The full council of Arona will address the housing problem in the municipality today. This will be done through a motion presented by the Socialists in which they propose declaring the municipality as a tense area in terms of housing.
It is “a tool at the disposal of the local government to process this figure, essential to lower prices,” says the PSOE. The goal is to ensure access to affordable rents for residents, who are affected by the significant price increase. This is further exacerbated by the status of a tourist municipality, “where the holiday rental business dominates a significant housing market.”
The Socialists point out that a tense area is one in which the cost of the mortgage or rent exceeds 30% of the average household income or where the rent has risen by 5% above the CPI in the last five years. In this context, the PSOE places Arona, where those affected allocate more than half of their earnings to housing rent.
PP, CC, More for Arona and PSOE note that the situation is worsened by being a tourist municipality
[–>
The approval of this declaration “represents the commitment of the tripartite government to carry out the necessary procedures to declare Arona as a tense municipality and, therefore, have a specific plan that will propose the necessary measures to correct this situation and approach the supra-municipal administrations,” add the Socialists.
The government group (PP, CC More for Arona) proposed an institutional motion through which the national, regional, and island governments would be urged “to respond to the housing issue through actions such as increasing investment in social housing or developing support programmes for property owners and tenants.”
However, this initiative was rejected by the opposition (PSOE, Vox, and NC) in the Spokespersons’ Board, so the matter is excluded from the agenda of today’s ordinary session.
The government group in the Arona City Council has highlighted “the serious housing crisis affecting the municipality, which poses a social and economic challenge, impacting the welfare of families and the sustainability of our economy and societal model.” It emphasized that, in the case of Arona, it is also “an area with high tourist and labour demand, where the scarcity of affordable housing has led to a crisis of availability for workers in the sector, causing even more mobility problems due to the long forced commutes.”
