Gasteiz / Vitoria

For the minority who do rent, the market is tight and shallow. A furnished one-bedroom flat lets at around €680 a month on the Idealista portal, while a furnished family flat of roughly ninety square metres reaches about €1,100. Those are not Madrid or Barcelona figures, but against Vitoria’s wages and its near-total absence of cheaper public competition they bite.

Supply is the deeper problem. New construction costs about €1,280 per square metre and serviced land in the Basque Country runs near €298.6 per square metre, a combination that pushes private developers towards sale rather than rental. Meanwhile the city is not short of walls: residential vacancy stands at 4.1% of the stock, some 4,876 dwellings sitting empty in the expansion districts of Salburua and Zabalgana and the older centre. The raw material for a rental supply already exists; what is missing is the vehicle to mobilise it.

If four in five homes are owned, the remaining sliver is where housing policy has to work. The genuinely public, municipally managed rental stock is tiny: 406 dwellings held through the city’s urban-development company Ensanche 21, barely 0.3% of all homes. The broader protected-rental layer, mostly delivered by the Basque public developers Alokabide and VISESA, lifts the below-market share only into low single digits.

The cooperative tradition that anchors housing in Vienna, Zurich or Copenhagen barely exists here as a tenure. Spanish housing cooperatives have historically been a way to build and then sell flats, not to hold them in common for the long term. That is beginning to change: the resident-owned, never-resold cesión de uso model that bodies such as Sostre Cívic have pioneered elsewhere in Spain offers Vitoria a template it has not yet built at scale. The Basque Government’s Etxebide register channels demand; what the city lacks is a standing cooperative developer to meet it.

Vitoria-Gasteiz already owns one of Europe’s most quietly radical regeneration stories. In the working-class Coronación district, the city retrofitted an ageing residential block to the passive-house standard, one of the first social-housing passivhaus interventions in southern Europe, cutting heating demand to a fraction of the norm. The expertise to renovate rather than demolish is therefore local, not imported.

There is plenty to renovate. Office vacancy sits near 11.8%, leaving on the order of 38,227 square metres of empty office floor, and the residential vacancy noted earlier adds thousands of unused flats. The Anillo Verde, the green ring of parks and restored wetlands that won the city its European Green Capital title, set the precedent that Vitoria can plan ambitiously and follow through. Turning empty commercial floor and idle dwellings in Salburua and Zabalgana into occupied, affordable homes is the same kind of long-horizon project, run by the same municipal developer, Ensanche 21.

Housing has moved to the centre of Vitoria’s politics in barely two years. The council led by Mayor Maider Etxebarria of the Basque Socialists has leaned on the powers that the stressed-zone designation unlocks, while the Basque Government in the same city has built the legal scaffolding around it. In 2026 a rent-reference index for Álava took effect, capping rents in Vitoria-Gasteiz on new contracts and for large landlords.

The debate is less left-versus-right than fast-versus-careful. One camp, spanning the Socialists and EH Bildu, argues the city must use the new caps hard and build protected rental quickly; another, around the centre-right and parts of the development sector, warns that aggressive caps in a market this thin will simply dry up the little private supply there is. The 2025 General Urban Plan, the first in more than two decades, tries to thread the needle by earmarking the great majority of future homes as protected.

Vitoria-Gasteiz has, unusually, most of the ingredients already on the table. It has thousands of empty dwellings and tens of thousands of square metres of idle office floor. It has a municipal developer in Ensanche 21 and public housing companies in Alokabide and VISESA that know how to build. It has proven, in the Coronación passivhaus retrofit and the Anillo Verde, that it can renovate rather than demolish and plan for decades rather than electoral cycles. What it has never assembled is a way to hold homes in common, outside the speculative market, for the long term.

That is the gap a cooperative model could fill, and it would not start from zero. Adaptive reuse is the obvious entry point: the empty offices and flats the market has left idle are exactly the stock a reuse-first cooperative would convert, keeping the Coronación logic of renovation over demolition. A standing cooperative could mix generations and backgrounds in a single building rather than sorting them by income, and run courtyard-scale, resident-governed communities of the kind Vitoria’s compact districts are built for. It could also offer something the city demonstrably needs: the roughly 8,000 mid-term residents, the university researchers at the UPV/EHU campus and the engineers cycling between the Michelin and Mercedes-Benz plants, are precisely the people for whom a cooperative network of dignified temporary stays would be an alternative to commercialised serviced flats.

The wider point is that a green capital that learned to think of its forest, its water and its bicycles as a shared civic project could think the same way about its homes, joining a network of cities, architects and cooperatives building a Europe without mental borders. The materials are here; the question is whether the city, its public developers and its residents decide to assemble them. Explore how the European Housing Coop model could take root here.