Spain to Speed up Industrial Construction of Social Housing With EU Funds

Spain Accelerates Social Housing Construction with EU Support

MADRID (Reuters) -Spain will spend around 1.3 billion euros ($1.48 billion) of EU funds over the next 10 years on industrial projects to build badly-needed social housing amid soaring property prices and rents, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Thursday.

The plan is to offer some 15,000 new homes per year, cutting construction times by up to 60%, and ultimately reducing an estimated shortage of 600,000 homes, Sanchez said.

Only 5% of the homes in Spain are built using industrial methods, where a large part of a building is produced at factories and then assembled at construction sites, whereas in Germany at least 20% are built that way.

The measure is part of a wider plan to increase the supply of affordable housing. The shortages have triggered waves of protests across Spanish cities as rents double and house prices rose by 44% since 2020, according to Idealista property website.

The Socialist government is also promoting rent controls in the largest cities and trying to limit short-term rentals to tourists and foreigners, while encouraging the construction of more social housing, which accounts for just 3% of all available houses, well below the European average of 9%.

Sanchez told a business event in Madrid that the eastern area of Valencia, which last October was hit by the deadliest flash floods in Spain's modern history, would be the first hub for industrial construction projects, without specifying how many houses would be built there.

($1 = 0.8781 euros)

(Reporting by Corina Pons, editing by Andrei Khalip and Tomasz Janowski)