Abstract

Housing is a basic pillar of the welfare state, as it is a necessary condition for the development of other fundamental rights, such as privacy, education, human dignity or health. The global financial crisis of 2007 continues to have a serious impact on the citizens of our country, which is now combined with the effects arising from the COVID19 (2020-2021) and inflation (2022) crises. Indeed, the constant process of urbanization, couple with the process of emptying rural space and the lack of social and affordable housing, has contributed to making housing unaffordable in the main urban areas of our country to the less well-off families. Multilevel public housing policies, however, have been erratic in recent years without providing real alternatives to home ownership (from which young people and low-income families are excluded) or tenancy (which is not a truly desirable alternative to home ownership), while attempts to increase the stock of social and affordable housing (for example, through expropriations or penalties for owners of empty homes) have had limited success. This has led to a progressive precariousness of tenure and the increase (and, even, its promotion by public authorities) of situations of hidden homelessness, such as squatting, shared housing, overcrowding or substandardhousing, without the State Housing Law 12/2023 having implemented any structural measures to cover the existing gaps in the development of the right to decent and adequate housing, a function that corresponds to public authorities and not to private owners, which they are seeing their right to private property gradually being eroded. This article analyzes this problem and possible structural solutions to the housing problem, such as the territorial cohesion or the diversification of housing tenures.