Zaragoza

For most of the last century a Spanish housing cooperative was a way to buy. Members pooled their savings and the cooperative acted as developer. Once the flats were finished, each member took the title and the cooperative dissolved. The newer form is the cesión de uso (grant of use). Here the cooperative keeps the building for good, and members hold a long, secure right to live in it. They pay a monthly fee instead of a mortgage, and nothing can be resold, so the home never returns to the market.

Zaragoza used the first form at scale. From 2001 the city and the Aragonese government turned the old Valdespartera barracks into an eco-district of 9,687 homes, 96.9% of them protected. Housing cooperatives were among the bidders for its plots and helped allocate homes by lottery. The district housed tens of thousands of people at controlled prices. But most homes were sold, so their affordability lasted only as long as their protection period. The grant-of-use model arrived later and haltingly. A 2018 municipal pilot for cooperative homes under a grant of use drew too little interest and became a conventional block of 64 protected flats, as a study of socially oriented cooperative housing in Spain records.

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Socially oriented cooperative housing as alternative to housing speculation

A study of Spain’s cooperative-housing revival that records Zaragoza’s stalled 2018 grant-of-use pilot and its support for senior cohousing.

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Today three groups are active, and they face different problems. The ownership cooperative survives as a familiar vehicle for protected homes for sale; it needs cheap land and mortgage credit, and its homes leave the non-market tier once sold. The second group is Torrecillas Azucarera, an Aragonese cooperative building 23 grant-of-use homes in the Rabal district. Its obstacle is capital: the members' cooperative is paying 71.47% of the cost, some €2.1 million, with EU funds covering the rest. The third group is senior cohousing, which regional and local authorities have begun to support, the same study notes. Its members struggle to find land and lenders who understand collective ownership.

For finance and know-how, Zaragoza's newcomers look east. In Catalonia, federations such as Sostre Civic, technical advisers at La Dinamo Fundació and ethical lenders such as Coop57 and Fiare Banca Etica have made grant-of-use building routine, with La Borda in Barcelona the best-known result. A review of international policies to promote cooperative housing lists the public levers that made it possible: land on long leases, soft loans and guarantees. Zaragoza has started to use the first of these. In its housing plans the cooperative is one bidder among several for leased public land, not yet a programme of its own.

Organisation in focus

Sostre Civic

The Catalan grant-of-use housing cooperative whose model Zaragoza’s newcomers look to.

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Organisation in focus

La Dinamo Fundació

Supports cooperative housing development and maintenance in Barcelona and Catalonia.

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Natalia Chueca of the centre-right People's Party has been mayor since June 2023, and calls housing the social pillar of her government. Her main tool is public land leased to private builders. The first 384 flats, in 11 buildings, used €15.5 million of EU recovery funds and are built on a derecho de superficie (a surface right, a long lease of public land) of 50 years, extendable to 75. Rents run around €7 per square metre and are capped at 30% of household income. The first 78 were allocated by public lottery in summer 2026.

Each level of government holds a different lever. The state sets the legal frame through Law 12/2023, the right-to-housing law, which lets regions declare zonas tensionadas (stressed-market zones) where rents can be capped. Its 2026-2030 housing plan adds €7 billion, 60% from the state and 40% from the regions. The Aragonese government under Jorge Azcón, Chueca's predecessor as mayor, re-elected in April 2026 with Vox, runs Plan Aragón Más Vivienda. It plans 2,784 affordable rental flats in the city at €300 to €500 a month, largely on land the council provides. The city itself runs Zaragoza Vivienda, which manages 2,640 homes, including 685 private flats let through its Alquila Zaragoza scheme for owners.

Cooperatives enter through the same door as private builders. The surface-right leases are open to them, and Torrecillas Azucarera is so far the only cooperative among the city's projects. When its 75-year term ends, the building returns to the council. The state plan pushes in the same direction, promising that homes it funds stay protected permanently rather than for a set period. For a grant-of-use cooperative, that rule fits naturally: its homes were never meant to be sold.

The city's answer to its empty homes is concentrated in the old town. The Zamoray-Pignatelli plan will create 125 public homes in the historic centre for €29.1 million, buying or expropriating vacant lots and unused buildings. Zaragoza Vivienda has also bought flats from banks, and the Alquila Zaragoza scheme pays incentives to owners who let empty flats at an affordable rent. Aragón's housing minister, Octavio López, has asked the state for its vacant land in the city to build around 2,000 more public homes.

