Casa 47: A large bureaucracy, very little affordable housing and a disgrace for those looking for a home

The Spanish Government presents Casa 47 as a response to the problem of access to housing. It is supposed to be a public and affordable rental scheme designed to help people who cannot afford the prices in the private market. However, when we look beyond the headlines, the figures paint a very different picture: an expensive structure, a limited supply and a highly questionable impact in the areas where rents are actually soaring.

According to OKDIARIO, Casa 47 spends more than €4.5 million a year on staff salaries. Its workforce consists of 112 people, including a management team whose nine members collectively earn around €800,000 per year. All of this is to manage, for now, approximately 645 homes.

It is difficult not to ask a basic question: Was it really necessary to create a structure of more than one hundred employees, with a multimillion-euro salary bill, in order to launch just over six hundred rental properties?

In a country where access to housing has become one of the main social concerns, where young people are delaying moving out and families are having to allocate an ever-growing share of their income to rent, this imbalance is outrageous. This is not about questioning whether public services need professionals. It is about demanding that every euro of public money produces a real benefit for citizens.

And, for the time being, Casa 47 does not appear to be meeting that objective.

The first call for applications includes 638 homes in 42 municipalities, according to the analysis published by idealista/news. Only 32 homes are located in provincial capitals. There are no properties available in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia or Málaga—cities where thousands of people compete for an insufficient supply and face rents that, in many cases, have become unaffordable.

Most of the properties are located in small towns far from the main employment, education and services centres. More than 80% of the municipalities included have fewer than 50,000 inhabitants. Promoting affordable housing outside major cities can also be positive; no one should be excluded simply because they live in a small town. However, presenting this initiative as a response to the rental crisis while leaving out the main pressured housing markets is, at the very least, deeply inconsistent.

Because affordable housing cannot simply be a label. It must be a real solution.

A real solution requires sufficient numbers, the right locations and prices that are consistent with people’s incomes. It is not enough to place homes on the market if they are located where the need is lower or if the prices raise questions about their actual affordability. The idealista analysis also points out that some rents exceed €1,000 per month. In certain municipalities, it has been warned that the financial effort required from households may exceed 35% of their income.

So what exactly are we talking about? Affordable rent or public housing with an attractive name?

The most concerning aspect is the impression that the creation of an administrative apparatus has been prioritised over the effective provision of homes. Public resources have been allocated to offices, management, senior officials, online platforms, call centres and administration, while the initial supply remains insignificant compared with the scale of the problem.

A website does not solve the housing crisis. A portal does not bring rents down. A newly created public body is useless if it cannot mobilise enough homes in the right places and at genuinely affordable prices.

Citizens do not need more announcements or institutional photographs celebrating the launch of another platform. They need results: available homes, transparent procedures, rents that do not force families out of their neighbourhoods and efficient management of public resources.

Spending more than €4.5 million a year on salaries to manage just over six hundred homes is a disgrace if it is not accompanied by rapid, verifiable and proportionate growth in the supply of housing. And if the priority continues to be maintaining an expensive structure rather than placing useful public housing on the market, Casa 47 risks becoming yet another symbol of the distance between political speeches and the reality faced by people looking for a home.

Housing does not need more expensive bureaucracy. It needs homes.

Fewer offices, less propaganda and more keys in the hands of those who need them.