The popular tourist area of Soller in Mallorca’s Tramuntana mountains has been having a crisis of late with serious traffic congestion and a lack of affordable housing and it has been revealed that there are 54 vacant urban plots —not counting those in the Port— totalling nearly 80,800 square metres of unused land, whilst residents are being driven out of their own municipality. The study, carried out by the geographer from Soller Antoni Marcús, not only outlines the problem but also clearly identifies the tools that already exist to begin reversing it.
“We are not talking about abstract theory or drawings on paper,” warns Marcús. He points out that planning regulations allow local councils to intervene when urban land remains blocked for years. Among the measures he proposes are the creation of a municipal register of undeveloped plots, the possibility for a third party to develop the land if the owner does not, unblocking stalled urban development areas through a change in their management system and, in specific cases, expropriation in the public interest.
The approach is straightforward: to activate these spaces for use as social housing or affordable housing. “Vacant plots should not be eternal speculative reserves,” argues the geographer, who maintains that mobilising urban land is, in itself, a housing policy. A policy which, in his view, cannot continue to be postponed whilst access to a home becomes a structural problem for the people of Soller.
The report goes beyond urban planning and adds another key piece of data: according to the National Institute of Statistics, there are 1,119 empty homes in Soller, thousands of square metres standing empty whilst residential demand continues to grow. Against this backdrop, Marcús highlights existing tools such as the ‘Lloguer Segur’ scheme, which guarantees rent payments to landlords and offers more affordable rents, although its impact remains limited and raises questions about the property sector’s involvement.
In response, he proposes a ‘local housing pact’ in which the local council leads the compilation of a genuine census of empty homes and facilitates its processing, whilst estate agents contribute their expertise to mobilise these properties. The message is clear: ‘Less resignation and more public land policy’, because the problem is not a lack of space, but a lack of decision-making.