The Government submits its "shock plan" to the Housing Board to build 5,000 affordable homes.

PalmThe Balearic Islands government has convened the regional Housing Roundtable, comprised of public administrations, social, business, and professional entities, to report on the "shock plan" for housing, which aims to build more than 5,000 affordable homes.

The Minister of Housing, Territory and Mobility, José Luis Mateo, chaired the meeting with around thirty representatives of public administrations, professional associations, business associations, social entities and trade union organizations that make up the Housing Roundtable, and outlined the axes of the different housing measures and, affordable for citizens residing in the Islands."

"Faced with the housing problem in the Balearic Islands, surely the greatest challenge we face as a society, this Government has made a decisive and courageous commitment to generating more affordable housing, through different means: with two new laws, to facilitate more housing and to speed up the obtaining of land, and with a reinforcement of existing programs, such as the reinforcement of existing programs, as well as the reinforcement of existing programs, to increase affordable housing that is only for residents," he said.

Thus, the Government has outlined the different axes of the plan and the new legal framework with which it seeks to increase the supply of affordable housing in the coming years in the Balearic Islands, both with Law 3/2024, of May 3, approved based on the Emergency Decree-Law, and the new Law 2 urgent aimed at obtaining land through strategic residential projects (PRE) in the Balearic Islands, and which also incorporates an express procedure to accelerate the public promotion of housing.

In this sense, the counselor also reviewed the various initiatives and programs, such as the deployment of the measures of Law 3/2024 to take advantage of existing buildings or vacant land; the reinforcement of public promotion through Ibavi; the new "Build to Rent" program, for transferring land to private initiative to build protected or limited-price housing; or the launch of the new "Safe Rent" program, to incentivize the release of empty or non-residential homes onto the market and allocate them to affordable rentals for residents.

By For its part, it has explained that the Emergency Law allows for the processing of more than 2,300 homes, with measures such as the conversion of premises into limited-price housing (325), the use of unfinished buildings (151) and height increases (137); and with the "Build to Rent" program, between the Government's call and those of several city councils, nearly 2,400 are planned. Between the law and this program, there are more than 4,200 homes in the planning stage, they assured.

Likewise, Ibavi is promoting public housing developments totaling nearly 900 protected homes, a figure that is expected to increase as it advances in talks with city councils to launch new developments. It is also accelerating the processing of new developments through the express procedure incorporated by the Government in the promotion measure of Law 4/2025 for obtaining them.

The Government has also presented to the Housing Roundtable the objectives of the new Law 4/2025 and the new concept of strategic residential projects, created to unblock and streamline urban and developable land and optimize the use of these lands, already provided for in current plans, in the main municipalities of planning and reparcelling and urbanization projects, to obtain urbanized land and reduce timeframes through a single urban and environmental processing.

This new scheme, directly applicable in municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants, guarantees that 50% of the buildable land in these projects will be allocated to subsidized housing, both public and limited-price housing, and therefore intended only for residents with five-bedroom homes. Furthermore, 15% of the land must be transferred to the municipal council to also build subsidized housing.

The PAH (National Housing Authority) denounces the transfer of public land to private developments at the Housing Roundtable.

The Platform of Mortgage Victims (PAH) of Mallorca participated this Friday in the Balearic Islands Housing Roundtable, where they denounced the transfer of public land to private developments. Gloria Olmos, one of the PAH's collaborating lawyers, explained to ARA Baleares that the meeting "was much the same as the previous ones" and denounced that "the Government believes that all the housing problems in the Archipelago are due to a lack of supply and, therefore, the solution is to build more."

In this regard, she explained that sources within the Government assure that these new constructions will be used for "affordable rental or sale and that this will be the solution to the current housing problems in the Balearic Islands." According to the lawyer, "these proposals are not going to solve anything."

"We attend this roundtable to contribute the perspective of the most disadvantaged population in our society, those without resources, those excluded and deprived of the right to decent housing, expelled from the real estate market, in need of institutional resources that offer decent housing," the platform indicated in a statement. Specifically, it has rejected housing policies that stray from the universality of the right to housing, as well as the transfer of public land to private developers instead of taking advantage of these spaces to build, from the public sector, housing where the rental price is measured by the circumstances of the individuals and families in need.

"Despite having legislative tools, both state and regional, the Government chooses to favor the private sector, whose objective is to make a profit, speculating with housing as if it were a market commodity," they added. The group reiterated that touristification, gentrification, and the lack of regulation of vacation rentals are driving citizens away from their homeland and treating them as second- or third-class citizens. The PAH has called for, in addition to bold measures, fair measures, policies that decommodify housing and protect it as a constitutional right.

Among other measures, they have also demanded the declaration of areas where housing prices are unaffordable for the working population as "stressed zones," social rentals for the most disadvantaged individuals and families, and regulation of vacation rentals.