There is a particularly comfortable form of solidarity: the kind proclaimed from a spacious home and financed with somebody else’s keys.
Access to housing has become one of Spain’s most serious problems. Rents have risen far faster than wages, countless young people cannot afford to leave home, and many families spend a suffocating share of their income simply keeping a roof over their heads. All of this is true, and it calls for decisive public action.
The problem begins when the time comes to decide who should pay for it.
Building public housing costs money. Releasing land requires planning. Speeding up building permits means reforming an administration that can take years to approve a development. Providing direct assistance requires including it in the public budget. These are slow, expensive solutions and ill-suited to a protest placard.
It is much easier to identify a landlord and inform them that, from now on, they too are part of the social services system.
The state recognises the right to housing but sends the bill to one particular citizen. The politician keeps the applause, the tenants’ union claims a victory, and the landlord provides the flat, the discount, the compulsory extension and, if necessary, the patience. It is a remarkably efficient system for everyone except the person paying for it.
Not every landlord is a modest pensioner renting out the flat inherited from their parents. There are investment funds, property companies and people with enormous fortunes. There are also landlords who own several rental properties. We do not need to invent a Spain inhabited exclusively by kindly little landlords surviving on a small pension.
But nor do we need to invent the opposite caricature.
A substantial share of Spain’s rental market belongs to private individuals with just one property to let. It may be a flat they inherited, a home they bought before moving to another city, or a property acquired after years of saving. Some will be wealthy; others are simply trying to supplement a salary or pension. Turning all of them into speculators is a rather ingenious way of fighting the privileged classes by starting with the middle class.
Still, let us accept the principle for a moment. Let us suppose that the housing emergency justifies intervening in private property and forcing certain people to provide accommodation for less than they could obtain on the open market. I disagree, but let us grant the premise and see how far our consistency takes us.
In that case, I propose applying an idea traditionally cherished by the left: progressivity.
Let us begin with those who have the most.
The government could draw up a register of the very wealthy, millionaire performers, businesspeople, senior officials and celebrities committed to the right to housing. It would then calculate how many bedrooms each family reasonably needs. One for the couple, one for each child, perhaps an additional guest room and a study where it can be proved essential for preparing speeches about inequality.
The remaining rooms would be added to the social rental stock.
It would not be expropriation, of course. We would use a more reassuring expression, such as “the socially responsible mobilisation of underused residential space”. The right choice of words can make entering someone else’s home sound like an innovative public policy.
Each room could be rented for four hundred euros a month. The legislature would bring these agreements under Spain’s Urban Leases Act, with a minimum term of five years, restrictions on rent increases and the tenant’s right to use the kitchen, bathrooms, swimming pool, garden and all other shared areas. If the property has domestic staff, their services might have to be considered an additional benefit, because we would hardly want social tenants to suffer inequality in relation to the owner.
Naturally, the hosts would not be allowed to choose who occupied the rooms. Allowing them to select tenants according to ideology, habits or personal compatibility would be discriminatory. The authorities would make the allocation according to income and vulnerability.
Just imagine the possibilities.
A young waiter could move into the spare bedroom of a celebrated actor committed to social justice. A mother with two children could occupy the guest floor of a left-wing singer’s home. A delivery rider could share a kitchen with a minister who owns several properties. They would all have the opportunity to discover that coexistence and solidarity are far more interesting concepts once they cease to be abstract.
Awards ceremonies would become more exciting as well. Before asking performers about their next film, journalists could raise matters of genuine social importance:
—How many spare rooms do you have?
—How much are you planning to charge for them?
—Will you renew your tenants’ contracts?
—Why do you retain a second home when other people cannot find anywhere to live?
The answers might be rather less elegant than the speeches.
The cultural left often displays extraordinary generosity towards private property, provided that the property belongs to somebody else. It calls for controls, prohibitions, compulsory extensions and reduced rents with the serenity of people who know that the press conference will end before anyone examines their property records.
