Mark Stücklin
When politicians run housing projects like vanity parades, the results are as predictable as they are depressing — La Escocesa is just the latest proof.
According to an article in the Spanish paper La Vanguardia, the Poblenou complex of La Escocesa was bought by Barcelona City Hall in 2017 for €10 million under the triumphant banner of fighting gentrification and promoting social housing. Eight years later, the site has been repeatedly occupied, evacuated, boarded up, and left to rot. What was trumpeted as a visionary public project has become, in the paper’s words, “the story of a very expensive fiasco.”
Big promises, small results
In August 2017, the then hard-left Mayoress Ada Colau (now a Gaza activist) proudly announced that the city had acquired three plots of the former La Escocesa factory — 93% of the site — for €10 million. The plan, she declared, was to transform the complex into social housing and public facilities. Nothing has been done since. Years later, the Generalitat has floated the idea of turning it into the future Casa América, another vague plan on the growing pile of unfulfilled promises.
Colau’s tenure was full of such grand gestures. She famously introduced the 30% social-housing quota for all new residential developments, promising it would deliver 300 affordable homes a year. The result? A collapse in new home construction and, according to official figures, just eight homes delivered under the scheme in nearly a decade. Far from solving Barcelona’s housing crisis, her policies have strangled development and made the problem dramatically worse. La Escocesa is simply one more example in a long list of left-wing housing programmes that have proved not just ineffective, but catastrophic for housing access in the city.
Public money, private indifference
This story has become painfully familiar in Barcelona. Politicians make grand claims, spend freely, and take victory laps in front of cameras — only to deliver decay, delay, and disappointment. Instead of hiring competent managers, they reward loyalty and ideological purity. There’s no accountability, no cost control, and no urgency. Nobody ever gets fired for doing a bad job.
In the case of La Escocesa, the city bought a derelict industrial site with great fanfare, boasting that it had stopped a private project of luxury lofts and “saved” the neighbourhood from gentrification. Yet today, it’s still an empty, dangerous ruin — a public embarrassment and a safety hazard. The only thing the city has successfully built there is a monument to bureaucratic incompetence.
What locals are saying
The comments under La Vanguardia’s report make it clear that ordinary Barcelonans are tired of the same political theatre.
One reader noted:
“A couple of weeks ago I saw a TV report about former narcopisos in the Raval. Some, returned to private hands, were already fully renovated and occupied. Others, now owned by the city, remain closed, untouched, waiting for bureaucracy or budget. And yet politicians keep boasting about their great housing projects.”
Another wrote:
“It’s the story of an announced fiasco. The city buys a deteriorated building, makes a show of it, promises social housing and facilities, and ends up doing nothing. The place falls apart, neighbours suffer, and it’s all just another example of municipal mismanagement.”
These voices reflect a growing cynicism about public housing policy — people can see the gap between rhetoric and reality.
The wrong kind of intervention
Calls for more state intervention in the housing market are growing louder, but if the public sector’s track record is any guide, we should be deeply sceptical. The state’s involvement so far has been marked by inefficiency, waste, and moral grandstanding. These projects end up spending vast sums of public money with few beneficiaries while paralysing the private sector that actually builds and maintains most of the homes people live in.
