Barcelona City Hall admits that its social housing quota was a mistake

A high-ranking official at Barcelona city hall says the policy introduced back in 2018 forcing developers to dedicate 30pc of new homes to social / affordable housing has been a mistake, as critics at the time of introduction loudly warned it would be.

‘Politics means getting things wrong sometimes’, is the gist of the defence by Jordi Valls of the disastrous social housing quota imposed on developers in Barcelona by the previous city government of Mayoress Ada Colau, and supported at the time by the Socialist party led by current Mayor Jaume Collboni, under whom Jordi Valls serves as a city councillor and fourth deputy-mayor in charge of the city’s economic affairs.

Speaking at an event organised by the Catalonian API real estate agents’ professional body Valls said that “the measure pushed by the government of Ada Colau imposing a 30pc social housing quota on new developments in Barcelona has not worked. Governing means rectifying, and what we need now is a good public-private collaboration to increase the supply of housing. Private capital will only get involved if we are able to incentivise it.”

He stressed that increasing the supply of affordable housing is the only way to solve the housing access problem in the Catalan capital. “In Spain only 1.5pc of homes are social housing, compared to 15pc in the rest of Europe,” he pointed out to demonstrate the scale of the problem. “The public administrations will have to make a big investment in housing, but we can’t do anything without the private sector.”

The city government under the hard-left former Mayoress Ada Colau took a very different approach, partly aimed at ‘punishing developers’ for building homes for profit. The resulting collapse in house building in Barcelona has exacerbated the city’s housing access problem, and pushed up prices for everyone whilst failing to increase the supply of social housing.

There are rumours that Ada Colau will be given the Housing Department of the National Government in Madrid if the current acting President Pedro Sánchez manages to stitch together a parliamentary majority for his left-wing coalition. Given her achievements as the Mayoress of Barcelona, that might be bad news for the home building sector in Spain.

But at least a pragmatic new Mayor in the person of Jaume Collboni is changing course in Barcelona and shaping a political narrative to amend or repeal Colau’s disastrous social housing quota. If done properly that will encourage the building of more homes the city desperately needs, including affordable housing.