• Law The Generalitat obliges banks and funds to renew social rents
  • The Ministry of Government wants to regulate rents to limit their price and avoid gentrification

Catalonia will pass a law to lower the prices of new rentals that are signed in the main cities of the community. The deputies of JxCat, ERC, En Comú Podem and the CUP have registered a bill this morning that the Tenants Union has drafted with the support of the Justice Department of the Generalitat . The objective is to stop the increases in the cost of housing for tenants, which has grown by 32% in Catalonia between 2015 and 2019, according to statistics from the Govern. The four formations that support the normative project have an absolute majority in the chamber, which is expected to enter into force through rapid approval.

The proposal of law contemplates that all the agreements that are signed from the time the regulation is implemented cannot exceed the price of the previous contract that governed the domicile. In the event that the last amount exceeds the average for your environment, the new contract must reduce it and adopt at most the reference amount set by the Generalitat for the area.

The promoters of the reform thus hope to achieve moderate reductions in half of the houses that are already rented. The apartments that are rented for the first time will have to adjust to the price index that the Catalan Government stipulates. Failure to comply is expected to be punished with fines. Newly built flats, real estate that has undergone a major renovation or cases where there is a relationship between the owner and the tenant are exempt from complying with the rule.

The Tenants Union has explained that the rule seeks to contain increases in rents and, in turn, reduce them in the 60 Catalan towns with more than 20,000 inhabitants, with sharp increases in prices and greater demand for affordable housing. They are populations that, together, house five million inhabitants, 70% of the Catalan population.

The platform stresses that "it is the first time that rental prices in Catalonia are regulated." To achieve this, it is covered in the Civil Code , the rule that regulates leases.

For the Tenants Union, it is "a minimum regulation" and "a first step". "We must remember that rents have increased 20 times more than wages in the last five years in Catalonia. The situation is very serious," he stressed in a statement. The organization calls for the measure to be implemented quickly, "given the extreme urgency" to access affordable housing in Catalonia, where 1,571 evictions of tenants were carried out in the first quarter of 2020. The CUP affirms that an extraordinary meeting of the Parlament so that the law can rise to approval in the next plenary session for "the need to urgently regulate rental prices."

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  • Catalonia
  • CUP
  • ERC
  • Comú Podem
  • Rental
  • living place
  • economy

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