Murcia

Most housing cooperatives in Murcia are ownership cooperatives. Members act as socios-promotores (member-developers): they pool savings, buy land and build at cost, which removes the developer's margin. The legal basis is Spain's national cooperatives law, Ley 27/1999. A gestora (a management company hired by the members) usually runs the project. When the keys are handed over, each member owns a flat outright and the cooperative's work is done. A second model is newer here. In a cooperativa en cesión de uso (a grant-of-use cooperative), the cooperative keeps the building for good. Members pay an entry contribution to its share capital, then a monthly fee, and the council's youth housing service notes that both come in below market prices.

The ownership model suits a country whose housing policy favoured buying over renting for decades. Protected homes were mostly built for sale, and a cooperative was simply one more route to a deed at cost price. Grant-of-use reached Murcia much later, carried from Catalonia. Research on the Catalan buildings finds stronger neighbourly trust, more communal participation and lower energy use than in comparable housing.

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Effects on Social Cohesion of the Grant of Use Cooperative Housing Model in Catalonia

Catalan grant‑of‑use housing boosts neighbourly trust, lifts communal participation by 45 % and cuts energy use.

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Today the sector falls into three camps. The largest is municipal. Urbamusa, the council's urban-development company, now forms and manages ownership cooperatives on public land under Murcia Crece, the programme of Mayor José Ballesta. Private gestoras run the same kind of ownership cooperative on market land for buyers who want a new flat at cost. The third camp is small and self-organised. Murcia Cohousing gathers groups that want to live together in grant-of-use buildings, and it represents the region in Spain's national network of such cooperatives. The camps face different obstacles. Ownership cooperatives meet land prices and building costs that leave little saving on a market sale. Grant-of-use groups struggle to raise entry capital, and to borrow for a building no member will ever own individually. A review of research in English and Spanish links cooperative living to better health and less isolation, though mostly on small studies.

Government now counts both forms as part of its affordable offer. Since 2023 the regional government has granted more than €4 million to 132 cohousing homes in Murcia, Cartagena, Lorca and Caravaca de la Cruz. It has also promised to write the model into its affordable-housing law. The city goes further on paper, pledging publicly managed cooperatives for the final phase of its 2030 housing strategy.

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La modalidad 'cohousing' formará parte del nuevo decreto de vivienda asequible de la Región de Murcia

Regional cohousing grants: 132 homes, La Rosaleda

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In Spain, housing power is split three ways. The state in Madrid sets the tenancy framework and co-funds a national housing plan. The regions hold most housing and planning law. Councils own land and can build on it. In Murcia the three levels pull in different directions. The city and the region, both governed by the People's Party (PP), have taken the supply-first side of a national argument that Madrid and Barcelona now embody.

Spain's 2023 right-to-housing law lets a region declare zonas tensionadas (stressed-market zones) in which rents can be capped. The regional government of Murcia has declared none. The state answers with money and a landlord of its own. Its 2026-2030 housing plan will channel €308 million into the region by 2030, at least 40% of it for building or buying homes. In December 2025 the state land agency SEPES became CASA47, a national public housing company that aims to keep rents below 30% of household income.

The regional reply came in July 2026 with Decree-Law 3/2026. It creates a new protected category, Vivienda Asequible de la Región de Murcia, open to households earning up to 5.5 times the IPREM (the state's benchmark income index), or €46,200 a year. Every procedure for such homes is declared urgent. Developers may add up to 40% more floor area, or 50% for protected housing, and buyers pay a super-reduced 4% VAT. Buyers under 40 pay a 3% transfer tax.

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El Decreto Ley de Vivienda Asequible de la Región ya es una realidad: estas son las claves

Decree-Law 3/2026 on affordable housing

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At city level the PP holds a majority. In November 2025 it voted down a motion from the Socialists (PSOE) to declare Murcia a stressed zone, and passed its own alternative instead. That text asked Madrid for a new state plan, asked the region for legal changes, and pledged council land for public housing. Four months later the council presented its Municipal Housing and Land Strategy 2030. It releases 66 council plots, more than 125,000 m² of land, for 2,366 homes in 26 neighbourhoods and villages. Of these, 1,136 are to be sold or let with an option to buy, and 1,230 will be public rentals. Prices are meant to sit 40% to 70% below market, and no household should pay more than 30% of its income.

