“I would say this thing is like living the dream ... housing is so hard, but here I have a peace of mind in my life, I have security.”

Adrià Garcia Mateu lives in La Borda, a co-operative housing development in Barcelona built on state land.

La Borda began its life in 2012 when local housing campaigners, social activists and architects sought a solution to the housing shortages in the Catalan city and could no longer ignore the vacant space beside them.

They formed a co-operative and secured a low-cost, 75-year lease on the public land from the municipal government.

Together they organised the funding, design and construction of the development.

La Borda was completed in 2018 and has 28 apartments, with rents of between €350 and €650 per month. Residents also pay a membership fee of €18,500 to take a share in the development.

It cost €3 million to build and was funded mainly by loans from a co-operative bank and residents’ contributions.

It is built from Spanish timber and concrete; residents’ apartments are all set around a central courtyard.

It has shared laundry, kitchen and livingroom spaces, a co-working space and a garage with shared tools.

The project has gained significant international attention and has been praised for its design and the way it was conceived and built.

At the heart of the project is something ingrained in Catalan culture – the importance of community.

“Neighbours are such a strong social figure in Catalonia. When my mom tells the story of her childhood, she always talks about neighbours. They are like a family, because they’ve been living there together for generations,” says Mateu.

For him, fellow residents of La Borda are more than just neighbours who “share the security of my housing”; some are friends and some are “like my family”.

“This kind of sense of community that the place gives us, starting at the building – that’s something that, for me, is one of the key things,” he says.

In addition, the housing is cheap, beautiful and “in a neighbourhood that is fighting not to get gentrified,” Mateu says.

It is hard to underestimate the huge task this community group undertook to campaign for and then organise, design and construct what ultimately is a very basic requirement: affordable housing for local residents in a thriving city.

“It’s perverse that we need to be superheroes of housing in order to get decent, basic human rights,” Mateu says.

“I’m always advocating for public, community-led housing like this partnership, but not everybody needs to become a housing activist.”

Mateu told the story of La Borda at the International Social Housing Festival in Dublin last week when more than 2,000 housing experts from across the world met in the Convention Centre to share ideas on better housing policy.

Barcelona’s housing crisis echoes the crisis in Ireland, Spanish public housing consultant Eduard Cabré told The Irish Times at the festival.

“Barcelona is at a pretty critical point now in terms of social housing. For a long time in Spain, social housing was considered to be a way to access home ownership. So we only have about 2 per cent public and social rental housing, and we essentially lack tools to respond to the need of social and affordable housing that we’re facing currently,” Cabré says.

The biggest pressure point in the market is in the private rental sector.

“Ever since the global financial crisis, access to home ownership has been very much restricted, and so all of the youth and migrant population are essentially fighting to get access to housing in the private rental sector, which has been very much strained,” says Cabré.

This has resulted in prices increasing fast in the past few years.

Average rents in Barcelona now stand at €1,193 a month, according to the latest data from the Catalan Land Institute, the region’s public land authority. Median net income in Spain stood at €19,307 – or €1,603 per month – last year, according to Eurostat, pointing to the pressure on affordability.

In 2023 the country’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, ushered through the country’s first housing law since its return to democracy in 1975.

The legislation caps rent rises at 2.2 per cent, limits landlords’ ability to increase prices between tenancies and protects renters from evictions. The rules have stabilised prices and “resulted in renters being able to stay in their homes for longer”, says Cabré.

“It’s going good in the sense that it has been able to moderate prices in Barcelona and all of the other municipalities in which it has been implemented.”

Short-term rentals were already regulated, with owners requiring a licence to operate. The number of licences allowed is capped with no new licences allowed.

However, a loophole has emerged whereby seasonal rentals, those between one and 11 months long, have been able to escape the rent caps and this has had an impact on the supply of long-term rentals.

“We have seen a decline in the new supply of rental housing, with some of it moving to the short-term seasonal rental rentals,” says Cabré.

“So what we’re trying to do now is to regulate these seasonal rentals, and we hope that a lot of landlords will go back to the long-term rentals again because they won’t see an incentive to do the seasonal contracts.”

Two initiatives are helping to tackle housing shortages.

• The first is the leasing of municipal land in city centre locations for non-profit housing such as that seen in La Borda.
• The second measure he cites is the state acquisition of privately owned buildings for public housing stock.

“We provide a long-term lease of 75 to 99 years, and once they have that piece of land, they can develop housing which needs to be permanently affordable,” Cabré says.

The state has first preference to acquire buildings larger than six units should a property come on the market. Cabré says these acquisitions have been happening over the past 10 years with more than 1,600 units bought by the State.

“We think this tool is especially important because it allows us to create affordable housing opportunities in areas of the city where we won’t necessarily have the ability to develop new housing because they are pretty much built up,” he says.

“It also keeps social cohesion across the city, and allows us to scatter our properties all over.”

What can Ireland learn about housing from other European countries?

Vienna

Vienna has a large share of social housing.

Almost half of all tenants in Vienna live “within the spectrum of social housing”, says Mara Verlic, a policy adviser with the Austrian Chamber of Labour, a practice that dates back to what she calls the “interwar time”.

“It’s a time period that is sometimes referred to as red Vienna, where in just a couple of years there was a huge socialist housing programme where 60,000 flats were built,” says Verlic.

“They built huge housing complexes, and it was actually planned to be spread around the city, so wherever there was free land at that time, social housing would be built. It also contributes to the social mix of the whole city today because most of these still exist and have never been privatised.”

The city never moved away from what she calls “object-based subsidies” – housing built by the State – to “subject-based subsidies”, such as rental supports.

Today, more than 20 per cent of the housing stock is owned by the state, while another 20 per cent or more is built by co-operatives.

“I would say there is definitely the culture of being proud of these social housing estates,” says Verlic.

“We did a study on the quality of the buildings and came to the conclusion that the quality standards are higher within the social houses.”

Brussels

In Brussels there has been a move to convert vacant offices to housing as remote work takes hold in the city post-Covid.

Paulien Bleekman, a PhD researcher at the Architectural Engineering school in Vrije Universiteit Brussel, has been looking at the work of private real estate company Inclusio, which provides housing to social rental agencies in Brussels.

“They convert office buildings to social housing, focusing on the potential of existing structures, to convert them quickly to housing so that it doesn’t take up a lot of construction time,” Bleekman says.

One such complex is Pavillon 7-9, the headquarters of the Association of Flemish Cities and Municipalities until the outbreak of Covid-19.

Inclusio purchased it in 2018 when remote work removed the need for such a large office space and converted it into 41 residential units.

“In Brussels now there are about 50,000 families on the waiting list [for social housing], so they need to double the number of social housing properties to help all the people on the waiting list,” Bleekman says.

Italy

In Italy there is a move towards using more sustainable materials in their building of social homes.

Marta Cassanova, a professor in the department of architecture at the University of Genoa, has been working on a project in Liguria that aims to “rethink” social housing for an ageing population.

The project will result in an old hotel being converted into a social housing complex for older people in the coastal city of Imperia.

While a core aim of the project is working not just with architects but also artists and “social innovators” to design inclusive space, using as much wood as possible was the driving force for sustainability and environmental reasons.

“In Italy, we don’t use a lot of wood in construction, normally just brick or reinforced concrete. It’s expensive, it’s not in our tradition,” Cassanova says.

“It is better for our environmental footprint, this is a sustainable material, and we have a lot of forest in Italy – but we have to build the supply chain.”

Source: The Irish Times.