Doomed to live in the river: the problem of substandard real-estate in Sabadell, 1939-1970. From social housing to the real estate business

Abstract

This research study aims to show how, in the context of the chronic shortage of real-estate in an industrial city like Sabadell from 1939 to 1970, the 1962 floods were the reason for consolidating the pathologies of unregulated growth of previous years. So, this is a detailed examination of an unregulated urban model that led to suburban sprawl on the outskirts of Barcelona. It shows how economic forces during the Franco regime caused any attempt at town-and-country planning to serve the people to be subjected to land speculation. The trend after the recent housing boom in the city of Sabadell is the legacy of a past that shifted from industrial activity to the real estate business.

The floods of 1962, together with the rapid and uncontrolled growth of the population, were exploited by local Francoist paternalism and were the great excuse for achieving a hegemonic regime with regard to the property system and the detriment of the rental system, a precondition for the over-specialization of the city in terms of real estate speculation. From what Jose Manuel Naredo (2010) called the “developmentism years”, from 1963 to 1973, in which real-estate pressure represented a forty per cent increase in housing construction in Spain, the consequent of this unprecedented urbanisation process has been what is dubbed wild city planning.

The main objective of the text is to establish how the initial excuse of the housing shortage was obvious at first in the slums and the phenomenon of legal subletting at a time of clear dominance of the rental system. From 1962 onwards, this situation began to be completely reversed, for political reasons on the one hand, in order to achieve social peace, and to promote economic speculation on the other. All this was possible by neutralizing any attempt at urban planning covered by current legislation, especially following the 1956 Land Law.