Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

In Spain, a housing cooperative is usually a way to build rather than a way to live. Members pool deposits, the cooperative acts as its own developer, and each member takes title when the keys arrive. That model is regulated in the islands by the Ley 4/2022 de Sociedades Cooperativas de Canarias (the 2022 Canary cooperatives law). The same law created a second form, the cooperativa de vivienda colaborativa (a collaborative housing cooperative that keeps the building for good). Its members hold a cesión de uso (a right to use a home rather than own it). They pay an entry contribution, refunded when they leave, and a monthly fee tied to running costs rather than market rents.

The city’s cooperative memory lives in its working-class south. In 1966 employees of the Jardineras bus company founded the Tres Palmas cooperative, and its members received their keys in 1974. Residents then finished streets and gardens themselves on Sábados Rojos (“Red Saturdays” of volunteer work). The estate went on to resist an eviction threat in 1979 and to fight a dispute over water in 1983. Its slogan still circulates in the city: social housing had become big business, until Tres Palmas stopped it.

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Today the sector falls into two camps with different problems. The first is the build-to-own cooperative, which still produces new blocks, among them 159 homes in Tamaraceite whose first stone was laid in January 2025. These projects compete with developers for land and pay the same construction costs, around €1,280/m². Their homes pass into private ownership and leave the non-market sector for good. The second camp is the shared-use cooperative. El Ciempiés in Arucas and Los Girasoles in Firgas sit just beyond the municipal boundary, and cohousing groups inside the city are still looking for land. Their obstacles are financing and access to plots, not market competition, and most of their members are older people planning to age together.

Government has started to treat the shared-use model as a policy tool. The regional social-welfare department is funding 11 collaborative housing projects across three islands with Next Generation EU money. It frames them as a way to keep older residents independent. The city’s own February 2026 housing package lists support for cooperatives and collaborative housing among its measures, alongside public building and a request for rent controls.

The city council, run since 2023 by a coalition of the Socialists (PSOE), Nueva Canarias and Unidas Sí Podemos, has made housing its priority. Its February 2026 package promises to build and buy public rental homes, to use first-refusal rights on sales, and to explore usufruct deals that let owners lend empty flats for affordable rent. It also creates a housing division inside GEURSA and a municipal housing observatory. The target is 1,000 public rental homes this term. The 2026 budget puts €30.8 million into housing, 47% more than in 2025. In June 2026 the council opened eleven municipal plots to 1,812 affordable rental homes, most of them in Tamaraceite and Las Torres.

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Each level of government holds a different lever. The state’s Ley 12/2023 por el derecho a la vivienda (the national right-to-housing law) lets regions declare stressed rental markets, where new leases are capped. The Canary government, a Coalición Canaria and Partido Popular coalition, decides whether to make that declaration. Its Canary Housing Institute (ICAVI, the regional housing agency) is also drafting the Plan de Vivienda de Canarias 2026-2030 (the regional housing plan), built around new protected homes, renovation and rent support. The Cabildo, the island council, co-funds municipal blocks through its housing consortium. The city owns the land and, through GEURSA, builds on it. The stressed-market request has stalled between the two lowest tiers. The region says the city’s data were not official and that caps shrink supply, and the city has sent its evidence twice.

The regional minister answers that caps are the wrong tool. Pablo Rodríguez, the Canary government’s minister for public works, housing and mobility, has said repeatedly that he will not approve a measure that reduces the supply of rental homes. Local reporting has followed the dispute closely, from the rival studies each side relies on to the mayor’s September 2026 accusation that the region was laughing at residents.

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Cooperatives are named in the programme, but the tools to help them are still being defined. In a September 2026 interview, Mauricio Roque, the councillor for urban development and housing, set out what collaborative housing groups such as Semilla del Norte need. His list: financing lines, land ceded by the city, fee exemptions and planning changes. The council has already cut the ICIO (the municipal construction tax) by 50% for protected housing. There is not yet a concept-led land tender or a ground-lease scheme reserved for cooperatives, of the kind that Zurich or Barcelona use.

