The Madrid Assembly has rejected, with the votes of PP, PSOE and Más Madrid, the Vox initiative that proposed incorporating the purchase option in the new tenders and concessions of the Comunidad de Madrid's Plan Vive.
In this way, the Non-Law Proposition promoted by the party led by Isabel Pérez Moñino, which urged the regional Executive to carry out the necessary studies to include in future developments of the Plan Vive the rent-to-own formula, ensuring that the exercise of said option remained linked to the maintenance of the price limits of protected housing, has not prospered.
In defense of the proposal, Vox deputy Beatriz Tejero has described as "sad" that all Madrileños who are paying their rent in Plan Vive homes will not be able to save to buy a home of their own. "With public land, without the Community spending a euro, homes are being built that in the future could be the owned home of many Madrileños. That future is in our hands, it just needs someone to study it," she pointed out.
Tejero maintains that the right to decent housing "is not exhausted" by access to rent, but also includes the possibility of aspiring to ownership as a "form of stability, security and capital accumulation throughout a working life," and criticizes that it is a public housing program that "by design excludes the possibility of purchase."
From the PP, deputy Ignacio Catalá has acknowledged that housing is one of the main problems for Spaniards and that "of course there must be public policies that are rent-to-own." However, he has raised the legal difficulties that arise "when the homes we are talking about have been built on assets of a public domain nature, what do we do with them?" he expressed.
In this regard, he recalled that these homes are "inalienable, unseizable and imprescriptible" and stressed that the Community had already announced that the next regulation will contemplate rent-to-own, while Vox "copies" their proposals.
The left demands to shield public housing
On behalf of the PSOE, deputy Javier Guardiola has intervened with a harsh criticism of the Plan Vive, focusing on the detected defects, the final cost, and the rejection of awardees. In his opinion, the solution is not through Vox's proposal, but by guaranteeing that public housing remains as such indefinitely. He argues that a strong public housing stock would have avoided "the problems that are being experienced in controlling housing prices."
Guardiola has also championed the State Housing Plan of Pedro Sánchez's Government, ratified in the Housing Sector Conference this Thursday, by which it will be "obliged for the first time for that money to be allocated to housing being permanently protected" and so that the right cannot "sell it to vulture funds as they have been doing with public housing in this region."
The Más Madrid deputy Jorge Moruno has also expressed his opposition to the initiative, who began his speech questioning the "achievements" of the Community of Madrid and denouncing that it is "at the tail end of Europe in public housing." "Thirty years with the same old song of liberalizing land, but without housing prices falling," he criticized.
In relation to the purchase option proposed by Vox, he argued that the Administration must guarantee "security and a home for families" and not "speculative assets," especially "on public land." Therefore, he reiterated the importance of protected housing maintaining permanent protection.