Muhamad Yehia
Madrid wants to build more housing, while Barcelona is looking to cap rent and restrict accommodation for tourists.
Amid soaring property prices and inflation, access to housing has become especially difficult for Europeans.
So how can the housing crisis, often exacerbated by the proliferation of short-term rental services such as Airbnb, be tackled in the European Union?
The mayors of Madrid and Barcelona each presented their own solutions to the European Parliament on Tuesday.
José Luis Martínez-Almeida, Madrid’s centre-right mayor, is advocating for a supply shock by encouraging the construction of new housing
“Housing can be solved by increasing supply and therefore by generating more land on which to build,” said Martínez-Almeida.
He also wants to guarantee greater “legal certainty” for landlords and tenants to “prevent illegal occupation,” and is a proponent of the construction of social housing while also calling for “a distinction to be made between social housing and affordable housing.”
“We understand social housing to be that which is aimed at people in vulnerable situations, who do not have the economic capacity to access housing under normal conditions,” he explains
Rent caps
In Catalonia, rent caps have been in place in densely populated areas since last year.
However, Barcelona’s mayor Jaume Collboni, who is a member of the Party of Socialists of Catalonia, wants to go further and extend the rent cap to short-term rentals.
He is also behind a letter addressed to Ursula von der Leyen, which was co-signed by an alliance of 10 European cities including Rome and Amsterdam, asking to be at the forefront of housing policy and to directly manage the European funds allocated.
“The problem we currently have in many European cities is that there is a conflict between the right to housing and the right to the economic or touristic use of this housing,” says Collboni
“In Barcelona, we have chosen to defend the right of access to housing as opposed to the use of accommodation for tourism,” he explains.
Collboni is therefore asking the European Commission to provide legal cover to rent caps in all municipalities.
The new European Commission, which started its term in December last year, has appointed a Commissioner in charge of overseeing housing for the first time in its history.
Dan Jørgensen, who is officially the Commissioner for Energy and Housing, is expected to come up with a proposal in the coming months, although housing is currently a competence of each member state.