The Community of Madrid is less and less Madrid.
This is confirmed by the population data by municipalities of the region from the National Institute of Statistics (INE).
The capital of Spain has gone from concentrating 57% of the community's population in 1996 to barely 49.2% in 2020. Does this mean that Madrid city has lost population?
No, in fact, it has gained 16% in that period, but its proportional weight, with respect to the rest of the cities and towns in the community, has dropped considerably.
According to the experts consulted, this demographic displacement would have its origin in the real estate boom and the price of land, at the same time that it has had an enhancing effect on car use to the detriment of public transport.
The "expulsion" from the center to the periphery
The demographic explosion of the Madrid metropolitan areas is a phenomenon that dates back to the sixties, when municipalities such as Móstoles, Leganés, Alcorcón or Fuenlabrada were populated with hundreds of thousands of people who emigrated from the countryside to the city in search of better conditions. of life. However, the demographic boost that has occurred since the beginning of this century has relegated that first strip of municipalities to the background, according to Antonio Giraldo, geographer and urban planner. “It is a second round of metropolitan growth. The shock wave of the first wave goes even further, when those areas have grown, the land became more expensive, so the population has been picked up by other municipalities, ”Giraldo explains.
Like the waves that are formed in the water when a stone falls, from Madrid to the outside, the new settlers first reached the peripheral districts of the capital (Vallecas, Carabanchel, Moratalaz, ...) and later to the municipalities of the belt industrial between the sixties and eighties. At the beginning of this century, and in the heat of the great urban developments, a new wave went further. This is how Parla, Arroyomolinos, Rivas and Valdemoro were populated, in a wave that detonated with the real estate boom.
Since the early years of the 2000s, real estate speculation has made prices per square meter climb to levels never seen in the city of Madrid, a 60 square meter apartment cost, on average, 200,000 euros, while a semi-detached house with a pool in Arroyomolinos, 100 meters long, it could be purchased for approximately 175,000. Although prices have varied, a report by the Bank of Spain released this August indicates that the cost of living in cities such as Madrid and Barcelona is 20% more expensive than in the rest of the country, largely due to the expense that it means housing for households.
Pedro Torrijos, architect, writer and cultural promoter, does not hesitate to describe this phenomenon as “expulsion”: “The enormous price increase that took place from 2002 to 2008, expels new buyers towards the peripheries. It is no longer talking about Leganés or Coslada, but about Mejorada del Campo, Morata de Tajuña, Aranjuez or Ciempozuelos. " And he adds: "This population growth cannot be absorbed by the centers because the real estate bubble makes it impossible for people to live well."
The predominant profile among the new buyers was that of a family that aspired to buy a house with a garden or a swimming pool, according to Giraldo: “They were young families who wanted to become independent and have children, and in part [moving out of Madrid] was the way to make it possible much more easily, it was difficult to develop a family in Chamberí ”, explains the urban planner.
Many new buyers had to go into debt, a fact that later, when the economic crisis broke, caused the lives of many families to fall apart.
In Madrid, the indebtedness was notorious: of the 50 Spanish municipalities with the highest percentage of mortgages in 2011, 13 were in the Community of Madrid, according to the INE.
Arroyomolinos, Rivas, Valdemoro, Ciempozuelos, were some of them.
The 13 had more than 50% of mortgaged homes out of the total.
But Arroyomolinos led the list at the national level, with 79.83%.
The scattered city
That Arroyomolinos was the town with the highest number of mortgages in 2011 is not surprising. The municipality received the brick and the laws that liberalized the land of the late nineties with open arms. The municipality pointed out ways since 1986, as this newspaper reported then in a 1986 report. It went from having 2,709 inhabitants in 1996 to 16,207 in 2010 and 32,935 in 2020. A small town became a city by brick in just 20 years.
The types of houses that were promoted in these years were two: the single-family chalet and the block of houses with private common spaces, usually with green areas or swimming pool.
The investment was very succulent in the eyes of the new buyers.
“The person who went to these places was someone who wanted to invest money in something that would give him better quality than he could have with an apartment in the center of Madrid.
They were looking for a garden, an increase in their standard of living ”, Giraldo explains.
The case of Arroyomolinos, although it is the most striking, is not the only one.
The 13 municipalities that have grown the most since 1996 that year barely added 19,510 inhabitants together.
However, in 2020, those same localities added 118,145 registrations (606%), around 4,000 more than in the Villa de Vallecas district in 2021.
In many cases the developments were so extensive and dizzying that they practically reconfigured the urban layout of many towns.
In Arroyomolinos, the chalet dominated the block of flats, which made the extension of the municipality grow so much that it doubled its original size several times.
A more polluting mobility
The construction, however, not only brought with it the construction of houses, but also large communication routes were created, such as radial ones, which made it possible to quickly connect the new developments with the center of Madrid.
"You can go to 30 kilometers that you are going to have a radio station and you are in the center of Madrid in 30 minutes," says Giraldo.
Public transport did not reach or did it with difficulty in the new urbanized areas, so the private vehicle stepped on the accelerator. The Daily Mobility Surveys (EDM), the studies carried out by the Community of Madrid to analyze the means of transport most used by the people of Madrid, point in this direction. Apart from pointing out the demographic displacement towards the peripheries and metropolitan areas, there are two data that show the use of private transport: the modal split and the motorization index.
The modal distribution indicates the percentage of use of each means of transport in the community, and the motorization index the number of vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants.
In the surveys carried out from 1996 to 2018, the modal split indicates, on average, that public transport loses weight to the benefit of the private vehicle.
The EDM 2018 expressly indicates the demographic displacement to the areas furthest from Madrid as one of the causes of this evolution.
At the same time the number of cars advances.
Emissions of polluting gases already shot up frequently in 2008, which is not surprising, since of all the vehicles registered in the Community of Madrid in 2018, 98.1% used diesel engines, according to the survey of that year.
Cristina López is an urban planner and is part of the Spanish metropolitan mobility observatory. For López, demographic movements are a constant that fluctuates over time, and he believes that the need for displacement will this time serve as a catalyst to re-concentrate the population: “With traffic jams and congestion, people want to go back [to the centers large urbanites] due to quality of life, they do not want to spend two hours of their life traveling ”. However, although in the 2018 EDM the use of public transport was “very balanced”, according to López, the pandemic has put it to the ground: “The fear of contagion has had a very negative impact on the use [of public transport] , despite cleaning measures ”. And he concludes: "People have resorted to individual modes, have moved less, or have chosen to return to the car."
The unknown effects of the pandemic
The confinement that took place in Spain in March and April 2020 highlighted the importance of the quality of housing.
It was not the same to spend the confinement in a 50 square meter apartment in Madrid than in a house with a garden in Moralzarzal, a town in the mountains of Madrid.
Home searches away from urban centers or in rural settings increased.
“I believe that they have learned to value aspects that were not valued so much before.
Open spaces, gardens, terraces, some element that perhaps can modify the real estate market ”, says Giraldo.
However, the expert believes that it is too early to say that it will be a situation that will last over time.
"I think we still don't have enough data to know if the trend is temporary or definitive."
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