Housing and housing policies in Madrid in the light of real estate crisis, protest and new regulatory policies

Abstract

Madrid is an excellent example of the problems of access to housing in Spain and other Southern European countries. Since the mid-twentieth century housing has been understood more as a private business than as a public right, framed in a rigorous urban planning. This notion settled and generalised in the years of the Franco dictatorship. During that period the great private developers of urbanisation successfully pressed the power, with which they joined common interests, to build very profitable residential spaces. Madrid grew steadily and the continuous increase in objective housing needs encouraged a fabulous business marked by an increasing production of buildings as well as a continuous increase in the value of the land. The gains obtained both by promoters and by the homeowners, who saw their prices keep growing, justified the maintenance of this dynamic home-business since the arrival of full democracy in the 1980s. Even a real estate bubble characterised for 1990–2008 was encouraged. Its puncture and the tremendous crisis that followed, are behind a rethinking of housing policies in Madrid, much more social and interventionist, animated by the new municipal government since 2015, whose limits and problems are analysed in the chapter.