It never rains but it pours: the problem of access to housing in a pandemic context

Abstract

This work explains the situation of access to housing in Spain in the complex year 2020. COVID-19 has reached our country without having recovered from the housing crisis of 2007. The measures taken in 2019 have not been useful to facilitate the access to housing, but to difficult families with fewer resources from owning a home without providing them with a viable alternative. In this context, Spain could only be one of the countries with the most important exceptional measures protecting mortgage debtors and tenants during the state of alarm and beyond. However, once this phase has been passed, it is again obvious the absence of a full understanding of the concept of ‘affordable housing’ at housing policy level, of a functional European-style reform of urban leases, of alternative tenure types to ownership and rental, and of an adequate policy of territorial cohesion, that is, the lack of structural reforms during the last fourteen years.