The new “affordable” homes from Almeida: handing over public land for a company to rent apartments for 950 euros and sell them for 324,000

The Madrid City Council is going to sell 10 plots of public land valued at 82 million euros to build 1,017 “affordable rental” homes with a purchase option. The houses will be located in two of the new developments in the southeast, Los Berrocales and Los Ahijones, both in the Vicálvaro district, and will be put out to tender in the coming months after being approved by the Governing Board, announced this Tuesday the mayor, José Luis Martínez-Almeida (PP). For a 90 square meter apartment, the owning companies must charge tenants 949.50 euros per month, details the Madrid city council in the note sent to the media.

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The plots ―which reach 70,410 square meters of buildable surface― will be divided into four lots, three for Los Berrocales and one for Los Ahijones, both future neighboring neighborhoods already under construction. 50% of the thousand homes will be reserved for people under 35 years old. Tenants, once seven years of rental have passed, will be able to opt to buy the house and will be credited for what they have already paid. The City Council information indicates that the sale price will be 3,600 euros per square meter. That is, the companies that buy the public land must sell the 90 square meter apartments for 324,000 euros. “Part of the monthly payments made during all that time under the rental regime will serve to capitalize the purchase,” they detail in the note.

The ten plots are valued at 82,061,597 euros and will be distributed as follows: in Los Berrocales, 744 homes can be built divided into eight lots and in Los Ahijones 273 houses on two plots. “This is a step in the right direction, not only that there are public rental homes, but that there are homes with a purchase option, which is what gives people security,” Almeida commented during the presentation of the Veranos de la Villa.

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Antonio Giraldo, PSOE councilor, is critical of the City Council’s “formula.” “They can do it in a thousand ways, but the result is the decapitalization of public land. That must not be overlooked. Although it then has other conditions, when you sell public land, public control ends up slipping away, and the market always looks for loopholes to make a profit. We have seen it with the Mahou-Calderón case,” he comments by phone. The councilor refers to 12 public plots in Arganzuela, next to Madrid Río, which the Almeida Government tendered two years ago for several cooperatives to build more than 600 affordable rental apartments for 15 years. The land went out to tender and remained unawarded, but one of them, later on, was acquired by a cooperative that now sells the apartments for 600,000 euros without specifying the affordable rent, as revealed this Tuesday by Eldiario.es. The mayor has defended that these developments “scrupulously comply with the law.”

The only way to permanently control that this does not happen, Giraldo points out, is public ownership. “It could be housing from EMVS [the Municipal Housing and Land Company]. In the developments announced today, once the seven years have passed, if you don’t want to buy it or can’t, can they keep the rent for you? Who says they won’t end up on the free market? That is the problem, crumbs for today and hunger for tomorrow, and when there are no more public plots, how will it be controlled? Land is a finite resource. We have barely 10,000 public homes and more than 60,000 applicants. If you sell it, you never get it back,” criticizes the socialist councilor.

Rita Maestre, leader of Más Madrid in the capital, has also mentioned the “scandal” of the Mahou-Calderón project, named so because it occupies the land of the former Mahou factory and the Vicente Calderón stadium, as an example of “misuse” of the sale of municipal land. “We are basically underselling and misappropriating public land that should be destined for families, for couples starting a life, for young people in Madrid who have difficulties acquiring a home. It is yet another way to hide a windfall in which a developer or builder can sell developments for 700,000 euros,” the councilor declared to the media.

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