This article is part of The Housing Fix, a series of dialogues with experts from cities around the world exploring affordable housing solutions and innovative ways to tackle the housing crisis.
Barcelona, Catalonia, has become a legislative laboratory for addressing access to affordable housing, although many of the measures adopted are viewed with concern by numerous legal experts. According to these experts, the reforms approved in recent years have eroded principles of civil law and, as a consequence, have weakened both the property and rental markets. Faced with what they consider the ineffectiveness of public housing policies, civil society and academia have begun to mobilize.
Last week, Chantal Moll de Alba Lacuve, Professor of Civil Law at the University of Barcelona and Director of the Chair of Registry Law at the University of Barcelona; Anna Bedmar, co-founder of habitacion.com; Carlos Tudela Desantes, President of FAM(H)S (Large Families in Supportive Homes); and Sara Martínez, Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Valencia and collaborator with FAM(H)S, shared practical solutions and innovative practices in law at a roundtable discussion.
What follows is a slightly edited transcript of a conversation in Spanish that took place on June 26, 2026 via video call.
Susana F. Molina: What is shared and temporary ownership? Why would you recommend this type of tenure as an alternative for accessing stable and sustainable housing?
Chantal Moll de Alba Lacuve: In 2015, Law 19/2015 was enacted in Catalonia as one of the solutions for accessing affordable housing that doesn’t fall under the binary of exclusive ownership or a rental agreement and that regulates shared ownership. [These models in Catalonia are relatively unusual internationally. They don’t simply subsidize buyers; they redefine the legal concept of ownership by splitting it either over time (temporary ownership) or between parties (shared ownership).]
In shared ownership, there are two owners: the physical owner and the legal owner. The physical owner has the exclusive right of use, which they pay for in installments towards full ownership to the legal owner. The physical owner’s share increases while the legal owner’s share decreases. You essentially buy the property in installments, but you already have the right to use the property. What does this allow? It lowers the cost. The idea here is that, with a smaller investment, one can have exclusive enjoyment of the property, but with only, for example, 25% ownership, with the ultimate goal of eventually acquiring 100%.
An important element in understanding this arrangement and distinguishing it from co-ownership is that there is no right to partition. In any ordinary co-ownership, if you are a co-owner with someone, you can always request the division of ownership, whereas here it is prohibited to ensure the owner’s peace of mind in enjoying their property.
Furthermore, shared ownership is transferable; it has all the characteristics of a real right. If I buy a property with a 25% share and I die, the 25% is transferred to my children, and the remaining 75% belongs to the legal owner.
Another form of intermediate tenure that we promoted as a solution for accessing affordable housing was the right of superficies, the right to build on someone else’s land. The right of superficies is a real right that allows a person (the superficiary) to build or plant on someone else’s land and acquire ownership of the structure, legally separating ownership of the land from ownership of the building. I was fortunate enough to publish my doctoral thesis on this topic, and at a conference I gave, the Barcelona Municipal Housing Authority attended. Following this, the Barcelona City Council began developing projects under this right, setting several precedents for practical application, whereas in the case of shared ownership, examples are few and far between.
Susana F. Molina: Explain why you founded habitacion.com and what it’s all about.
Anna Bedmar: I find Chantal’s explanation very interesting because habitacion.com started as a co-ownership model. When I started working, I lived in a shared apartment for two years, and it took me an average of 11 years to save enough to buy my first home. This isn’t an isolated personal situation. According to Idealista and data verified by the INE (National Institute of Statistics), currently 87% of young Spaniards share accommodation and take an average of 16 years to save enough to buy their first home. So we thought that since young people are living in rooms, why not buy a room instead of renting and save around €15,000 over three or four years to afford their own apartment? Therefore, habitacion.com was born to facilitate access to purchasing an undivided share of a property, a form of co-ownership regulated since 1880, in which one is the formal owner of a percentage of the property from the first day of purchase.
