I lived in Spain for 2.5 years. I have to say, the appartment life there was fantastic. I'm back home living in the 'burbs and I still miss the "15 minute city" keenly.
I know the status-quo in Spain, but the history presented here is kinda fascinating. I keep forgetting how dynamic these things are. Also... is anyone else shocked how little development there is currently? Maybe this is just because it doesn't have e.g. 2010-2023 numbers (the downturn _was_ extremely brutal) but I thought the development sector had rebounded at least somewhat.
The downturn was brutal, but the drop in development was also needed.
At the height of the property bubble around 2005-2007, Spain (pop ~44M) was building more units per year than Germany, France and the UK (combined pop. ~195M).[1]
During the GFC Spain suffered from population shrinkage [2], surfeit of available housing stock, and the economic crunch pushed into the market some of the housing stock that would previously have been kept in reserve, so yeah, it wasn't necessarily a bad thing that building activities slowed down.
[1] I don't have a source, because I learnt this from a bunch of attendees to a conference on concrete (yes, the kind you use for building) in Madrid in 2007. We exchanged impressions on how software conferences (PyCon forever!) are different from the ones in the building industry, and they shared some eye opening statistics.
I lived in Spain for 2.5 years. I have to say, the appartment life there was fantastic. I'm back home living in the 'burbs and I still miss the "15 minute city" keenly.
I know the status-quo in Spain, but the history presented here is kinda fascinating. I keep forgetting how dynamic these things are. Also... is anyone else shocked how little development there is currently? Maybe this is just because it doesn't have e.g. 2010-2023 numbers (the downturn _was_ extremely brutal) but I thought the development sector had rebounded at least somewhat.