Islands government of "urgent measures in housing matters" is insufficient to restore dignity to our fellow citizens.
Just as to avoid bubbles, macroprudential measures are taken to try to curb them, when there is a shortage of housing, extreme and rapid measures are required to promote supply. And that has not been done nor is it being done.
Without building housing, society goes into a tailspin because our young and not so young people cannot become independent. Without emancipation there is no life project and without a life project there are no new babies. And without babies there is no society. That is why I say, here and now, that the political elite that governs us is committing a very serious act of social terrorism.
It is necessary to liberalize a lot of land (and for the funny ones, in Lanzarote there is plenty of land without environmental impact), cut bureaucracy to its minimum expression and, above all, put money so that builders start building.
Ah! and it is also necessary for citizens in the elections to punish all the parties that are against social progress: the degrowth ones. Or if not, let them continue voting for them while they earn 1,200 euros to pay for homes of 1,000 euros.
