The dream of a roof, the reality of disenchantment

For a large part of the 20th century, owning a home served as a cornerstone of the modern social contract: it was the unspoken promise that with work, savings, and some time, any citizen could access their own space, stable and dignified. Ownership symbolized not only asset security but also belonging, continuity, and intergenerational progress. In contemporary Argentina, however, this horizon has eroded into a chimera for a large segment of the young population.

This article addresses the issue of access to housing from a structural perspective, incorporating economic, social, and political variables, with an approach that utilizes local analysis within a comparative lens. In light of the transformations in the real estate market, the precariousness of work, the dollarization of assets, and the ineffectiveness of current housing policies, the question of homeownership emerges as one of the most relevant and least addressed economic and socio-political inquiries of our current situation.

Profile of an impossibility: blocked access

According to data from the 2022 Census and estimates from organizations like CIPPEC and TECHO, less than 10% of Argentine youth aged 25 to 35 are able to access their own home without family inheritance. The rest live in rentals, share housing with others, or remain in the family home beyond early adulthood. The problem is twofold: there is not only a growing gap between income and real estate prices but also a complete disconnection between the youth work reality and traditional financing requirements.

While property prices are historically expressed in dollars, average youth incomes remain in pesos, often under informal conditions or with a single tax regime. This duality generates a structural trap: even those who manage to save do so in a currency that systematically loses value against real estate assets. In real terms, property moves further away each year.

The market as exclusion: financialization, speculation, and inequality

Blocked access to housing cannot be understood without analyzing the global mechanisms of financialization of urban land. The transformation of housing into a financial asset has produced an alarming paradox: the more value is assigned to property as an investment good, the less it is considered a right. Investment funds, temporary rental platforms, and large developers accumulate urban land in major cities worldwide, and Buenos Aires is no exception.

This speculative logic drives construction aimed at the "investor" rather than the "inhabitant." Apartments are built for rental purposes, not homes designed for those who need them. The result is exclusion: there are vacant homes while thousands cannot afford rent, and the index of idle homes grows in high-value areas.

Public policies: omission and insufficiency

In recent decades, Argentina has lacked a sustained, comprehensive housing policy aimed at the young population. Traditional mortgage loans are practically inaccessible: the requirements for formal incomes, high rates, and the absence of macroeconomic stability conspire against any possibility of long-term financing.

Meanwhile, the supply of rentals contracts in the face of regulatory uncertainty, informality proliferates, and housing quality diminishes. Policies aimed at building social housing also fail to meet actual demand and are often associated with clientelist or fragmented logics.

Precarious subjectivity, blocked future

The impossibility of accessing housing impacts the vital autonomy of young people, but also their planning capacity. Independence is postponed, family project formation is deferred, and the very idea of rootedness is fragmented. The habitat becomes an unstable, uncertain, temporary variable. How can one build a life project without a space to inhabit it?

Moreover, the phenomenon reproduces and deepens structural inequalities. Those who inherit or receive family help manage to enter the market; those who do not get trapped in a cycle of rising rents, constant moves, and housing vulnerability. The meritocracy of effort loses meaning when access to a basic good depends on prior capital and not on one’s own abilities.

Possible alternatives: rethinking the right to inhabit

Diverse international experiences offer alternative frameworks to the paradigm of individual ownership as the only way to access housing. Housing cooperatives in Uruguay and Denmark, social rental models in Austria, or "rent-to-own" schemes subsidized by the state in the Netherlands show that other ways of inhabiting are possible if there is political will and long-term urban planning.

In Argentina, some cooperative experiences, self-management models, or participatory urbanism resist from the periphery of the system. However, without a robust regulatory framework, stable public financing, and a state vision that places housing at the center of the debate, these alternatives will continue to be marginal.

The right to imagine a future

Access to homeownership is much more than an economic issue. It is a central vector in the construction of full citizenship, in the possibility to project, to plan, to take root. When the habitat becomes a luxury good, the future becomes foreign territory.

It is urgent to restore housing to its rightful place: a right, not a privilege. And for that, much more is needed than individual will: a public agenda, intelligent urban planning, and a collective decision to stop normalizing the unacceptable. Because without a space of one’s own, the possibility of imagining a common future is also lost.