They have told us so many times that the market fixes everything that they forgot a small detail: to ask the Canarians if they can still afford to live in their own land.
And the answer is beginning to be painfully evident.
According to the latest data, three out of every ten homes sold in the Canary Islands end up in the hands of foreign buyers. Let no one misunderstand me. The problem is not who decides to come and live on these islands legally. The Canary Islands have always been an open, hospitable, and welcoming land. The problem is that, while new owners arrive, more and more Canarians have to leave because they can no longer build a life project here.
And that is not progress. That is a political failure.
For years, they have told us that the real estate market was a success. That rising prices were magnificent news. That money from abroad was synonymous with wealth. The curious thing is that this wealth never quite reaches the pockets of the waiter, the nurse, the police officer, the farmer, or the young person who finishes university and discovers that becoming independent in the Canary Islands is almost a fantasy.
Because the market, indeed, has regulated itself. It has regulated our young people towards the airport. It has regulated families towards impossible rents. It has regulated essential workers towards shared rooms at forty years old. What a wonderful regulation.
Then the same old people appear saying that intervening in the market is little less than sacrilege. A curious concept of freedom that consists of giving absolute freedom to speculate, but none for a young person to live in the neighborhood where they were born.
The Canary Islands do not have a problem of lack of love for this land. It has a problem of priorities. We have allowed housing to stop being a right and become a financial product.
From Nueva Canarias–Bloque Canarista, we defend that the right of Canarians to continue living in the Canary Islands must be placed at the center of public policies: more public housing, mobilization of empty homes, regulation of tourist accommodation where it displaces residents, and dignified access for those who live and work here.
Every young person who leaves this land because they cannot find affordable housing is a future doctor, a future nurse, a future lawyer, a future teacher, or a future engineer that we lose. It is talent. It is wealth. It is the future.
Canary Islands does not need to become a theme park where everything is for sale. It needs to remain a land where those who are born, work, and build these islands can live with dignity.
Because an island that expels its people stops deciding its future. The question is no longer whether the market works. The question is much more uncomfortable: Who will be able to live in the Canary Islands in ten years?