With the same title as this article, the Afi Emilio Ontiveros Foundation has just published a study that reveals how demographic dynamics, the framework in which our housing market develops and the widening of the intergenerational, but also intragenerational, wealth gap , have been closely intertwined in our country in recent decades. Furthermore, it points out how in the near future there may be conditions for this phenomenon to be perpetuated and even intensified. The boomer generation, which is now beginning its gradual incorporation into retirement, is not only the largest in terms of size. never existed, but the one that will certainly mark the peak for many future decades, this century at least. It is a generation under which not only the currently existing framework of freedoms has been consolidated, but also the process of European integration and economic modernization of our country materialized in levels of well-being and wealth not previously known. Obviously it has not been a continuous process. We only have to remember some of the crises of the end of the last century and, singularly, the great crisis that followed the real estate boom in the first decade of this one. All in all, and despite the consequences of the latter, the boomer generation has globally enjoyed the fortune of riding on the back of an accumulation of wealth, especially real estate, to which they were able to access in early phases of their life cycle and which were has revalued extraordinarily. More than other assets and more than in other countries, and, as is known, real estate assets weigh heavily in the total wealth of Spanish households, much more than in neighboring countries. As a consequence of the continued reduction and extraordinarily low birth rate, the millennial and subsequent generations are, by contrast, substantially smaller. So much so that, despite the growing and very high longevity of the Spanish population, demographic winter has been established in our country for almost a decade. It is not a future; The population born in Spain is already decreasing. As much as 150,000 people on average in the last three years. A fall that will last over time and that would lead, according to recent projections by the INE, for those born in our country to fall in the next fifty years to 32 million people from just over 40 million today —basically the same as beginning of this century—Obviously, this demographic dynamic would make the mere maintenance of our productive infrastructure unsustainable, not to mention the dramatic situation that the social and assistance services that a much larger population will require would face operationally and financially. aged In just 15 years, those over 65 years of age will become almost one in three inhabitants compared to one in five today, and those over 80 years of age will already represent 12%, doubling from the current 6%. Such evolution will ultimately determine that the current dependency rate of 50%—the aggregate of children under 16 and over 65 years of age over the total population—reaches no less than 75% in this short period. Fortunately, incoming migratory flows to our country are more than compensating for this demographic winter that has settled, to stay, in Spain. As much as to strengthen the economy, in the absence of a more than desirable significant increase in productivity. If this increase continues not to occur—and even if it improves—it will require many millions more people in the coming years. So much so that the INE's projection over the 50-year horizon converges to a very different population structure: almost 40% of residents in Spain would be born outside our borders, compared to less than 20% currently and just over 5% at the beginning of the century. Obviously, this attraction of immigrants, whose integration is easier due to their majority origin, represents an important asset for Spain, but it also entails some collateral implications that are not always easy to manage. One of them is the additional pressure on a housing market already stressed by the current low production capacity of new homes, the growing and intense territorial concentration of the population, the underoccupancy derived from increasingly smaller homes and , above all, the scarce presence, if compared with European standards, of a public stock of protected or rental public housing. Pressure that is leading to an undesirable and marked segmentation between households that have a home they own in their backpack and those others—young people and the immigrant population above all—who do not have the possibility of accessing affordable housing. Such a situation causes a “snowball” effect in widening the wealth gap compared to households that already have real estate wealth. Expansion that, for this reason among others, ends up having not only an intergenerational impact but also an intragenerational one. Finally adopting a prospective vision of the medium and long term, it is also possible to derive some diagnoses of interest for public policies. It is not difficult to see that the combination of some of the aforementioned dynamics can potentially exacerbate the concentration of wealth and the increase in inequality. This is so because the millennial generation, much smaller than the one that preceded it, will be the recipient, in the natural process of wealth transmission, of a volume in per capita terms much higher than that received by any past generation. The paradox would thus arise that – seen as a whole – a generation that, at least until now, is in a worse relative position than that of its parents at the same age, would nevertheless end up concentrating a very important heritage. . Of course, in the final stage of his existence as a consequence of the transfer of wealth from those, his parents, who today make up the boomer generation. Said transfer, in any case, would reproduce among the millennial beneficiaries the wealth distribution structure of their parents which, by the way, also exhibits a tendency towards concentration in recent decades. This process of concentration, the result of the mere replacement generational, another will be superimposed as a consequence of the future population structure itself. The much greater relative weight of the immigrant population, which in general has a much smaller backpack and/or will receive in the second generation a much lower endowment of wealth than those born in Spain, can exacerbate the increase in inequality. Daniel Manzano is a PhD in economics and a partner at Afi.