David Pujol (MÉS per Palma): "Urbanizable land must be progressively municipalized to end speculation"

Palma"We must progressively municipalize developable land to end speculation and ensure that housing becomes a right again." With this proposal, the candidate for mayor of MÉS per Palma, David Pujol, today called for a profound change in housing and urban planning policies to confront what he considers "the great challenge of our generation." According to Pujol, the housing crisis demands abandoning timid policies and decisively intervening in a market that, he denounces, "has turned a fundamental right into a business." "We must remove housing from market logic and make houses what they have always been: homes to live in".

Pujol has made these reflections during the conversation Grassroots Policies to Recover Palma, organized by MÉS per Palma with the participation of the spokesperson for Adelante Andalucía, Pilar González. The meeting served to confirm that Palma and many Andalusian cities share the same diagnosis: the rising cost of housing, mass tourism, and an economic model that expels residents from their neighborhoods.To reverse this situation, Pujol has defended a package of measures that include maximizing the IBI for large holders with permanently empty homes, incorporating these properties into the public social rental housing stock through the instruments provided for by legislation, creating a municipal public housing company, and progressively municipalizing developable land to put an end to speculation.The candidate of MÉS per Palma for mayor has also warned that the social situation is increasingly worrying. "Palma is expelling its people. It is not a cliché, it is a reality that more and more people are experiencing firsthand," he assures. Along the same lines, he denounces that job precarity is no longer synonymous with unemployment. "Today there are full-time workers who do not make ends meet. This is one of the great injustices of our time."Tourism model

During the conversation, he also highlighted the need to rethink the city's tourism model. In his opinion, reducing tourist pressure is an indispensable condition for Palma to be a liveable city again. During the event, the coordinator of MÉS per Palma, Xisca Mir, emphasized the need to strengthen alliances between peoples who share common challenges. Mir pointed out that the Balearic Islands and Andalusia face "similar challenges" in areas such as the right to housing, social justice, and the defense of sovereignty to decide their future, and advocated for "the construction of transformative alternatives based on sovereignty, feminism, and environmentalism".