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.
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.
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ESP/spain/population