Ideas, strategies and projects that give rise to pilot projects. They tackle the challenges raised by the stakeholders involved and which are found in particular places in Barcelona or Medellín.
Some 3.8% of Barcelona's flats are empty, the equivalent of over 31,000 homes. 92.1% are for residential use, 3.3% for other uses, including professional activities, and 0.8% are under construction.
According to the White Paper on housing, 5% is regarded as the appropriate percentage of empty flats required for the smooth running of the residential housing market.
Despite that, one of the City Council's priorities was to make these empty flats socially useful. And several incentives have been launched to achieve just that.
Empty flats are directly purchased by the City Council and then restored and put onto the rented-housing market. 106 empty flats have been acquired in Ciutat Vella and a further 164 in the rest of the city.
Flats on sale that that are unable to find buyers are rented out as subsidised social housing, as is the case with the 189 Regesa flats in the Torre Baró neighbourhood, all of which are currently social rented housing.
And finally, individual owners are being encouraged to hand their empty flats over to the City Council for social rented housing. This initiative is being carried out by the Third Sector Round Table.
Barcelona's stock of Social Rented Housing consists of 10,426 flats. This stock has gone up by 4% over the last four years. But the most important growth was seen in the flats in this stock that are intended for social rented housing, in other words, where their tenants pay no more than 30% of their income. We have seen a rise in the number of such social housing flats over the four years, from 1,140 to 2,300, representing a 102% growth.