We tried for a long time to talk to banks to create a specific product for co-ownership, but the only thing we managed to get was a personal loan with very good terms. Furthermore, some owners asked us to have their own bathroom and kitchen. So, we started working with developers to build entire buildings of studios, innovating significantly at the architectural level to reduce the buyer’s initial investment. This type of property can be mortgaged more easily because it is an independently registered property, which was one of the challenges we encountered with co-owned rooms.
The main criticism we received was that this model would force everyone to live in small studios. But that is not our proposal. We are another option, designed to meet the needs of a specific stage of life. We currently have 40,000 people on our waiting list despite organic growth through word of mouth.
Susana F. Molina: What are the main challenges facing shared ownership? What measures could make it a more viable option for more people, especially young people, to consider?
Chantal Moll de Alba Lacuve: We have shared ownership legislation that’s like a Ferrari, but we do face several challenges: recognition from the government and financial institutions; and then a lack of awareness among the general public, especially outside of Catalonia. Some time ago, we created a research group called Catalan Housing Law, which also includes administrative law experts, because we’re looking for multidisciplinary solutions to help the market embrace shared ownership and gain a foothold in financial institutions. But it came to a point when I said, “Let’s stop meeting with lawyers because we already have the law; it’s perfect. What we need is to engage with investment funds, with banks, with those who control the money, and get them to commit to this.”
Given this situation, it’s mostly social organizations that have opted for shared ownership. Although, ultimately, when you buy with a mortgage, the buyer owes the bank money while the seller no longer has any assets because they’ve sold everything. The other option that existed before the development of mortgage lending was the sale of real estate on installments. These famous promissory notes were once very important in Spain. Of course, it was even riskier because you sold everything, but you were left without any real right; you didn’t have any ownership share, and the other party paid you in installments. There was a resolutory clause as a guarantee. So, compared to installment sales with promissory notes, shared ownership is much more attractive because the seller of the physical property retains formal ownership, which has value.
The mortgage system has been a crucial avenue for accessing housing, and a significant market has developed within it because consumers understand it and know where to go when they want to buy a home, yet they still buy from the bank in installments.
Anna Bedmar: One of the options we considered at the beginning of our project was: what if we bought the properties outright and sold a portion of each property (a room) each month? This model would have been a great fit for the shared ownership that Chantal explained. We studied it with lawyers for a few months, but it would have placed us within a legal framework regulated by the Bank of Spain. If you do it more than 15 times, it’s considered financing, and you essentially become a bank. Because of this highly regulated framework and its high costs, we decided to focus on other solutions to continue fulfilling our mission: facilitating access to affordable housing.
Susana F. Molina: Explain what FAM(H)S is.
Carlos Tudela Desantes: We are a non-profit organization, and we currently operate at the municipal and local levels in the city of Valencia. We act as intermediaries between homeowners and potential renters. We have focused on large families, the social sector we want to help, because we understand that the crisis has particularly hard hit this group in terms of access to rental housing. Since the pandemic, many large families have gone from having easy access to the rental market to being completely excluded. If the rental market is already very limited, then when we talk about large families with certain minimum requirements, the available supply shrinks exponentially.
Furthermore, we face another problem that isn’t so serious when you’re young: the feeling of being uprooted. When you have young children in school and family nearby, moving causes real hardship.
Then we came up with an idea to help these families by observing a phenomenon that already occurs spontaneously quite often. For example, a family that has been renting for 10 years has just been evicted because their rent was doubled overnight, and they are desperately looking for a place but can’t find anything. Through WhatsApp messages or word of mouth, a landlord with a vacant apartment learns about them and decides to meet them because people have spoken highly of them and they seem reliable. The landlord not only values making a profit, which is perfectly legitimate, but also values security and trust. And by putting a face to these families, this trust carries so much weight that they decide to rent even at below-market prices. Although it may sometimes sound a bit naive, we know that many landlords value this.
At FAM(H)S, we aim to strengthen this emerging phenomenon by first filtering families with stable financial situations, whether they have a regular salary or are self-employed, through objective validations transparently documented on our website. Secondly, we establish collaborative frameworks with real estate agencies specializing in rentals in Valencia. These agencies have the best understanding of how to provide security for landlords, validate documentation, and ensure families’ solvency, as well as the legal mechanisms and non-payment insurance available to guarantee this security. Furthermore, this collaboration includes a significant reduction in real estate agency fees to incentivize transactions.
