The COAIB warns that 20% of Ibiza’s homes are empty in the midst of a housing crisis

The Official Association of Architects of the Balearic Islands (COAIB) in Ibiza and Formentera has focused on one of the great paradoxes of the current residential model of the island: about 20% of the housing stock remains empty while access to decent housing has become one of the main social and economic problems for the resident population.

This reality was exposed this Thursday at an event in which the entity presented a new series of conferences on housing, which will be held between January and March and which aims to go beyond the diagnosis to move towards concrete proposals.

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According to the press release issued by the COAIB, Ibiza has had a structural housing problem for decades, which has been aggravated by population growth, tourist pressure and the consolidation of a real estate market oriented to luxury and second homes. The population has grown from about 70,000 inhabitants in the early nineties to about 165,000 today, without the residential park and infrastructure have grown at the same pace.

The Architects’ Association warns that the existence of a large number of vacant homes is largely due to the legal insecurity of small owners, who choose not to rent their properties. At the same time, situations that were previously considered exceptional, such as seasonal evictions, the rental of non-habitable spaces or the proliferation of substandard housing and precarious settlements, have become normalized.

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Faced with this scenario, the COAIB’s Ibiza and Formentera branch has decided to promote the cycle ‘The challenge of housing in Ibiza: from reflection to proposal’, with the aim of generating a technical, social and institutional debate that will allow progress towards realistic solutions. The program will feature four presentations by professionals from different fields and will culminate with a round table with the participation of public administrations, social entities and economic agents.

The cycle will start on January 16 at the Auditorium of Sant Antoni de Portmany with an intervention of IMA Lab (Laboratory of Sustainable Transformation). On January 30, journalist and essayist Jorge Dioni López will give a lecture at the Centro Cultural de Jesús. On February 27, architect Jin Taira will speak at the Auditori de Caló de s’Oli, while Estruch Martorell will do the same day at the COAIB headquarters in Can Llaneres. The program will close on March 13 with a round table at the Club Diario de Ibiza.

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The president of the Demarcation of Ibiza and Formentera COAIB, Lluís Oliva, stresses that the housing problem can not be solved immediately, but insists on the need to start acting. “We cannot solve in a short time what has been decades in the making, but it is essential to lay the groundwork to reverse this situation,” he says.

From the COAIB insist that the combination of empty homes, unaffordable prices and scarce public housing shows the need to rethink the residential model of Ibiza, and hope that this series of conferences will serve as a starting point for a change of course.

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