Last week, the director of the CCOO’s economic cabinet, Carlos Martín Urriza, said that promoting home ownership meant returning to the Francoist model “of owners and not proletarians.” Faced with these statements, the networks reacted against it with such force that even a certain communist newspaper echoed it. The tweeters said things like that working your whole life so as not to end up having anything amounts to a modern form of slavery; or that in countries where renting predominates, home ownership is concentrated in a few macro-companies that have to be paid for a lifetime.
Traditionally, the left has advocated for rental housing. But just as in the past what they proposed was to rent public housing (which can have a devastating electoral effect: in Vienna the same party has been ruling for a hundred years thanks to the clientelistic dependence generated by municipal rent), the current reality is that practically all of the rented house belongs to private hands. This means that, if massive access to property is not promoted, inequalities increase.
In our country, for years, millions of modest people accessed the property by paying in installments through the so-called deferred access to the property or the mortgage loan. The result is that today in Spain 46.9% of citizens live in a house for which they do not pay either a landlord (because they are owners), or the bank (because they have already managed to repay the loan). In contrast, in countries where rent predominates over property, more than 3/4 of the population pays their entire life. This causes great problems when the retirement age reaches and the pension does not allow to continue paying the house of the whole life. Perhaps this is why the percentage of tenants has been declining throughout Europe in recent years, and this increase in the percentage of owners is seen as progress.
Despite the evidence that a land of owners is better, progressive preachers keep saying things like those defended by the aforementioned economist-unionist. These rental propagandists often set Germany as an example to follow. They do not tell us that in Germany the highest percentage of tenants is in the popular classes: the wealthy, if they can, buy. While those who need it least stop paying for their house after a few years (when they can repay the loan), those who have less are forced to pay for their house for life (using a much higher percentage of their income than a person with high rent). One of the most frequent arguments of these progressive preachers is usually tearing their clothes because they have to pay the mortgage for thirty years. They hide that the alternative is to pay an increasing rent (that of the mortgage always decreases) for more than double the years… ..
The left was supposed to make proposals aimed at reducing inequality. Promoting rent rather than ownership dramatically increases inequalities, placing citizens who can buy a home at a huge advantage over those who cannot. It is shocking that a trade unionist advocates for the housing policy that generates the most inequalities. The only reasonable explanation is that, as I have been denouncing, the current left has become fake: it speaks of equality, but it always favors the opposite result.
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