Important day in July at the Catalan Parliament. With an unprecedented housing crisis, which has made housing the main problem of Catalans in official polls, Parliament has approved the regulation of seasonal rentals and housing. Two rental typologies that have disrupted the real estate market in large cities, because they have been massively expanded, as seen by settlers seeking to escape the price regulation established by the Housing Law. From New Catalonia it became a laboratory and settled the issue and with the initial impetus of organizations that defended the right to housing and citizen associations. The approved text is called Housing and town planning measures law, it modifies the articles of the Catalan urban planning and housing laws, and in a great vote of decades of enmiendas, it was approved with the votes of the PSC, the ERC, the Municipalities and the CUP. The PP announced that it would present an appeal of unconstitutionality before the Constitutional Court against a regulation according to which its representatives understand that Catalonia has no competences and is “an expropriation encubierta of private property”.
The new law also extends the protection of VPO housing located in municipalities with a tight market, to stop the hemorrhage of declassification of protected floors. In Barcelona alone, 40,000 homes will lose their social status by 2030. And this will allow Ayuntamientos to establish in their urban standards that “residential use” is a priority in their real estate stocks.
The new regulations can be summarized in that seasonal rental or housing will have the same rules as any residential rental: its price will be limited by the official index. In the case of housing, the sum of prices that exist on a floor cannot exceed the peak. In Barcelona, renting a house is like a basement. In addition, contracts must contain the purpose of the temporary stay (studies, professions) and the tenant’s permanent address. The law also distinguishes between “residential” and “holiday or leisure” seasonal rentals, which are only subject to regulated rates.
The councilor of the Territory and Vivienda, Sílvia Paneque, defended the law with the argument that the government of Salvador Illa insists on: the convenience of intervening in the market when it affects and distorts social cohesion. “This law aims to ensure that the villa is a right and not a source of anxiety for citizens.” “There is no way to achieve this with a country, neighborhoods and cities that are more precarious, less cohesive and with less progress,” he says. On the side of ERC, the former deputy and advisor during the last mandate Ester Capella maintained that “the limit of the market is in the right direction”. On the side of the Commons, Deputy Susana Segovia thanked the Sindicato de Inqulinas and the PAH for their mobilizations and their legislative impetus to defend the right in the House. On the CUP side, Laure Vega warned that a crisis like that of the Chamber would cause the rise of the ultra-right.
The fact that the rent for short stays has a regulated price is an important complaint of tenants’ unions, who have been demanding it since the development of the Spanish Housing Law (2022-2023). The organization has since warned that there would be a flight from homes during the season, to avoid price spikes. During the last legislature, I was on the verge of approving it by decree and on the eve of the spring 2024 elections, when it was drafted then the ERC Government by the hand of the communities. Together and PSC then paid for fewer prisons and more “legal security”. The scale of the drama, when season rentals were reached, according to official figures, around 26% of those who registered in Barcelona (and not all of them registered), led the socialists to accept the norm.
An expanded law to accelerate the expansion of social housing
The approved law is originally a decree (2/2025) that modifies the administrative, urban and housing legislation, drafted by the government of Salvador Illa to accelerate the expansion of the social park as part of its project to add 50,000 public floors until 2023. The text, adopted several times by the Council of Legal Guarantees, includes modifications in terms of public works, administrative procedures, VPO and urban planning.
In addition to changes in seasonal rent or the extension of VPO protection in tense areas, it gives more funds to Incasòl to build social housing, increases the reserve percentages for the construction of social housing in new neighborhoods and expands the hypotheses of preferential purchase of housing by the administration (right to portrait and portrait). The law also creates the Register of large tenants, empty floors and sets fines for those who do not identify their properties.
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