Get thy own house in order

In a bar in Malaga city earlier this week, while discussing summer plans, a young Spanish friend from Malaga asked me: "What's Murcia like?"

"OK," I said. "The coast around Cartagena is nice."

"No, no, I mean Murcia city," she replied, adding, to my surprise, "I am thinking of moving there."

It turns out that my friend, who wants to buy her first (small) home in her mid-30s, is priced out of the local market. The nearest place she thinks can offer a similar type of life to Malaga city at the right price is Murcia.

The bleak housing situation for young professionals on the Costa del Sol has reached the point where people feel they need to uproot their lives from friends and family and move 400km away.

That is, if you don't know, some six to eight hours away by public transport, in this new green era in which the younger generation finds itself pushed to live. It would be easier to move to another EU country, for these Spaniards still fortunate to have free movement.

What was striking, as we talked over beer, is also the lack of attractiveness of smaller places in the Greater Malaga area. Nowhere on the Cercanías lines has affordable housing anymore and other towns simply have no real public transport infrastructure, such that Murcia is emerging, to my friend, as the best cost-benefit option.

The same day, while preparing this newspaper you are holding, I was reading about more blocks of tourist apartments going up on precious pieces of land in Malaga city. They are generally small developments, but they are increasingly appearing in traditional 'salt-of-the-earth' workers' neighbourhoods. Here, a whole generation in their 20s and 30s is still sharing with parents, staring wistfully out of childhood bedrooms at the cranes building tourist accommodation nearby.

A few odd tourist apartment blocks cancelled will not solve the missing 750,000 homes Spain needs. But how can the authorities still be so tone deaf to what people are saying? It is not a good look. Governments at all levels claim it is so hard to get new homes built, yet the go-ahead for blocks of tourist flats, luxury hotels and branded residences never seem to be out of our headlines.