Within the framework of the 2nd Municipal Conference “Inhabiting the Future: Affordable Housing, Citizen Participation and Vulnerable Neighbourhoods,” organised by the Murcia City Council, national and international experts from the public, academic, and social spheres gathered to reflect on one of the major urban challenges of our time: how to ensure access to decent and affordable housing in a context of growing inequality and pressure in the residential market.
Within this debate, the panel “Unlocking Affordable Housing: Policies and Innovation” addressed a key question: what needs to happen, in practice, for affordable housing to stop being a recurring policy objective and become a structural reality in our cities.
From SpainNAB, we took part in this panel by bringing a systems perspective: affordable housing is not only a matter of prices, nor a challenge that can be solved solely through more construction or short-term subsidies. It is, above all, a structural challenge that requires aligning public policy, financing, development and management models, and long-term social objectives.
Housing as a key driver of social inequality
Recent data confirms a profound shift. For the first time in reports on social development in Spain, housing has overtaken employment as the main driver of inequality and social exclusion. Today, millions of people are trapped between unstable incomes and rising housing costs.
Renting has become the main pathway into housing exclusion: nearly half of tenant households are at risk of poverty, showing that the market, far from providing protection, is amplifying inequality. At the same time, employment has lost its historical capacity to guarantee inclusion. Having a job no longer ensures access to and the ability to remain in adequate housing, creating an unprecedented level of social fragmentation.
That is why, when we talk about affordable housing as if it were a “missing product,” we are misdiagnosing the problem. What is truly lacking is a system that enables affordable housing to be produced, financed, and preserved in a recurring and sustainable way.
A structural problem, not a pricing problem
From SpainNAB, we identified three systemic failures that explain why affordable housing continues to rely on ad hoc solutions rather than scaling as a structural policy.
First, housing continues to be treated primarily as a short-term financial asset, rather than as social infrastructure that requires long time horizons and moderate returns. Second, there is significant fragmentation among stakeholders: public administrations, developers, investors, and operators act in silos, with misaligned incentives. And third, risk is poorly distributed: the public sector bears the social pressure, the private sector demands returns that are incompatible with affordability, and citizens ultimately absorb the final cost.
The result is a fragile system in which affordable housing is sustained through temporary subsidies rather than supported by stable financial and operational models.
Affordable housing only scales as an impact ecosystem.
The central idea we defended in the panel is clear: affordable housing only scales when it is designed and managed as an impact ecosystem. An ecosystem in which each actor does what it does best, but with shared objectives, clear rules, and aligned time horizons.
It is not about charity or about giving up financial viability. It is about reducing systemic risk, lowering the cost of capital, extending investment horizons, and designing replicable structures. When this happens, affordability stops depending on continuous subsidies and begins to rest on solid economic foundations.
In practice, this requires five enabling conditions: treating public land as a lever for impact rather than a fiscal revenue source; combining public, philanthropic, and impact investment capital to reduce financial costs; professionalising development and, above all, long-term management; providing stable and predictable regulatory frameworks; and measuring social impact with the same rigor as financial performance.
Reframing the question to unlock consensus on affordability
One of the main blockages in the public debate is that the question is often framed incorrectly. The issue is not “how much an affordable home costs,” but rather what level of housing effort is acceptable for a given household in a specific territory, and for how long, without compromising its present and future well-being.
Affordability is not an absolute value. It depends on the profile of the household, the local context, and the time horizon. For this reason, consensus is not reached by searching for a single “magic number,” but by establishing clear agreements on who housing is for, what level of financial effort is considered acceptable, and for how many years that affordability is preserved. Without that time-bound agreement, affordability risks becoming a marketing concept rather than a genuine public policy.
When housing is understood as social infrastructure and supported by stable rules, structured land, and patient capital, consensus emerges and impact scales. At SpainNAB, we believe the role of impact ecosystems is not to replace the state or the market, but to synchronize them. That means translating social objectives into viable financial structures, aligning incentives among actors that do not usually collaborate, and scaling what has already proven to work.
Unlocking affordable housing is not only about building more homes. It is, above all, about building a better system that makes them possible and keeps them affordable over time. That is the challenge—and also one of the great opportunities for the future of our cities.
