PCTE on housing crisis

In Madrid, finding an apartment is getting complicated. I'm not saying anything new. Rents are sky-high, buying a home requires a down payment that many workers will never see in their lifetime, and finding something reasonably close to work has become almost a risky business. That's why it's comforting to see that there are still institutions willing to lend a hand when a housing problem arises. Planifica Madrid, a public company of the Community of Madrid, bought a penthouse in the Chamberí neighborhood in April for 6.3 million euros. Almost 500 square meters, 200 of which are terraces. A small apartment.

The explanation was that Isabel Díaz Ayuso needed a place to work while the Royal Post Office was being renovated. It makes sense. Anyone who's ever done home renovations has been there. They start by saying they're going to replace the windows, and you end up asking a friend if they know of a 500-square-meter penthouse on Martínez Campos Street where you could stay for a while. That's renovation for you.

There was, however, a small problem. The penthouse couldn't be used as an office. What bad luck. Six million and some euros and nobody had thought of that detail. I don't know how you buy a home, but I imagine that before parting with an amount equivalent to several lifetimes' salary, you check a few things: whether it has any outstanding debts, whether the electrical wiring is sound, whether the upstairs neighbor plays the trombone, whether there's a drug den downstairs… If you're also buying with other people's money, perhaps you're even interested in knowing if the property is suitable for what you say you're buying it for. Maybe it's just me, being old-fashioned.

From then on, the explanations became less straightforward. The president could use it, or perhaps a council member; it could serve for meetings, but in no case would it be an official residence. Finally, as the apartment began to cause more problems than it solved, the decision was made to sell it. And Ayuso later explained that she knew nothing about these purchases because Planifica Madrid buys and sells real estate, and that's not within her purview.

There's an administrative marvel contained in all this. A penthouse is purchased for the president's use, but the president knows nothing about the purchase of penthouses for her use. Let's acknowledge that, as a system, it has advantages. One can simultaneously be the recipient of a transaction and completely unaware of it. It's a rather advanced form of separation of powers.

The Madrid social democratic opposition has, naturally, found plenty to talk about for a while. They'll ask questions, request files, discuss accountability, and, if they can, try to convert the square footage of the terrace into votes. That's their job. But I have the impression that if we stop there, we'll miss the most interesting part of this whole affair.

What's truly curious isn't the 485 square meters. It's that such an operation could seem perfectly normal.

Madrid is a community where thousands of workers dedicate an unbearable portion of their salary to paying for a roof over their heads. Young people with jobs still living at home with their parents, families increasingly forced to move further from their workplaces or the neighborhoods where they grew up, rooms rented at prices that, not so long ago, would have paid for an entire apartment… We've become accustomed to talking about it the way we talk about the August heat: an unavoidable misfortune about which little can be done.

Meanwhile, a public company can shell out 6.3 million euros to temporarily resolve where a president works because her office is under construction, which will also cost a fortune. There's no need to imagine envelopes, conspiracies, or secret rooms for the episode to be politically scandalous. Simply accepting the explanations offered is enough. Perhaps that's even the worst part.

Because the problem is not only determining who decided to buy the penthouse and why no one checked beforehand whether it could be used as an office, but what kind of society we live in where such an operation can seem, even for five minutes, a reasonable solution?

Perhaps because six million euros means very different things depending on your perspective. For someone living on a salary, it's an unimaginable sum; for an administration that buys and sells assets, it's a real estate transaction. And therein lies a significant part of the issue. We've managed to make it perfectly normal for housing to be an asset, an investment, property that can be bought, sold, and used to generate returns, while it's starting to seem almost utopian that someone who works can simply afford to live near their workplace.

The penthouse in Chamberí has ​​a touch of caricature about it because it concentrates that logic into 485 square meters and a 200-square-meter terrace. But the logic doesn't begin or end there. The housing problem isn't a lack of discourse on housing, housing plans, or promises of housing. Housing exists. What exists is a society in which access to it depends on how much each person can afford, and in which an apartment can be, more than a place to live, an investment, an asset, or a business opportunity.

That's why perhaps the least extraordinary thing about this whole story is that a public company could buy a penthouse for 6.3 million. What's truly extraordinary is that a worker can buy one for three hundred thousand.

In the end, they're going to sell the penthouse, and this whole thing will probably just become another one of those controversies that current events consume at breakneck speed. Some will conclude that the mistake was corrected and that's the end of it.

Perhaps. But for a few weeks, the Madrid government has given us a nice metaphor about housing. For some, the problem is making ends meet after paying rent. For others, it's finding a temporary office space. To each their own.