Retrofit is the climate side of the same programme. In 2022 the European Commission chose Zaragoza as one of 100 cities aiming for climate neutrality by 2030. For 2026 and 2027 the council has set aside €8 million for home rehabilitation, €4.25 million of it for energy efficiency. Since 2019 more than 10,668 homes have received rehabilitation aid. Research on the just transition in building records Zaragoza's mayor presenting that progress as a mission city. A 2026 study of the EU's coming carbon price on heating fuels models its cost region by region, Zaragoza included, and warns that the poorest households will feel it most.

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The sharpest argument is about rent caps. The Aragonese government has refused to process any request to declare a stressed-market zone, citing Catalan evidence that caps shrink the rental supply. On 18 September 2026 Fernando Beltrán, the central government's delegate in Aragón, took that refusal to the regional high court, calling it a legal and political aberration. The tenants' union sees the council's flagship flats differently from the mayor. Its spokesperson Teresa Lajusticia says they are presented as affordable but are very small homes with rents of €450 to €500. In May 2026 around 1,500 people marched through the centre behind the banner “End the housing business”. The finished and half-built blocks are where that argument can be tested.

Valdespartera is still Zaragoza's reference point, twenty years on. Planned on bioclimatic principles from the start, it oriented streets for sun, insulated to a higher standard and collected waste by pneumatic pipes. It proved the city could build protected housing at a scale few Spanish cities matched. Its limit was the tenure. Almost every home was sold, and as protection periods run out those flats can move to market prices. The district shows what Zaragoza can build, and why ownership alone does not keep a home affordable.

Torrecillas Azucarera is the other end of the scale. The cooperative's 23 homes on Camino de Torrecillas, in the Rabal district, range from about 49 to 81 square metres. The maximum rent is €4 per square metre, so monthly fees run from €341 to €566. Members hold a 75-year right of use, after which the building reverts to the city. It is Zaragoza's first grant-of-use cooperative, and a very small one. Its members carry most of the cost themselves, which is exactly the hurdle that keeps the model rare.

The council's 384 EU-funded flats are the largest recent public delivery. They sit in eleven buildings across San José, Las Fuentes, the Rabal and Valdefierro, and are let by lottery. Rents are held to 30% of income, a rule that protects low earners better than any fixed price. The friction lies in size and speed. The tenants' union calls the flats too small for the rent, and the scheme depended on a one-off EU recovery fund that ends in 2026.

Parque Goya will host the region's largest youth rental project in decades. The Aragonese government has awarded 543 homes for people aged 18 to 39 to a joint venture of Metropolitan House BCN and Genivs Insulae, which will build and run them for 75 years before they return to public hands. It shows how far public-private concessions can stretch a small public budget. It also shows their cost in time: building starts in 2027 and the keys arrive in 2029.

Pignatelli 43 is the old-town plan in miniature. The building was occupied, damaged by fire in 2023 and then expropriated by the city. Zaragoza Vivienda is now rebuilding it as 10 affordable rental flats with a shared ground floor and solar panels, for about €1.3 million. Each such building takes years of legal and technical work. That slowness is why the Zamoray-Pignatelli plan counts its gains ten flats at a time.

Zaragoza Vivienda holds this programme together, from rent collection to rebuilding and social support for about 6,000 residents. Beyond the city, the cooperatives Zaragoza could learn from are close at hand. Entrepatios built Las Carolinas in Madrid on a grant of use financed by ethical banks, and Barcelona's La Borda showed the model at a larger scale. A Eurocities review of how European cities are tackling the housing crisis, and an EU advisory committee's report on affordable sustainable housing, both point the same way: public land kept public, and patient finance. Zaragoza has the land and the lottery. The patient finance is still missing.

Lighthouse project

Las Carolinas

Seventeen homes house fifty residents, zero‑carbon design, rainwater harvesting, cooperative ownership, rooftop terrace.

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Lighthouse project

La Borda

Six-story timber cooperative with 28 units, 25% communal space, 75‑year lease, biomass heating.

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