The response to empty buildings comes mainly from regional law. The Decreto-ley 1/2024 (the Canary emergency housing decree) lets owners turn offices, shops and tertiary buildings into homes. Where a whole tertiary building is converted, at least half of the new flats must be protected housing. The Ley 6/2025 (the Canary law on holiday lets) reserves most residential land for permanent homes and automatically suspends new holiday-let permits in a declared stressed market. That ties the city’s request for rent controls to its fight against holiday lets. Meanwhile the council uses provisional ordinances and inspections against unlicensed holiday lets, and it is studying usufruct and first-refusal deals to bring some of its empty flats back into use.

Climate goals run through the same programmes. The city’s climate and energy plan commits to cutting CO2 emissions by at least 40% by 2030. In practice, retrofitting municipal estates with solar panels and insulating coatings delivers much of that goal in housing. Land is the other limit. Half of the islands’ territory is protected, so building on already urbanised public plots, as the June 2026 rezoning does, avoids consuming new ground.

The results so far can be seen in a handful of neighbourhoods, where the city is rebuilding, retrofitting and building new homes at the same time.

Las Rehoyas-Arapiles is the city’s largest housing undertaking and its most difficult. The 1960s estate is being replaced block by block under a plan for about 2,600 homes in seven phases, budgeted at €183 million over at least 16 years. The first 148 new homes by the park are finished. The second building, 152 homes on Doctor Chiscano street, was halted in April 2026 with less than a fifth built, after new building rules pushed costs up by 49.79%. Residents waiting to move have run out of patience. “The work is stopped, everything is stopped,” Pino Sánchez, former coordinator of the neighbourhood platform, told El Espejo Canario.

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La Paterna shows the quieter route of renovating what is already there. The council has contracted the renovation of 819 homes in 23 blocks for €19.2 million, 70% of it from Next Generation EU. The works add 407 solar panels, thermal coatings and new lifts. They should cover more than 60% of the blocks’ energy use from renewables. The programme has been let in stages over several years, and its final contract went to Construplan, the firm whose Doctor Chiscano contract the city later ended.

GEURSA’s blocks on Avenida 8 de Marzo in Tamaraceite mark the city’s return to building public rental housing. The 131 homes in two buildings, 46 two-bedroom and 85 three-bedroom flats, were awarded in July 2024 for €18.9 million, with more than 30% of the site kept as green space and community gardens. They are the largest single piece of the council’s public-rental pledge for this term, which will be hard to meet in time.

Las Torres is where the next wave lands. Under an agreement signed in January 2026 with the Cabildo, the city will build 240 affordable rental homes behind the Las Ramblas shopping centre for €39.6 million, with construction from 2027. Augusto Hidalgo, the Cabildo’s vice-president, presented it as housing for the middle class. The June 2026 rezoning adds 595 homes in the same district. It was not uncontested. After objections the council dropped a Tamaraceite plot, and Coalición Canaria councillor David Suárez argued that land for about 3,000 homes was already available elsewhere.

El Ciempiés, on the hillside in neighbouring Arucas, is the model the shared-use movement points to. Founded in 2018, the cooperative owns its homes and lets them to members, young and old together. It received €450,000 from the regional housing institute. Its sibling Los Girasoles in Firgas plans about 24 flats for people aged 50 to 70, with shared kitchens, workshops and gardens, and hopes to open in 2027. Both depend on grants and on land outside the capital, where it is cheaper. That is the gap the city’s own cohousing groups are asking the council to close.

Columbus stopped here in 1492 to mend a rudder, and the city has been a stopping place ever since. The question is who gets to stay. Rebuilt estates for families who have waited years, public blocks on council land and a few shared-use cooperatives in the hills are the beginnings of an answer. Whether they can grow fast enough to keep workers, students and returning children in the city is still open.