Administrative Blindness Fuels Housing Chaos
The chaos in the management of protected social housing (VPO) in the Canary Islands is very real. The public body in charge of its control, the Canary Islands Housing Institute (ICAVI), has admitted via a Transparency request to Canarias Ahora that it does not have a list of all public housing developments on the Islands detailing their location, classification date, file number, or total number of homes. It also does not know the annual evolution of the total public housing stock since the year 2000. In both cases, it claims that such information “is not compiled”. Regarding the latter, it states the data is not in its archives and that to know how the number of VPO homes has varied year by year in the Archipelago, a “complex task of reworking using different sources of information” would be required. The Institute, however, “lacks the necessary technical and human resources to extract said information, making it impossible to provide it”.
A Breeding Ground for Irregular Practices
This administrative blindness has turned the social housing market in the Autonomous Community into fertile ground for sharp practice and irregular activities, ranging from sales of homes still classified as protected to illegal rentals without meeting requirements, legal sources confirm. The lack of control is also confirmed by Miguel Ángel Pulido, who was Director General of Housing for the Canary Islands Government between 1997 and 2003 and, until a few years ago, a board member of the islands’ public social housing company, Visocan. Pulido says he experienced the lack of control first-hand upon taking office, discovering, for example, that in the Jinámar district of Telde alone, more than 1,000 people were living in public flats without any contract. The homes had been passed from one family to another outside the law, and the government—continues the former insular president of Nueva Canarias in La Palma—had to undertake a massive regularisation process examining whether each occupant met the conditions.
Old Problems Persist for Buyers and Officials
But what happened over twenty years ago appears not to have changed one bit. Martín García, manager of the León Home Inversiones estate agency in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, recounts the case of a client in Vecindario who bought a home years ago without anyone (neither the seller nor the notary) warning him it was a VPO. Now that he wants to sell it, he has discovered he cannot do so on the open market and has been forced to process its declassification. “It has been a disaster. Fifteen years ago nothing was demanded, and as there wasn’t such a housing shortage or it wasn’t so much in the spotlight, there was no control. In the end, VPO homes were sold and bought as if nobody saw anything,” states García.
His encounters with these practices do not end there. “I had another client who was a local police officer in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria who asked me if I could get him a VPO. He had obtained his about 20 or 25 years ago [already as an officer] when the developer, who couldn’t sell it to him, asked in return that he buy two parking spaces instead of one. I don’t know exactly on what basis… I imagine it’s a lack of control,” laments the estate manager. And when it’s not that, it’s directly the administration lacking the basic documents to confirm the status of a development. García mentions knowing of a former protected home in the Madera y Corcho area of the Gran Canarian capital, for which he requested information from ICAVI. He points out that the Institute responded by demanding he provide the first purchase deed showing the home’s protected status, when in his opinion the opposite should happen. “The logical thing would be to go to the public body and ask how much time is left before a home can be declassified. But in this case, we had to do that, search for and present the first public deed of the person who bought or had it,” he indicates.
Legal Experts Decry Systemic Failures
Carolina Martell, director of Martell Abogados law firm, delves into this issue. “This lack of control translates into very concrete situations. For example, in old developments for which there is no clear information on their protection regime, their occupancy status, or transfers made over time, it is frequent that when processing a sale, inheritance, or regularisation, the administration does not have the complete file or consolidated data on grants awarded, classification periods, or award conditions,” she adds. Lawyer Jonathan Pérez Moreno goes a step further and mentions examples of empty public homes or ones that have been swapped. He also adds that it is common to find beneficiaries of privately-developed VPO homes renting out their properties without requesting authorisation or checking the tenant meets requirements. He criticises ICAVI, which he describes as “a supreme entity inaccessible to the public.” “Appointments are given for three months, six months, if not a year… They should provide more resources. They should provide, I say, more facilities. By doing so they could have better control of what happens in the homes they manage,” stresses Pérez.
Unfilled Posts and Political Promises
The Canary Islands Government’s Minister for Housing, Pablo Rodríguez (CC), announced in October 2023 a shock plan to fill 72 vacancies at the Canary Islands Housing Institute. But by April 2025, the date of the last public update of the body’s Staffing Register (RPT), there were still 54 unfilled posts out of 221. In the Public Promotion Service for the province of Las Palmas, for example, more than half the posts are vacant (9 out of 16). And in the Private Promotion Service in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 12 out of 25. Sources from Rodríguez’s department clarify that as of February 2026, nearly 40% of the vacancies have now been filled. But they also emphasise that until the Public Function service launches a Public Employment Offer (OPE), the posts will meanwhile be filled with interim staff or secondments, “but it’s something provisional, that’s why the figures vary.” The autonomous government itself acknowledged in writing in a parliamentary response that it is “carrying out a comprehensive review of the ICAVI’s RPT so that its posts are reviewed and adjusted according to the current needs of the organisation,” but did not say when it would be ready. The opposition has criticised the minister for promising a reinforcement that, two and a half years later, still has not fully materialised. “When will you fill the 72 vacancies at the Canary Islands Housing Institute that you promised in October 2023? When will you fill them?” Socialist MP Patricia Hernández asked Rodríguez in a plenary session of Parliament.
The Mystery of Empty Homes and National Fines
The Ombudsman published just over a decade ago a report on empty protected homes, confirming that the Canary Islands did not (and do not) have a public housing inspection service and only acted upon prior complaint. “Because those empty VPOs exist, but the autonomous government doesn’t even know where they are,” criticises Miguel Ángel Pulido, former Housing Director of the regional government. In its study, the High Commissioner of the Cortes Generales tasked with defending citizens’ rights and freedoms estimated there were approximately 13,506 empty VPO homes across Spain. In the Canary Islands alone, there would be 76. The newspaper El País recently published a report compiling the amounts of fines imposed by the autonomous communities for misuse of public housing between 2019 and 2025. In total, over nine million euros collected in fines related to illegal subletting or prohibited sales. The Canary Islands, Aragón, and Murcia were the only autonomous communities that refused to provide information.
A Shrinking Stock and Gentrification Fears
The Housing and Land Observatory of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda released a report last year counting a total of 19,413 publicly-owned homes in the Canary Islands, including those under public-private collaboration models and those under rent-to-buy schemes. That is the Archipelago’s current public housing stock. But between 1980 and 2023, 55,360 protected flats were built, according to the same study. And as can be deduced, the majority of those homes (35,947) have passed into the open market after their classification expired in a process of “gentrification by declassification,” according to Juan Manuel Parreño, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC). “The existence of short protection periods means these properties enter the housing market for sale and rent at open market prices. In a way, there is a transfer of public aid to private assets, but the worst part is that this can lead to a price increase while reducing the available protected stock. Even in some cases, declassification can lead to population replacement by higher-income households,” concludes the geographer.
Alejandro Armas, also a Doctor of Geography from the University of La Laguna (ULL), laments the loss of VPO, especially given the current emergency. “It means reducing the administration’s capacity to respond to the housing crisis, particularly for the most deprived sectors of society who have the greatest difficulty accessing decent and affordable housing,” he reasons. “The incorporation of VPO into the open market can induce processes of resident population expulsion (gentrification) due to price rises equivalent to those of non-protected housing. There is evidence of this in some developments in Madrid,” he emphasises.
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