The environmental group GOB (Balearic Islands Ecologists) has called for a protest on Tuesday at midday in front of the Balearic Parliament to demand a halt to the decree to obtain residential land agreed between the centre-right minority Partido Popular Balearic government and far-right Vox, which they describe as a ‘windfall’ because ‘it will mean even more expensive housing, fewer green areas and a great benefit for developers’.
The government has issued a statement assuring that the decree that Palma City Council and the regional government have presented as a tool to obtain land for affordable housing ‘is in reality the biggest urban planning scam of the last 50 years’.
Among other measures, it ‘radically’ modifies Palma’s General Plan, approved two years ago, to allow property developers to build 45% more buildable area on developable land and ‘opens the door to radically reducing, in some cases to as little as a fifth of what is foreseen in the General Plan, the open spaces that were to make up Palma’s gardens and parks in the future.
According to the government, the ‘excuse’ is that developments will have to reserve 50% of what is built for affordable housing, but they consider this ‘a big deception’ because the General Plan of 2023 already stipulated that 50% of the housing to be built on developable land should be for Public Housing (PH) ’ with the difference that now they could be 30% more expensive’.
According to the environmental organisation, the result of the decree will be that “housing will be even less accessible to the people, there will be far fewer green areas, and an additional profit will be generated for developers that can be estimated at around 500 million euros”. They detail that, just for the owners of one of these developable areas, ‘this gift that PP and Vox want to give them has been estimated at more than 115 million euros’.
For all these reasons, the government, together with Palma XXI and the Federation of Neighbourhood Associations of Palma, has called the protest on Tuesday against the decree which ‘attacks the rights of the citizens of Palma’ and to demand that its ratification in Parliament be stopped.
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