The champagne socialist does not exactly reject private property. What they reject is other people managing their own property without regard for the champagne socialist’s political convictions.
When their own home is involved, the right to privacy, legal certainty, family needs and a profound emotional attachment to every square metre suddenly make an appearance. It turns out that the empty bedroom was not truly empty: it contained memories. Nor was the second home superfluous: it was somewhere to recover from the exhausting work of demanding sacrifices from the middle class.
We should not stop with performers. After the billionaires would come the millionaires; then ministers and senior officials with several properties; then major businesspeople and members of the upper class. After that, we could turn our attention to the upper middle class, with its second homes and manifestly underused bedrooms.
Only once all those bedrooms, apartments, villas and holiday homes had been exhausted would we begin to consider the contribution of the worker who inherited their parents’ flat and rents it out to supplement their income.
It would be a perfectly logical order.
It would also be fascinating to observe the speed with which many supporters of state intervention in private property suddenly discovered the virtues of liberalism.
To be clear, I am not genuinely proposing that the state install tenants in anyone’s spare bedrooms. I do not want an actor, a singer, a minister or a businessperson to be forced to share their home with people selected by a government office. Their home belongs to them, even if it is large, luxurious and contains more bedrooms than they need.
That is precisely the point.
Private property does not become less deserving of protection when it belongs to someone less famous, less wealthy or less capable of defending it on television. If turning a celebrity’s mansion into a state-run boarding house seems absurd, turning a private citizen’s flat into the nearest branch of the Ministry of Housing should also give us pause.
This does not mean that property is an absolute right. There are planning regulations, taxes, contractual obligations and limits intended to protect tenants. A landlord should not be allowed to breach a contract, discriminate unlawfully, maintain a home in uninhabitable condition or force a family out through threats. Regulating a market is not the same as abolishing it.
But setting rules is one thing; forcing a particular citizen to finance a social policy designed by the government out of their own assets is quite another.
If we believe that a vulnerable family needs a home costing four hundred euros a month, society should provide it through public housing, assistance funded from general taxation or voluntary agreements supported by guarantees and incentives. What is unreasonable is for the state to decide how much that family needs and then select another citizen to pay the difference.
Social justice does not consist of choosing private individuals to stand in for the public budget.
Spain needs to build far more housing, genuinely expand its public rental stock, release land, simplify procedures, provide legal certainty and offer direct assistance to those who cannot afford market prices. It can also reach agreements with owners who voluntarily place their homes in social rental programmes in exchange for guarantees, insurance and tax benefits.
All of that requires governing.
Forcing somebody else to pay requires only an official gazette.
The proposal to introduce social tenants into mansions is therefore not intended as a genuine political programme, but as a test of consistency. Anyone who believes that an emergency permits the state to dispose of other people’s property should accept that intervention must begin with those who own the most. Anyone who finds it intolerable that the state should decide who sleeps in their bedrooms might begin to understand why a small landlord does not want a minister deciding for how long, at what price and under what conditions they may recover their property.
Housing is an essential need, and facilitating access to it is a public responsibility. But the right to housing does not mean a right to one particular home, in the neighbourhood of one’s choosing, compulsorily subsidised by another person.
Politically committed performers can donate money, buy homes and place them in the social rental sector, or voluntarily offer any rooms they do not need. That would be admirable. They can also continue demanding that the state build public housing and finance it through a progressive tax system.
What is rather less admirable is demanding solidarity exclusively from other people’s wealth.
So, if we ever decide to turn landlords into compulsory providers of social housing, let us at least do it fairly. Let us begin with the billionaires, continue with the millionaires and then move on to those who own several homes. Once all their bedrooms are occupied, their second homes incorporated into the social housing stock and their swimming pools properly shared, we can knock on the middle-class landlord’s door.
Perhaps by then we will have found a better solution.
Or perhaps we will have discovered that the revolution was very simple for as long as the house always belonged to the neighbour.