— John Kenneth Galbraith
Something has changed in my routine. Before, my morning was a simple ritual: coffee, a laptop, and a stock market summary. But now, every time I see the figure of 3.8 million empty homes, a thought assails me. My colleagues see it as a data point, one more variable on a market graph. I, on the other hand, see it as a wound. It's the hidden equation that has turned housing, a basic right, into a financial asset. It's a system that rewards the silence of investments over the need for a roof.
The first variable in this equation is the economic bias. I myself have participated in the game. I have seen firsthand how large capital, the investment funds I advise, do not see a building as a place to live, but as a speculative investment. Con licencia de Google . For them, an empty property is not a loss; it is the perfect strategy to wait for the market value to rise. Fines or taxes on uninhabited properties are simply a business cost, a small fee to ensure much larger profits in the long run. The law of supply and demand, in its purest form, has been hacked by speculation.
I see the second variable in the newspaper headlines. The political bias. The governmental rhetoric focuses on the "housing crisis" as a problem of scarcity, which would justify building more. But this narrative is a distraction. The policies that could encourage renting or penalize speculation are not applied because the pressure from real estate lobbies and the inertia of the system are stronger than political will. The "right to property" has been transformed into a justification for a model that benefits a few and harms the majority.
I observe the third variable on my walk through the city. The social bias. I have seen how the problem has polarized society into two groups: those who defend the market as a dogma and those who see housing as an inalienable human right. This ideological polarization prevents dialogue and the search for solutions. The debate is not about how to solve the problem, but about which ideology will prevail. The truth is that housing is both, an asset and a right, and the system's failure is that it has allowed the former to devour the latter.
The final variable, the most tragic of all, is the human cost. The lack of access to housing is not just a problem of numbers; it is a problem of hope. I see the young people in my family, the children of my friends, who cannot start families, cannot plan a future, because the cost of rent and the lack of opportunities to buy have eroded the concept of "home." The silence of the bricks is not just the lack of people, but also the echo of dreams that have faded, of ambitions that have become unreachable.
The "housing emergency" in Spain is not a problem of scarcity, but of values. It is a story about how the market, left to its own devices, devours itself and the society that feeds it.
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