literally live inside them

If they told us 10 years ago that the houses were going to be about such crazy prices that even the “guiris” were going to resign frightened of their golden retreats in the Balearic Islands or the Canary Islands, few would have believed it. but so things are. In 2019 someone did a simple sum: empty stores and expensive apartments gave a logical result. What then was an experimentliving in commercial premises, is now becoming the norm in the town councils of Spain.

A new housing policy. Móstoles has decided look at the closed basement as an urban housing reserve: a Special Plan makes the change of use of empty premises more flexible to incorporate them into the residential stock, cuts license times, reduces the ICIO, limits the prohibitions only to strategic commercial axes and pursues a dual purpose (creating more affordable housing and at the same time avoiding the visual and functional degradation of streets where commerce has died).

This is not an isolated occurrence: the City Council itself frames the measure in a larger package than will add thousands of new units via urban developments, although the decisive gesture is that it recognizes as legitimate and necessary a route that, until recently, many municipal governments ruled out due to regulatory, reputational or political fear: exchange dying trade for housing effective and fast on already built surface.

Live in a place. The logic that Móstoles has turned into structural policy todayhad surfaced before as a tactical response in municipalities under acute pressure: Petrer (Alicante) rewrote its PGOU to accept the change of use in areas where commerce had become extinct, with 42 premises already converted in habitual residence and strict control to avoid substandard housing.

The idea is not born in the political center but in the edge where scarcity is experienced as an operational urgency. In those places the discussion “if it should” was replaced by “how to do it without making basements”, and the city council acted on the only level it controls: the urban planner.

The Canary Islands confirmed the drift. In Arrecife, the technical office has authorized this year 39 conversions taking advantage of Decree Law 1/2024, which accelerates changes of use if habitability and ventilation are accredited. The argument reproduces the same reasoning: extract supply from where commerce will not return, reduce rental pressure and, simultaneously, revive depressed urban fabrics.

This is not “experimental” housing but rather legally consolidated housing under the accelerated rule: a preview of how the State and the Autonomous Communities seem willing to cut procedures if the housing benefit is immediate.

Zaragoza provides critical mass. The Aragonese capital demonstrated shortly after that the phenomenon was not marginal: 177 authorized homes since 2021, 36 licenses in 2025 alone, expansion to neighborhoods where it was previously prohibited after making the PGOU more flexible and minimum technical conditions adjusted to noise, surface and ventilation.

Here, the relevant figure is not the absolute volume, but the conceptual leap: the change in use is recognized as a stable instrument of residential policy, deployed on empty stock and correlated with the fall of physical commerce. Plus: the City Council does not present it as an exception, but as ordinary tool treatment of built heritage in the consolidated city.

Something more than politics. Ultimately, the success of all these reconversions does not depend on political speeches but on follow clear rules: that the PGOU allows it, that the premises have sufficient size and height, natural ventilation, a project approval and construction and first occupation licenses, in addition to its registration.

By standardizing and accelerating these steps, what was once exceptional becomes a repeatable procedure. The difference between city councils is not one of ideology, but rather of friction: how long it takes, what they require and on which streets they allow or prohibit the change of use.

The turning point. If you like, the 2025 scenario has followed a more or less logical line: what in Petrer tried himselfin Reef accelerated and in Zaragoza was systematizeduntil finally Móstoles converted it in strategic leverage with fiscal incentives, administrative priority and a desire for scale within a broader housing production agenda.

That a large metropolitan municipality adopts this logic means that reconversion stops being a kind of peripheral repair and becomes a central policy of offer on already built land. By reopening the debate on what to do with the exhausted trade in Spain, Móstoles pushes other municipalities to choose: or accept the inertia of those hundreds of dead stores as scar urban, or convert them into housing to alleviate the housing bottleneck.

Hence the question has shifted: it is no longer whether it should be done or not, it is directly how to do it, and that is probably the true structural change that is now seems to spread in Spain.

Image | Pexels, Pexels

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