The second of the major instruments that help people to achieve their right to a home is policy on subsidised housing. Spain has traditionally opted for this kind of policy in preference to direct financial assistance. In recent decades, however, our country has leant more towards tax breaks for home purchases.
Encouraging access to home ownership by means of subsidised housing has had a major impact on other ways of meeting the social need for accommodation, with a rented housing market that is smaller and more expensive than in other countries due to the short supply. Added to this is the limited tradition and spending on policies that aim to foster access to a home by means of renting.
The result, in practice, combined with factors mentioned in previous sections, is that Spain is the EU country where rent accounts for the highest proportion of households’ disposable income and is, moreover, one of the three countries with the highest percentage of people bearing excessive rented housing costs.

Trilla and Bosch (2018) have identified four phases or periods in the evolution of subsidised housing in Spain.
- In the first period of growth in construction in Spain (1959-1965), subsidised housing amounted to as much as 70% of the total.
- In the years that followed up to 1981, there was a sharp decline in the volume of subsidised housing, which nevertheless still accounted for between 30% and 40% of all homes built.
- In the adjustment period of the first half of the 1980s, open-market and subsidised housing construction were almost the same.
- From the mid-1980s, the dramatic growth of the construction industry resulted in the declining importance of subsidised housing, which fell to below 20% of the total. This fall was also influenced by the increasing introduction of house purchase incentives, applied via the tax system, which became the dominant policy.
Ministry of Public Works statistics on new-build housing make it possible to draw a connection between the evolution in the past with the current situation. The figures show an ongoing fall in subsidised housing since the start of the financial crisis, to the extent that it has now reached historic lows. At the peak moments of the crisis, this type of housing once again accounted for a very high proportion of the total number of homes built despite the fall in the construction of new homes. As a result of the collapse of the sector, the construction of open-market housing fell to a volume seven times lower than before the downturn. In the economic recovery period, subsidised housing seems to have been abandoned as a housing policy instrument, with the lowest levels of construction since the 1950s.