Cooperatives get instruments of their own. Urbamusa has hired advisers to locate plots and form new cooperatives. It also guarantees 20% of the price for members under 40 or with children, so that a bank will lend the rest. The council reserves €1 million a year for that guarantee, enough for more than 30 homes. The regional cohousing grants open a second route, for groups that let homes to their members instead of selling them.

The decree also reaches for the city's empty space. It lets offices and ground-floor commercial premises change use to housing. It revives unfinished buildings and half-built estates, provided at least half of each project becomes protected housing. A FEANTSA study of reusing vacant buildings argues that conversions of this kind can house people faster than new construction.

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Retrofit is where housing policy meets climate policy. Next Generation EU money funds a programme for about 450 homes in two renovation areas. Some 375 sit in the city's older neighbourhoods, with a target of cutting energy use by 30%, and 75 are council flats in the villages. The council finished that second part in 2026. Its 75 retrofitted flats in Beniaján, Javalí Nuevo, Churra and Monteagudo now use more than half less energy. The European Commission's research magazine links unaffordable rents to cold homes, which is why public and cooperative landlords, able to renovate a whole block at once, are the natural carriers of these targets.

Urbamusa is the engine behind almost everything the city is trying. The council's urban-development company has been active since 1986, and on its housing schemes it works without a profit motive. Instead of selling plots to developers, it now builds through cooperatives, recruits their members and administers the guarantee for young buyers. That makes a municipal company, rather than a private gestora, the developer of last resort for Murcia's ownership cooperatives.

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Urbamusa

Murcia’s municipal urban-development company, now building through cooperatives

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Cooperativa Aire in Puente Tocinos was the first test of that approach. Its five-storey block on Calle Mayor holds 26 homes of one to four bedrooms around an inner courtyard with a pool. The council supplied the land, and sales opened in March 2024 from €110,000. Deputy mayor Rebeca Pérez presented it as a project with high social returns. Its members will own their flats, so Aire's affordability ends with its first generation of owners.

La Rosaleda Cohousing takes the opposite route. The group formed in 2022 with members of different ages. On a plot of almost 2,000 m² it plans 26 one- and two-bedroom homes of 50 to 60 m², with shared gardens, a pool and storage. A regional grant of €858,383 covers part of the cost. In return the homes must go to households earning less than five times the IPREM.

Murcia Cohousing does the slower work that such projects depend on. The association runs workshops for people who want to live in a grant-of-use building, helps them form groups and links them with the national network. It is the nearest thing Murcia has to a cooperative federation for the grant-of-use model.

Organisation in focus

Murcia Cohousing

Grant-of-use cohousing association forming Murcia’s first groups

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The retrofitted council blocks in Beniaján and Javalí Nuevo show that the public stock can be modernised in place. 35 flats in Beniaján and 23 in Javalí Nuevo received new windows, heat pumps and repaired roofs and facades as part of a €1.49 million programme funded by the EU. Energy use in the Javalí Nuevo flats fell by almost 68%.

The 66 plots of the 2030 strategy are the test still to come. Spain has shown it can build well on public land: its recent protected housing has won international design prizes. A comparison of affordable cooperative housing systems in eight countries shows what turns such plots into lasting affordability: land kept in public hands, non-profit rules and supportive public finance. Housing Europe's State of Housing in Europe 2025 makes the same case continent-wide.

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Affordable Cooperative Housing: An International Typology, Supportive Institutions and Public Policies

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For twelve centuries the huerta's water has been shared by rule rather than sold to the highest bidder. Since 2009 UNESCO has recognised the Consejo de Hombres Buenos, the elected farmers' council that settles its disputes. Murcia now holds the land, the company and the first groups needed to share homes in the same spirit. Whether the cooperatives of the strategy's last phase rent to their members or sell to them will decide how long that affordability lasts.