There are moments when cities speak to us with unexpected clarity. It happened to me while traveling to New York just the week the city was choosing a new mayor, Zhoran Mamdani, with a campaign based on an idea that resonated strongly with my own experience: the need for the city to become affordable again. Not just "cheaper," but truly livable for the people who live in it and make it possible.
It may seem obvious, but urban affordability goes beyond housing: it is the sum of what it costs to move around, care for children, access health services, have green spaces, participate in the city. A city is affordable when the whole of urban life does not demand impossible sacrifices.
In New York, this idea has exploded politically with housing at the center of the debate: more than half of residents spend more than 30% of their income on rent, and those looking for alternatives have to live so far away that mobility expenses offset any savings. In Barcelona, where salaries are much lower, it often exceeds half of available income. The result is the same: the urban middle class is shrinking.
This concern is not new. Richard Florida speaks of the "new urban crisis," one in which innovative cities generate so much inequality that they expel the talent that made them possible. Edward Glaeser insists that the lack of construction and urban planning flexibility is one of the roots of the problem. Saskia Sassen describes how global cities become territories for capital rather than for residents.
We need to pay attention to the middle class, which is what sustains the city — shopkeepers, restaurateurs, small business owners, doctors, healthcare personnel, teachers, service personnel, technical personnel… People who often suffer costs that exceed their real economic capacity and that of their families to inhabit and live.
In New York, urban restrictions and the scarcity of new housing keep the city permanently strained, and in Barcelona, three-quarters of the same happens. Barcelona has enormous potential: a human dimension, efficient mobility, an internationally admired urban quality. But without guaranteeing more housing supply, this value is diluted.
For this reason, it is urgent to make urban planning regulations more flexible, to facilitate the rehabilitation of buildings and the construction of new works while promoting residential uses in areas such as 22@ and recovering the famous "Barcelona posa't guapa", an instrument very well accepted by Barcelonians to update their homes.