It is known to everyone that housing prices have witnessed disproportionate growth in recent years due to several factors, including the high cost of materials, excessive tax burdens required by various departments, and enormous bureaucracy. … Projects must bear the lack of official assistance to buyers.
All this results in the most disadvantaged being unable to obtain housing, making it a major social problem that has a very particular impact on young people, because, faced with this impossibility, they are forced to continue living with their parents or, as a lesser evil, to go to other cities far from the place where they were born.
To address this problem, various initiatives to reduce housing prices are proposed, but they do not solve it completely due to the slowness required in their implementation or due to the lack of decision-making by administrations to ease the financial pressure, especially the central government and the city councils themselves.
However, in this context, the decree on urgent measures recently approved by the Andalusian government for the construction of 20,000 affordable homes in the next five years must be evaluated positively, using already existing lands in the inner areas of cities that have not been promoted over time due to insufficient use or lack of demand for them, which advised that the said decree directly enables changes in land uses, increasing density and even buildability, as long as the new projects are intended for affordable housing.
It should be noted that this initiative also aims to encourage the construction of smaller homes, which is what young people are asking for and that this measure has already been tried with great success on other occasions, as was the case in the Seville Airport industrial zone in the crisis experienced by the sector after the Expo, where it allowed the exchange of 2 houses for 3 apartments (a formula called 3×2) or in the planning of the Entrenúcleos project, which also led to an increase in the number of homes initially planned, from 6,750 dwellings to more than 20,000 units.
To develop this programme, the Ministry of Public Works has created a remote portal to know the bags of available land and from now on, each municipality has the opportunity until next March 2026 to inform the Andalusian Junta of the land in its area that it wishes to join the programme, which means that public and private lands can be registered and integrated into it so that there will be no excuse for vacant urban land to remain unused for a purpose. Social such as protected housing without a doubt.
In the case of the capital, Seville, JESCO conducted a detailed study for this purpose in which it determined that there is sufficient land in its 11 urban areas to address the program to which we refer.
Without prejudice to the above, we believe that the measure we propose could be further strengthened if the new Housing Law of Andalusia, which is currently under parliamentary processing, or the subsequent State Land Law, would allow the reduction of the provisions and equipment currently required for those projects in the united city that in fact have these provisions in their own areas, because this would not only reduce housing prices, but also what is necessary: helping young people to return to their traditional neighbourhoods, as the vast majority would like.