The housing crisis in the Balearics is no different in essence from that experienced in other parts of Spain, although it does present more serious indicators in many aspects. One figure that exemplifies the problem is the leading ranking of households living in rented accommodation: one out of every three properties (31%) is inhabited by tenants who pay rent, a sign of the growing difficulty on the Islands to obtaining a home of their own.
Thus, the proportion of households in home ownership is 62.6 %, less than two thirds of the total. This is the lowest percentage in Spain and well below the average of 75.1%. Spain, in fact, is in the top half of the European Union table, as it is the twelfth country with the highest number of people who own their own home: only one in five households (18.7%) live in rented accommodation (the remaining 7% corresponds to tenants who neither live in rented accommodation nor are homeowners: their children, for example).
According to the Report of the Economic and Social Council (CES) of the Balearic Islands, the proportion of homeowners has been plummeting since 2004, when it was up to ten percentage points higher. ‘The relationship between poverty and housing prices is clear and growing,’ says the CES, stressing that the lack of affordable housing affects above all those who live in rented accommodation. ‘It therefore affects the Balearic Islands more than any other region. In fact, up to 11% of households with mortgages are in extreme poverty after paying for housing; a situation that affects 38% of households renting at market rates.
The economic effort made by families in the Islands is the greatest in Spain: if one considers as an extra effort to spend more than a third of one's income on buying or renting a home (not counting the cost of utilities), up to 24% of Balearic households meet the definition. On the other hand, if variables such as average income and average house price are crossed, the Balearics need more than 63 years devoting a third of their income to buying a house. If we analyse the evolution of the last few years, after the real estate crisis of 2009, the price of land in Spain as a whole has remained more or less stable at around 150 euros per square metre. In contrast, the evolution in the Balearic Islands during the same period has been upwards: in 2023 it stood at 320 euros per square metre (again, the highest of all the autonomous communities).
‘This trend conditions the price of housing and does not help to mitigate the problems of accessibility among the resident population’, says the CES in relation to the evolution of the price of housing, an institution that for the first time has incorporated data related to homelessness and evicted people in its study on housing in order to reflect the problem of extreme residential exclusion. According to the National Statistics Institute (INE), in 2023 there were a total of 535 homeless people in the Balearic Islands who made use of care centres, the same proportion as in 2012.
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