The ombudsman, Ángel Gabilondo, urged all public administrations to build “more public and protected housing” and allocate it to rental as a remedy to the current access crisis affecting the entire country. Gabilondo also asked that these new homes maintain their qualification “permanently” so that, in addition to the expansion of the public park, the continuous increase in prices in the unregulated market stops.
“The problem comes from afar,” Gabilondo said during his participation in the Joint Commission on Relations with the Ombudsman, which took place on Monday. “The data are eloquent: the increase in purchase and rental prices is much higher than the increase in wages and the purchasing power of citizens”, he indicated as one of the determining factors of the crisis. “We are in a time of need,” he lamented.
In addition to considering the current public housing stock “scarce”, Gabilondo also underlined that the aid intended to cover the payment of housing in its various forms “reaches the beneficiaries late”, which prevents “being able to cushion the social consequences of the increase in prices”. In this line, it asked the various Administrations to provide their institution with all the data relating to officially protected housing, built or under construction in the various territories of the country, and the number of applicants, in order to monitor the real situation. “There is a lack of information that needs to be corrected,” he stressed.
Gabilondo, who specified that during 2024 the institution he directed received a total of 822 complaints relating to housing, warned that the lack of supply and the slowness in accessing aid and in the process of handing over assigned homes “occurs in all autonomous communities, but is more intense in territories with more population and tourism”, and that this strongly affects vulnerable groups such as young people.
The Ombudsman recalled that “in a State like Spain, access to housing constitutes a fundamental need and a right enshrined in the Constitution”, and that “the interest that must prevail is the general, common and shared one”, which requires “broad consensus and agreements”. For this reason he invited the General Administration of the State, the Regions and the Municipalities not to adopt “short-term policies”, since it is “a structural problem of the country”.
Judicial resources
The first step, therefore, involves the construction of public and restricted housing intended for rental, and whose qualification cannot be released at any time. “Although the social asset has grown in recent months – it has gone from 2.5% to 3.4% – it is essential to move forward to reach European standards,” indicated Gabilondo, who also warned that the increase in accommodation intended for tourist rental has had a strong impact on the market; and that this “has generated a new inequality gap”, influencing “the well-being and saving capacity of middle-income families”.
Regarding phenomena such as illegal occupation or “inquisquatting”, Gabilondo asked for greater “material and personal” resources for justice. “Effective justice is essential and the Ombudsman requires more and better provision of resources.”
“I don’t think limiting prices is going to end supply,” he said in reference to arguments addressing the idea that subsidizing access to housing automatically means higher house prices. “We need to combine measures. The solution is neither one extreme nor the other. We need to implement targeted measures to mitigate the needs of many people in the short term, and others aimed at improving construction in the medium and long term. I believe in a regulated and limited market. Nobody talks about a market without a market, but about a regulated market,” he stressed.
