Spain is experiencing a time when developers are in good health and real estate developments are working well, but the sector faces the challenge of urban planning. There is an urgent need for a land law that eliminates bureaucratic obstacles and shortens deadlines. A Legal Security Law is needed to provide greater security to a development and that is not subject to the court being able to knock it down for different reasons. There is no doubt that the implementation of measures throughout the urban transformation process reduces the economic cost of the real estate product and, consequently, the cost passed on to the consumer, but also results in greater legal certainty for the system, making it more predictable, encouraging the .
“We must try to move towards much more flexible legislation on land. The land law of 1956 marked a before and after in Spanish urban planning, with more interventions and more planning and what it brought was a rise in land and greater speculation. What the citizen wants is more certainty. Every land law that has been given, with the exception of the land law and appraisals of 1998, have followed this line of making more interventions and what has been achieved is to increase prices and more speculation. We need new, more agile laws, more flexible laws that give certainty to the citizen”, explains Raimundo Herraiz, general director of Urbanism of the Autonomous Community of Madrid,
Along these same lines, José María Morente, director of urban planning and housing at the Marbella City Council, declares that “we have reached an unsustainable situation in urban planning. We have a multitude of general plans and it takes a long time to process them from the Administration. It takes 9 years to process a general plan and an average of 4 years to annul the general plan by the courts of justice. Every time a procedure is missing, the entire plan is annulled. The State has been promising a state law of legal certainty in urban planning for years and it hasn’t arrived. We have a major problem because urban planning is necessary to order a city”.
Spain is a country that does not have a scarcity of raw material, which is the soil, but nevertheless, and this, according to the experts, has a clear origin in the political decisions of interventionism, so they hope that the new legislation in this regard will go towards a trend more flexible and more liberalizing. “In Spain, in our legal system, the land law is our housing law because article 47 of the Constitution empowers public administrations to safeguard the right to housing of all citizens by acting on the land, then the land law is what determines all kinds of reservations and transfers necessary to allocate land to affordable housing, which is what we have a huge shortage of,” says Carolina Roca, vice president of Asprima and general director of the Roca Group, who adds that “Land laws have been very interventionist to the detriment of activity and economic growth, but on the other hand, they have been very social and guarantor in favor of the generation of land for housing at affordable prices generated by private investment. For What is essential is to speed up so that land is truly developed with that generation of protected land destined for affordable housing, which is the great breadbasket of the generation. ation of new developments”.
In Andalusia, the Law to Promote the Sustainability of the Territory of Andalusia (List) came into force on December 23, 2021 and was created to unblock the urban planning of the region, which in many places has been paralyzed for more than 10 years. Since its entry into force, Morente explains what has been achieved: “We have made an instruction applying the List law and if before the urbanized land in Marbella was 40 million meters, now with the entry of the List we have 50 million, 25% more urban land and there are cases of urbanizations where a piece of paper was missing and the List does not consider it urban land and now it is included. Therefore, with the application of the new List law we have more urban land. In addition, it is finally recognized that the urban competences of urban planning are held by the City Councils and from the entry of the List in Andalusia, the general plans are approved by the City Councils”.
The Omnibus Law is focused on economic recovery
As for the bill that is being processed in Madrid in the Assembly, it is not a law comparable to the List because the Omnibus Law, which will be approved this year, is a law focused on economic recovery where many legislative texts are modified, among them that of the soil, but all the measures are focused on economic recovery.
“On the land issue, we want to adapt to the state law because this has given many problems of interpretation and has ruined some developments such as the Mahón Calderón or the Bernabéu due to different interpretations that the courts have later ruled against since the law is not there. adapted to state legislation,” says Herraiz, who adds that “in the Community of Madrid we are also working in parallel on a new comprehensive land law that will be approved in the next legislature and we are going to incorporate the land legal regime that brought the consolidated text, that is, urbanized land and rural land. Our idea is that within this Omnibus Law that we have in progress, in what refers to actions on urban land we are going to adjust the charges to improve the attraction of investment, because the charges are still a tax on the land that makes it more expensive. We also adapt to the recast text with regard to urban transformations and the terms in the procedures will be reduced by having greater legal certainty and there will no longer be those studies on normative interpretation and finally, we include the possibility of making transfers of use “.
Although the Lista Law is not comparable with the Omnibus Law focused on economic recovery, but with regard to the comprehensive land law that is being worked on in the Community of Madrid, it should be more similar to the Lista Law in form and structure. According to David Ortega, director of the Real Estate Master of Rebs, these aspects should be included: “General planning is no longer a competence of the Autonomous Communities, but of the City Councils. As for the detailed general planning that marks more guidelines and not in the meantime in the detailed and creativity is allowed in new areas.Buildable land becomes a residual, it is not that it disappears, but that it is included within the rustic and I would also highlight a figure: the preserved rustic land, that is, that kind of land sectorized or non-sectorized urbanizable. All this with the aim of improving access to housing for sale or rent”.
José Antonio Pérez, director of the Real Estate Business School, concludes that time is money: “If we want to make affordable housing, we have to shorten the time because the situation we have with the rise in the cost of materials and the increase in IPC, which has come to us, so it is essential to implement the Land Law and for this public-private collaboration to be able to create an affordable housing stock. There is still a lot to resolve and if it is not done, we will continue with the Law of 1956 that applies an interventionism dynamiting the right to property of citizens”.
Within the Omnibus Law
The Omnibus Law, whose full name is the Law of Urgent Measures for the Promotion of Economic Activity and the Modernization of the Administration of the Community of Madrid, modifies 50 normative texts -among them, 31 laws, three legislative decrees, six new regulations of legal status and two decrees. With regard to Urban Planning, it will make it possible for town councils to build public housing on dotacional land or for developers to buy available building meters in the same area.
The new rule simplifies and speeds up procedures, to lighten the urban process in order to facilitate the attraction of investment. They also seek to relax the management mechanisms and facilitate the processing of urban planning licenses so that, for example, what would take a year to process, could be solved in two months.
Legal certainty also comes from the clarification of the rules of the game and the clear definition of the agents involved in private actions, license requests, administrative transfers or public-private collaborations. Lastly, there is a need for economic activation and reactivation of rural environments, towns and cities by regulating the uses of non-developable land.
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