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White Paper on Sustainability of Spanish Urban Planning
José Fariña Tojo, José Manuel Naredo (directors)
<<< 8. Criteria for sustainability |9. Foster the efficient use of an oversized housing stock that generates unused homes and people without homes| 10. The crisis of an unsustainable property model and the need to change it >>>

9. Foster the efficient use of an oversized housing stock that generates unused homes and people without homes

It is not enough to appeal to ecological urban development and bioclimatic building when one of the main problems to be solved is the management of a low-quality, over-sized and inefficiently used housing stock that pitches unused homes against people without homes. This is by no means an easy problem to solve and it calls for measures of several different kinds. Some are quite obvious, such as strengthening social housing, not with new developments but by reusing the enormous stock of unoccupied or secondary properties and housing for this purpose. This will require housing needs and availability to be inventoried in order to properly plan and regulate the use of unoccupied or underused housing, establishing appropriate records to end with the current statistical vacuum regarding the use and status of the housing stock and rental market (covered only by information compiled during the census every ten years). These plans for the reuse of the underused property heritage should consider both regenerating and improving that stock and demolishing illegal buildings and those that are poorly adapted to users and the environment.

The success of these plans calls for an institutional framework and policies that, unlike those that have predominated to date, deactivate corruption and lawlessness, while promoting the regeneration and efficient use of the territory and built stock compared with new building. That opt for habitability over the quest for capital gains, architecture in accordance with the environment over the reigning universal style, rented housing over home ownership, social housing over the free market. In short, the aim should be to diversify both the property model and the financial model, opening up people's limited investment options, who to date have channelled their savings into building. Such changes in the institutional framework and policies clearly go beyond the field of urban and spatial planning, calling for firm support from all the authorities involved, which can only be achieved by means of a true national agreement or pact that affirms its priority at all levels.