The housing bubble bursts: no energy, no new boom

The 20-year growth model is running out—and nobody has a plan B

The diagnosis is circulating through the economic rumor mills with an insistence that is no longer just bar-room pessimism: Spain’s model of the past twenty years—millions of new consumers, breakneck construction, cheap energy—has supposedly hit its ceiling. The central argument is uncomfortably simple. No more housing is being built because there is no serviced land and no power grid to support it, and without new housing the only growth lever this country once handled with ease snaps.

The thesis is not an academic finding; it is an intuition circulating with scattered data and a lot of gut feeling. But it is worth taking seriously, if only to take it apart. Because if this issue has one thing, it is that nobody—neither those warning of collapse nor those denying it—can quite make the figures add up.

Why isn’t more housing being built in Spain?

Those defending the exhaustion thesis point to a physical bottleneck before a financial one. Every new development needs to connect to the power grid via its boletín (electrical installation certificate), and that grid, they argue, is saturated. Some claim to have detected brief outages in specific areas on the urban periphery—Torrent, in Valencia, is mentioned—and others say large industry is already suffering forced disconnections due to lack of supply.

The technical answer soon appears: more demand means more production, and blaming the grid is confusing the symptom with the disease. The problem, they reply, is political decision-making and a strangling regulatory framework. Others go further and add the coup de grâce: between data centres, electric vehicles and a larger population, consumption only grows just as power plants are shutting down.

The upshot of this clash is a country that needs millions of homes for a growing population and that, according to the most alarmed camp, is incapable of building them. There’s no energy here, sir, the optimist would sum up.

The political battle: who allowed the mass arrival

The issue quickly drifts into politics, as expected. One current holds that the party that has most stressed the migration problem also failed to turn off the tap when it could: it governed in regions such as Castilla y León and has supported PP governments in Andalucía, Madrid and Valencia. The reply is categorical: you cannot reproach someone who has not been in central government, and its proposals mention closing the migration route, not opening it.

What the general mood does capture is a cross-cutting distrust. Whatever the colour, it is argued that employers’ organisations will always ask for more workers and that this interest weighs more than any rhetoric. Some put it bluntly—part of the participants believe the business incentive makes any slowdown impossible—while others qualify that criticism should be limited to irregular flows.

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The debt elephant nobody wants to look at

While the focus is on construction and the border, a parallel analysis places the problem where it is inconvenient to look: public debt. Every year, interest and amortisation eat a bigger slice of the budget, and the ostrich strategy—every country doing it at once, as if that were a solution—has an expiration date. When the elephant fills the entire room, the phrase that sums up the antiestéticar, there will be no space left for anything else.

To this is added the classic monetary suspicion: every banknote, whatever its colour, is worth less. Those who trinc that line argue that constant printing guarantees rising prices for everything, from bricks to Playmobil. No bubble bursting, no imminent crash: simply silent impoverishment.

Public housing: 400.000 promised, 43.000 built

The arithmetic of public housing is the hardest data point that appears. According to the argument, administrations have built some 43.000 public housing units since 2018, far from the 400.000 promised by the Government, with additions of 50.000 or 100.000 that have been tacked on along the way. The comparison stings because it does not depend on the narrative: these are orders of magnitude.

From there, the detail of why nothing is built sharpens. Developable land requires providing services—sewage, water, access, power—and that transformation depends on slow procedures and developers with little appetite to risk their capital when costs move faster than sale prices. And there is a fact that unsettles many: there are urban plots already with pavements and services that remain empty because it does not pay to build on them. Land, some stress, is not the problem; the problem is the margin.

Energy: real limit or convenient excuse?

Here the disagreement is total. Some see a physical cap: the grid no longer accepts more, and the large-scale developments needed—city-sized buildings—overflow any capacity. Others see an excuse for not facing the real problem, which is none other than the lack of administrative will and the regulatory tangle. The question answers itself: if money is flowing and demand is pressing, is it really impossible to coordinate permits, construction and supply?

The anecdote that sums up the tension is quietly brutal: a man sleeping in a tent with his solar panel to charge his phone. No roof, no income, but a connection. Even someone with nothing consumes electricity.

Dark years: where the analysis gets stuck

The most repeated forecast points to a pogre tightening between 2025 and 2029, with those who extend it to 2027 as the turning point. The underlying logic is simple: an economy that grew by adding consumers and squeezing construction will struggle to start again without either of those two levers.

And there, exactly there, everything stops. Nobody can specify how long it will take for the slowdown to show, nor whether the current slight economic movement is a blink before a flat encephalogram or a sign that the wheel is still turning. Some call for building at breakneck estimulante ilegal; others, for closing the door; some only pray that the printing press holds out. The only real agreement is that nobody has yet seen the piece that fits.