This is how much it costs a young person to become emancipated in the Balearic Islands

Both data reflect the contrast between the most and least burdensome communities in terms of housing in Spain which is “inaccessible” for a young person, as explained to EFE by the vice president of the Spanish Youth Council, Antonio Báez.

These are the figures reflected in the report for the second quarter of 2021 prepared by the Emancipation Observatory of the Spanish Youth Council (CJE), with the latest data available in this comparative, which show that a young person between 16 and 29 years has to spend an average of 79.2% of their salary for rent, when this percentage should not exceed 30%.

This inability to access housing has social and economic consequences, according to another report prepared by the Youth Institute in 2020 in the framework of the 2030 Agenda, according to which “young people have been excluded from the right to emancipation and to exercise an autonomous life“.

The same report reflects that young people are emancipated at 29.5 years old, but in 2010 53.3% of young people between 18 and 34 years old still lived with their parents, while the percentage rose in 2019 to 64.5%.

Added to this is the “impossibility of accessing stable housing even on a rental basis” when home ownership, “which is a complement to the pension enjoyed by the vast majority of the elderly in our country, is de facto forbidden to a young person, which adds even greater uncertainty to their future.”

Báez insists on the fact that the average rent in Spain was at 848 euros in the second half of 2021, while a young person could only pay 320 euros so as not to “over-indebt”, a fact that, in his opinion, does nothing but place a “barrier of entry” towards their independence.

However, he assures that young people are “overqualified” for their jobs, in which part-time work dominates, especially among women, two factors that contribute to the fact that only 15% of people between 16 and 29 years of age are independent in our country.

Catalonia, the Canary Islands, the Community of Madrid and the Basque Country are, in addition to the Balearic Islands, the Spanish regions where rent is above the average (79.2%), while the Region of Murcia, Extremadura and Castilla-La Mancha are the regions where renting is the “cheapest”.

Despite this, none of them is below 30% of a young person’s salary (the one where the least rent is paid is still 7.9 points higher), a threshold above which access to housing would imply an outlay well above the maximum tolerable, the CJE points out.

Young person better to buy

Faced with this scenario, there are two ways to “relieve” the pockets of a young person: one is to share an apartment and the other is to buy a home. And just as renting an apartment in Spain represents 79.2% of a young person’s salary, a mortgage is somewhat less, and on average costs 51.1%.

In fact, while ten communities are above 60% in renting, in the case of mortgages it is much lower, and only three of them (Baleares, Madrid and Euskadi) are above 60%, although only Castilla-la Mancha is below 30% (with 29.4%), therefore, in all but La Mancha young people also have to over-indebt to buy.

At the same time, buying an apartment also has a big disadvantage: you have to have a down payment. On average, a young person has to spend 3.8 times their net annual salary, that is to say, they have to give almost four years net salary to be able to pay the deposit for an apartment and later to begin to pay the monthly morgage payments.

For Báez, this is an “impediment” for which “measures must be applied” because, “however much cheaper the mortgage may be later, with this great barrier it becomes impossible to buy an apartment”.

It is “a loop”, he says, because what is achieved, through the impossibility of accessing the purchase of a property due to the deposit, “it then continues to be rented”, to be “almost inaccessible” to pay that amount of money.

Sharing an apartment

Thus, the only solution to become independent is to share an apartment. By sharing, young people only spend 25% of their salary, 5% less than the total they should spend.

Likewise, shared housing is just one more indicator that women (18.5%) become independent more than men (12.5%), but part-time work or “job insecurity” “forces them to live with more people in the same home,” says Baez.

To highlight this fact, he points out that while 26.7% of emancipated men live in single-person households, only 13.8% of women can afford to do the same.

The rental voucher

The vice-president of the CJE emphasizes that, therefore, for the Council the rental voucher “is insufficient”, because, in addition, “it only benefits 2% of young people and anyone who does not have this aid is left out of this framework”.

In his opinion, one of the few solutions would be to cap rental prices with the aim of making this market a more “accessible” sector, as well as creating public housing.

For the full article, please visit Diario de Ibiza website here.