When regulating without evaluating ends up being improvising

This could be one more of the many opinion articles about housing. Every day, analyses and reflections are published, and it may seem that everything has already been said. Even so, there is an element that is often overlooked: the times. One of the great dysfunctions of the housing market is precisely this—that inertias are long and results are slow. When you realize you have a serious problem, you are already late. And when you propose far-reaching solutions, it must be clear that the effects will not be visible for many years to come. As has often been pointed out, today's housing price is the result of twenty years without a housing policy. And the word "price" must be understood in all its dimensions, both economic and social.

Probably, today there is more consensus and policies have been put in place that will bear fruit in the medium and long term. It is not the purpose of this article to analyze them, but to emphasize that a housing policy cannot function in isolation: it needs a transport model, an economic model, a territorial model. In short, a country model. Without this, any strategy will be incomplete.

The challenge, however, is the short term. The problem is the present, and it is getting deeper every day. Faced with this problem, the market has been intervened with a set of measures in force for just over a year. In this time, not only have they been expanded, but we have also changed the language and intentions: we have gone from regulating to prohibiting. And this deserves a pause for reflection.

Are we sure that adding regulation upon regulation and prohibition upon prohibition will bring us closer to the objectives we pursue? It often seems more like a reaction to impotence—or a political calculation—than the result of a coherent analysis.

Do we really have a shared vision of what "the housing problem" means? We would need a measurable and, therefore, evaluable objective. Before adding new measures, perhaps we should review the existing ones and modify them (which does not mean repealing them) if they do not yield the expected results. It is curious to see how positive political readings are made of current measures and, at the same time, many more are promoted, a complete contradiction.

Entering the realm of prohibitions is dangerous, especially when accompanied by imprecise concepts such as "speculation." In the short term, any investor—large or small—who bets on long-term rental housing in a regulated market should be welcomed with a red carpet. The administration should see them as a strategic partner for the next 5 or 10 years. But, since the term investor has been assimilated to that of speculator, we end up defending that they should be prohibited from buying.

Housing does not need more gesticulation, but rather direction, coherence, and the ability to learn from what doesn't work

As long as we don't have clear, consensual, measurable, and evaluable objectives, we will continue improvising. Today, with fiscal and regulatory measures; tomorrow, with prohibitions. And so, by wanting to "do something," we run the risk of creating more noise than solutions. Housing doesn't need more gesticulation, but rather direction, coherence, and the ability to learn from what doesn't work.