Access to housing has become “the most pressing political and social issue today, both in Europe and across the Western world,” according to the United Nations, and the figures support this view: since the year 2010, the average sale price of homes has soared by 55% in the European Union, and rental prices by 27%.
This phenomenon, however, tends to concentrate in large urban agglomerations, where specific economic, demographic and territorial dynamics converge. Larger cities are more productive, offer more job opportunities, and provide a much greater diversity of services—professional, commercial and cultural—which attracts more people. And this additional pressure falls on a housing market whose supply has not responded with sufficient agility.
The medium- and long-term response to rising house prices and rents can only realistically be to increase the supply of residential property. The devil, however, is in the detail. The market must play a role, but so must urban planning: land reclassification, streamlining of administrative procedures, and a framework that steers construction towards mid-range and reasonably priced housing, rather than exclusively towards luxury segments.
In the case of the Balearic Islands, property market pressures have progressed in parallel with the strong and sustained population growth of recent decades, a trend that has been closely and consistently linked to the rapid development of the tourism sector. If policies designed to contain this demographic growth are not adopted, any increase in residential supply will remain insufficient. And, it should be said, had meaningful containment measures been applied in the past, it would not be so necessary to keep building at the current pace today… In any case, in the Balearic Islands, containing population growth necessarily involves acting decisively on tourism activity. For example, reducing the number of available tourist places, without this necessarily resulting in a decrease in the overall economic value generated by the sector.
Increasing the housing supply is a long-term strategy, but some measures can indeed have rapid effects. Reducing short-term holiday rentals can return housing to the residential market in the short term. Another possible measure is rent control, something that for conventional economists—myself included—is almost heresy: price freedom provides information about scarcity and creates incentives to increase supply. However, prices also determine the distribution of income, which today has major effects on inequality. It is possible that there are forms of price regulation which, applied cautiously and temporarily, could be useful. But given the implications of poor implementation, for now I prefer to maintain an agnostic stance on the matter.
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