Bureaucracy, housing and gerontocracy are squeezing out young Spanish families

Bureaucracy and housing: why young Spaniards aren't starting families

The paradox is uncomfortable: Spain is ageing while none of the branches of the state, from the central government down to local councils, seems to have any real incentive to help young people leave home and start families. The criticism is not aimed at one party or one policy: it describes a hypertrophied administrative machine that extracts rents in the form of licences, permits and taxes, and ends up suffocating adult life.

The barriers blocking independence

The diagnosis groups the drivers into several fronts. On one hand, stagnant wages and high youth unemployment, aggravated — in this reading — by an influx of migrants that pushes wages down. On the other, housing prices, which turn renting into a millstone. Add to that taxes, the demand for university degrees for jobs that do not require them, and an educational outlook that, again according to this view, steers young women away from motherhood.

Some go further: the state would not be a counterweight to the market but its servant. In this scheme, the family is a leftover of a system that needs flexible, available individuals with no dependants. And a third reading points to gerontocracy: the decision-makers belong to a generation that has already paid off its mortgage and secured its pension, and legislates without ever having to weigh the costs of entering adult life.

• Stagnant wages and structural youth unemployment
• Housing out of reach on a first salary
• Rising tax pressure on low incomes
• Over-qualification as a way to delay independence

The conclusion these analyses point to: the shortage of families is not an accident or a mere cultural shift, but the predictable outcome of an environment designed to extract rents from the young. With this cocktail, the question is not why there are so few families, but how anyone still manages to form one.