The reproaches have not been long in coming. The proposal of the Canary Coalition (CC), from the regional government, to build protected housing on rural land to alleviate the housing emergency in the Islands has hit a wall even within its own formation. The party has sweetened the initiative as the days go by. But he has opened the door to an incessant barrage of criticism, just as he did when he approved the Land Law in Fernando Clavijo’s first term as head of the island Executive.
“Improvised and sudden”: CC Fuerteventura attacks the Canary Islands Government’s proposal to allow construction on rustic land
The occurrence was announced for the first time by the director of the Canary Islands Housing Institute (ICAVI), Antonio Ortega, who made no distinction between the typology of the houses to be built and said that what was agreed in La Palma, where the reconstruction policies after the volcanic eruption will allow the urbanization of real estate on rustic land, it must be exported to the rest of the Archipelago. Then Clavijo said that they would only be officially protected housing (VPO). Then Nueva Canarias and the PSOE outlined reprimands. Even CC in Fuerteventura believes that it is an “improvised” and “sudden” idea.
For the experts consulted, the proposal is one more step towards the liberalization of rural land in the Canary Islands. But many of them are not surprised. Víctor Jiménez Barrado has a doctorate in Geography from the University of Extremadura (UE) and is currently a professor at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC). In 2017 he published a academic research titled Urban deregulation of rural land in Spain. Cantabria and Extremadura as case studies. He asserts that what happens in the Islands has happened in other autonomous communities.
“It is a policy that is very much in line with neoliberal ideas and that is in tune with what they understand by rustic land, a storage room in which everything fits, empty of meaning and content, when it is just the opposite. “In it is the natural and cultural heritage of the Canary Islands,” Jiménez reflects. For the geographer, this discourse mixes the concepts of value and price. On the one hand, “in urban planning eyes”, rustic land is the cheapest. “But that does not mean that it does not have important value,” especially in the Canary Islands, a region with high percentages of protected spaces.
Jiménez has studied in depth the proliferation of illegal houses on rural land and its flexibility. And although many of these urban planning actions have arisen as a result of reclassifications and balls urban planning, what the Canarian Government intends to do now is to “open a door” and for the building to be “consolidated” for an issue that, in principle, is temporary (the housing crisis). The expert believes that precisely “what they are looking for” could be done in another way, with other mechanisms, such as those included in the Canarian Territorial Planning Law or projects of insular interest. But what they are trying to do is “go from the extraordinary and punctual to opening a gap that allows this to be the general tone.” And it is in that context that there could be room for “new developments, whatever their type.”
The professor of Physical Geography at the ULPGC, Emma Pérez Chacón, points out that the key to this issue is really knowing how much percentage of developable land has not been developed on the Islands. Because the axiom of the president of ICAVI was that: there is no more, so it’s time to crush the rustic. However, the data refute this.
The Urban Information System (SIU) is an instrument of the Ministry of Transport, Housing and Mobility that facilitates knowledge of the urban reality and planning forecasts for all regions of Spain, allowing comparisons to be made between them. It specifies that in the Canary Islands, non-developable land represents 92.1%, consolidated land 4.1% and unconsolidated land 0.5%. It also includes the development areas and the planned buildability in each municipality as of 2023.
In the last report, the SIU points out that the Archipelago plans to build 46.69 square kilometers of residential areas, according to planning, but has only executed 31.7%. In fact, the document specifies even more and points out that the Islands have only developed 29.4% of the homes planned for construction, a total of 364,207. Within the Autonomous Community there are towns that fare better than others. For example: La Matanza de Acentejo (81.6%), Yaiza (75.4%) and San Miguel de Abona (69.4%) lead the execution of the real estate projected in their respective general management plans. While places like Ingenio (11.3%), Santa Cruz de Tenerife (10.6%), Santa Brígida (7.4%) and Teguise (3.7%) still have a long way to go.
The figures suggest, then, that the current planning of the Canary Islands foresees significant amounts of land to be incorporated into the urban fabric. That it doesn’t seem necessary to pull the rustic one. Environmentalists oppose this.
“To do so would be to influence an obsolete development model that is causing the collapse of this land. Until now, they had only been concerned with facilitating the development of tourism and forgotten social problems. Hence the rise in housing prices and the lack of supply,” says Eustaquio Villalba, geographer and spokesperson for the Association of Friends of Nature of Tenerife (ATAN). “And now, which is a consequence of their actions, they try to resolve it at the expense of the heritage of all the Canary Islands. It is absolutely rejectable,” he adds.
Villalba recalls that the rustic soil of the Archipelago preserves “the original vegetation” of the autonomy and, at the same time, “can have agricultural use”, despite not having been fully used until then. He highlights the “landscape impact” that the measure would have and the motivations that could be behind it. He gives the example of Adeje. There, the City Council has declared the development of 16 urban plans to increase the Public Land Assets (PPS), among them that of Puertito de Adeje (Cuna del Alma), as a response to the housing crisis. The declaration would allow the “treatment” of protected species, such as the famous sad viper, “susceptible” to appearing in more parts of the region.
“Housing construction will always be behind the population growth that we are experiencing,” suggests Villalba. “Politicians are wanting to build more roads, more trains, more tourist developments… But the problem is that the Islands do not believe. The surface area does not increase every year. It is as if we had a car very fast on the road and, instead of braking, we widened the roads and removed obstacles so that it does not crash. But that can not be. “We have to stop.”
María Ángeles Nieto, biologist at Ecologistas en Acción, argues along the same lines. “It is one thing that in La Palma it has been approved out of necessity [lo de construir en suelo rústico]. But that this extends to the rest of the Canary Islands seems ridiculous to me.” The expert highlights that the coronavirus pandemic and successive supply crises have revealed the external dependence of the Archipelago. And that is why it is so important to “have your own land reserve” to draw on as soon as the alarm goes off. Otherwise, it would only serve for “urban speculation.”
For his part, Ángel Lobo, doctor in Administrative Law from the University of La Laguna (ULL) and specialist in territorial planning and management, states that solving the housing emergency in the Canary Islands is “very complicated”, so he would not take a dim view. the construction of VPOs on rural land, although it recognizes that the Autonomous Community “is not the most appropriate place to carry out these operations either.” The National Institute of Statistics (INE) estimated last summer that the Islands have 211,000 empty homes. But Lobo clarifies that putting all those houses on the market is not that simple. In fact, this is evidenced by the plan devised by the Government of the Canary Islands to do so between 2022 and 203: only one was put into social rental.
The expert believes that the urban land of the Canary Islands cities “can be used even more”, raising the height of the buildings and implementing what architects call “sponging”, that is, when a neighborhood grows in density, but respect the scale. Of course, he concludes that “there is no magic solution” and that of the housing problem in the Archipelago “we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg.”
2024-01-21 16:55:58
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