Why Spain can't make housing a free public service like health care

Housing cannot replicate the health care and education model because it is a capital-intensive stock asset, not a current-spending service, and because its decommodification would clash with the wealth of the 75% of Spanish families who own homes, with banks' mortgage balance sheets and with European fiscal rules. The structural analysis is sound; the revolutionary conclusion is another matter.

The question is a fair one: if Spain managed to safeguard health care and education as universal, free public services, why hasn't the same peine with housing? The answer lies not in a lack of political will or in some supposed conspiracy, but in a confluence of structural, macroeconomic, legal and sociopolitical factors that make housing a radically different case. It is worth going through them one by one, because each on its own would already be a serious obstacle.

## A nation of homeowners built by design

The Franco dictatorship explicitly chose to turn workers into homeowners in order to defuse social conflict. The slogan was clear: a country of owners, not proletarians. That institutional design survived the transition to democracy and endures to this day. More than **70-75%** of Spanish families own their home, and that figure is not a neutral statistic: it conditions any public policy.

Housing is not seen merely as a good for use. It is the main savings, inheritance and deferred-pension asset of the Spanish middle class. Any measure that reduces the market value of the existing stock directly erodes the net worth of most of the electorate. And that electorate votes. There is no need to invoke conspiracies: it is enough to look at who loses money when property is decommodified.

The result is a political trap that is hard to escape. Governments that have tried to regulate the rental market or expand the public housing stock have run into resistance that comes not only from large landlords, but from millions of small owners who see their flat as the only inheritance they will leave their children.

## Property underpins banks' balance sheets

Spain's productive structure has cyclically depended on the real estate sector, construction and mortgage credit as engines of GDP and employment. Spanish banks' balance sheets are largely backed by mortgage portfolios and real estate collateral. A planned depreciation of land and properties would destabilise banking solvency ratios and private credit.

There is a second actor that is often forgotten: the small and medium rentier. The rental market in Spain is not solely in the hands of large funds or listed REITs (socimis). A notable share belongs to individual owners who supplement stagnant wages or pensions with the rent from one or two flats. This sociological bloc has considerable political resistance capacity against any decommodification.

Regulating an investment fund is not the same as regulating a widow who relies on 600 euros of rent to make ends meet. Any government that ignores that distinction crashes.

## Health care and education are flows; housing is stock

Here lies the underlying economic difference, the one that explains why the model is not replicated even if there were political will. Health care and education are services intensive in current spending: doctors' and teachers' salaries, recurring operating maintenance. They are financed from the annual budget and delivered without needing to build anything new each year.

Housing, by contrast, is a capital-intensive fixed-stock asset. Building or expropriating a universal public stock capable of meeting demand would require an outlay of hundreds of billions of euros before delivering the first service. There is no way around that initial investment barrier.

To that is added spatial rigidity. Housing cannot be provided in a vacuum: it requires developable land with infrastructure in areas with dynamic labour markets. Urban land in high-pressure areas is a finite, positional resource, subject to differential rents and natural scarcity. Health care does not suffer from this problem: a hospital in Soria and one in Madrid cost about the same and do not compete for an exhaustible resource. Land does.

## European fiscal rules and Article 47

The Maastricht Treaty framework and EU fiscal rules impose strict limits on the deficit, at **3% of GDP**, and on public debt, at **60% of GDP**. Financing the acquisition or construction of a public stock that rose from the current **~2%** of total dwellings to the 20-30% seen in the Netherlands or Austria would require borrowing incompatible with those ceilings and with European Commission oversight.

EU directives prioritise the free movement of capital and competition in open markets. Massive state interventions in price setting or public monopolies of provision often collide with EU rules on state aid or distortion of the internal market.

Spain's legal architecture adds another brake. The 1978 Constitution enshrines education as a fundamental right of direct application in Article 27, and health care as a guiding principle with its own general law in Article 43. Housing appears in Article 47, also as a guiding principle and not as a subjective right directly enforceable in the courts. That difference is not rhetorical: it determines what can be claimed and what cannot.

Exclusive powers over urban planning and territorial organisation rest with the autonomous communities, while land management and building permits depend on municipal councils. Any state-level strategy requires intergovernmental consensus that is practically impossible in a fragmented political map. State housing laws repeatedly face constitutional challenges for encroaching on regional powers.

## Real estate as a global safe haven

Spain operates within the global capital circuit as a recipient economy for services, tourism and real estate investment. The boom in tourist housing, purchases by non-residents and the arrival of institutional funds have turned Spanish property into a globalised financial instrument, a hedge against inflation.

Decommodifying or radically restricting this sector would trigger an outflow of foreign capital and diplomatic and trade tensions in international financial markets. This is not a hypothesis: it is what peine every time a country tried to close its property market to foreign investment.

The conclusion of the analysis is that health care and education were able to be safeguarded in the twentieth century as instruments for reproducing the labour force, benefiting both capital and workers. Housing, by contrast, has become fully integrated as the very infrastructure of financial speculation and the extraction of property rents in contemporary capitalism.

From there to concluding that a revolution is needed is a leap the analysis does not justify on its own. The factors described explain why the model is not replicated, not that there is no room for intervention. There are intermediate formulas —public rental stock, regulation of short-term rentals, public land— that operate within those limits without breaking them. Whether they are enough to solve the problem is another matter. This article describes an open economic and political debate; any decision about housing affects wealth, debt and contracts, so it is wise to seek advice before taking personal positions.