The Valdeluz housing development, 60 kilometres (38 miles) northeast of Madrid Susana Vera/Reuters

The first thing you notice in Valdeluz, Spain is the wind. It meets no resistance as it blows hard and loud across empty lots where apartment blocks were meant to stand. Roads that appear on Google Maps go nowhere and have no names. Some 40 miles from Madrid, Valdeluz was conceived at the height of what is sometimes called Spain’s economic miracle. In a Catholic nation, whose faith has declined substantially during its three decades of democracy, there is an increasing reluctance to believe in miracles of any kind.

Spain’s economic crisis now feels so deep, lasting and all-pervasive, it’s hard for many to recall how different the atmosphere was during the economic boom. A huge influx of immigrant labor, tourists and expatriate house buyers after Spain joined the European Union in 1986, and the launch of the euro, in 1999, helped the economy to soar. After decades of backwardness, Spain opened its cultural riches to the world, and the world came to visit: It is second only to the United States in revenue from international tourism.

Spain could not stop building. At its peak in the 2000s, construction made up 19 percent of the Spanish economy, and fat paychecks lured teenagers away from school to the building sites of developments like Valdeluz.

The crash that followed looks less like a hangover than a catastrophe that will last a generation. Shock has given way to resignation: “We will just have to learn how to be poor again,” one young indignado (outraged) told me. In May, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy celebrated a drop of 110,000 in unemployment, which sounds like great progress until you realize the jobless rate is still 25.9 percent, youth unemployment is still a staggering 57.7 percent, young graduates are leaving in droves.

The Spanish crisis is not only hurting an entire people, it threatens to harm the rest of the continent too. Spain has the fifth largest economy in the EU and the 13th largest  in the world—if it sinks further, or is forced to abandon the euro, it may take the whole Eurozone with it.

Yield for Tumbleweed

The plans for Valdeluz give a clue to the hubris that characterized the boom years. When Spain’s high-speed train network announced in 2004 that it would be building a stop near Guadalajara on the much-travelled Barcelona-Madrid route, it was decided to build an entire town of 30,000 people on the back of it.

The construction giant Reyal Urbis invested $1.6 million in the construction of Valdeluz—it would be their “jewel in the crown,” a dormitory town utopia 15 minutes from Guadalajara and less than an hour from Madrid—a place for the comfortable middle-class to rest and play and raise their children amidst lush greenery, away from the dirt, grime and clutter of the capital.

The environment would be tailored to a master plan for better living: No home would be more than 200 yards from the nearest “green zone,” and the town would have the best sports facilities, schools, leisure facilities and transport. Valdeluz—“the valley of light”—would even have its own golf course. This, said the dreamy rhetoric on Reyal Urbis’s website, was going to be the future of housing....Continue Reading

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