Barcelona’s housing mission: from a market-fixing to a market-shaping approach

In many major cities around the world the housing rental market is broken. Barcelona is a case in point: <a href="https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/brick-by-brick_b453b043-en" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">rent is skyrocketing, and is now at record levels when compared with wages</a>. Meanwhile, affordable dwellings are not being delivered by the market at the scale needed to satisfy present and future demand. There is, in short, a market failure. What went wrong? The mainstream approach to addressing the housing crisis has been to move from a rental and social housing model to a private homeownership-based system where the market is the leading housing provider. In line with the neoliberal approach to policy in other areas, the role of the public sector was reduced to being a market-fixer; only correcting market failures when they arise. In the case of housing, this meant that the public sector only aimed to provide social rented housing for extremely low-income families where targeted, means-tested housing allowances were introduced, while public investment in social housing construction was dramatically decreased <a href="https://medium.com/iipp-blog/barcelonas-housing-mission-from-a-market-fixing-to-a-market-shaping-approach-b52f9ab6ae">Read More</a>