Thanks to the generosity of many companies, we have been able to advance the FAM(H)S initiative. One such company is Semilla Proyecto, which has provided us with a digital tool that automatically manages all information and data. This makes us a scalable solution to expand access to affordable housing beyond Valencia in the future.
Susana F. Molina: How does a philosophy professor become involved in an initiative like FAM(H)S? How can civil society play an important role in the face of the housing crisis?
Sara Martínez: I’m a restless philosopher, very interested not only in Aristotle but also in the ethical problems of contemporary society. In general, philosophers have a certain sensitivity to the statistical normality of what happens, that is, the status quo. In other words, sensitivity to why things are the way they are, why they have to continue being that way, and at what point, for example, the market dictates, and I obey. So, you start to investigate, to read, and you realize that ultimately it’s almost a mimetic contagion: if someone else is renting for 2,000 euros, why am I renting for 500 euros? Our primary value shouldn’t be money because then we create a society of enslaved people, which is already happening. Ultimately, it boils down to a call to civil society to open our eyes to the grave moral situation. For example, it’s good to donate to an NGO, but we can also do things here and now for our neighbors.
I remember speaking with Carlos, an engineer, on the phone, and he said, “Well, the ideas go this far. Now we’re going to put it into operation. So, thank you for your contribution. Now let the engineers get to work.” It’s wonderful to see an interdisciplinary team working together. If there’s one thing civil society can do, it’s try to inspire and encourage others to help, because it also generates emotional well-being.
I got involved in the project and made many calls to lawyers. They needed an hour-long conversation to understand what we wanted to propose because there’s another problem: the landlord’s legal security, which doesn’t help families with children access rental housing at all—and not even homeownership, because banks are reluctant to give us mortgages to buy. In the event of default, it seems that, given our vulnerable situation, banks can’t evict us, which discourages people from getting a mortgage. So, this is a terrible situation: no mortgage, no rent.
Chantal Moll de Alba Lacuve: This problem faced by large families is even worse in Catalonia; you have a whole field here where you could help families. Limiting rents hasn’t helped at all; rather, it’s a form of harassment and demolition against landlords, and it doesn’t increase the supply of apartments for working-class families, such as teachers with children, as Carlos mentioned. Sometimes, supposedly protective policies are a disaster because they don’t work in practice.
Here in Catalonia, a rental ad goes up, and 900 people are waiting. And who gets the job? A family with children, or a self-employed person, can forget about it. It goes to the expat who pays in cash and who also benefits from the Beckham Law—a special tax regime in Spain that allows foreign workers and professionals to transfer their tax residency to the country while maintaining their non-resident status.
Right now, if the tenant doesn’t pay, it’s difficult to recover possession of the property because evictions have been suspended. The moratorium in place during COVID has been extended, and that has dried up the rental market; in such cases, landlords are only selling.
Therefore, from a technical point of view, we can’t forget that we have to defend property rights because, as you said very well, Sara, in the end, if landlords are scared off, they won’t rent. So, we have to promote supply and let people self-regulate. Why have you achieved that with your initiative for large families? Because you’ve created an atmosphere of trust. Since the 2023 Housing Law, a healthy rental market that takes into account the civil rights of both landlords and tenants has been disappearing. You can’t label one as good and the other as bad; they are people, and each one is looking out for their own interests.
Sometimes, the landlord can be much poorer than the tenant because they are a young person who, for example, is moving to work elsewhere and renting out their apartment. But the law protects the tenant; it doesn’t treat people equally. So it’s a matter of dignity and returning to civil law. In my opinion, as long as we don’t protect the homeowner, there will be no solution to the housing problem.
Anna Bedmar: In fact, we have personally experienced the housing supply throughout all the regulations in Catalonia since the founding of habitacion.com, and it hasn’t improved much. How many homes do you think there are in Sabadell today, for example, which has a population of about 230,000? 30 properties! I studied economics, and when you understand how the mechanisms work, that’s when civil society can make demands and begin to change the system.
