In Spain, rents have risen 74% over the last decade, with even steeper rises in the main cities. The Socialist-led government’s Housing Act has failed to rein in speculation, leaving many working-class Spaniards struggling to pay the bills.
Last Thursday, housing activists hung from the façade of Madrid resident Mariano’s apartment, to prevent the eviction decreed by his aristocratic, multi-property-owning landlord. The attempted removal in the working-class neighborhood of Vallecas was just one of the approximately eighty evictions that occur daily in Spain, the most painful face of a housing crisis driven by relentlessly rising rental prices. “Millions of people survive with €300 or €400 per month after having paid the rent. We don’t only work for our bosses, we work for the rentiers, and that’s unbearable,” Valeria Racu, the spokesperson for the Madrid Tenants’ Union, recently explained.
This may augur poorly for Spain’s center-left government, headed by Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) leader Pedro Sánchez. Already in the wake of the financial crash of 2008, the country’s mortgage crisis brought José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s PSOE government to its knees (losing power in 2011) and plunged the Spanish political system into a deep crisis, which gave rise to Podemos and the Catalan independence movement. Likewise, the current rental bubble could drag down Sánchez, as he resists taking necessary measures to guarantee the right to housing.
A Weak Government
The Spanish government, composed of the PSOE and left-wing alliance Sumar, relies on a parliamentary majority made up of an eclectic range of more or less progressive forces, regionalists, and the center-right Catalan pro-independence party Junts. This fragility is compounded by a fierce campaign from the political, media, and judicial right to weaken the government and the prime minister in particular. Sánchez and his personal and political circle have had to face a flood of lawsuits, often based on questionable information from conservative media, which have also affected his popularity. According to the latest 40dB poll, the conservative Partido Popular leads the PSOE in voting intentions, and the far-right Vox is gaining ground. Over the last year, the housing crisis has become the primary concern for the Spanish population, adding to the government’s woes.
Mass evictions were the hallmark of the 2008 crisis in Spain, where the real estate sector was bloated with speculation. Thousands of evictions were stopped by the civil disobedience movement that spread all around the country, with migrant workers playing a leading role. But though evictions continue even now, the reasons have changed. While most evictions in the 2010s stemmed from unpaid mortgages taken out during the early 2000s housing boom, today seven out of ten evictions are due to the inability to pay rent. In addition, there are “invisible evictions”: families and individuals moving because they cannot afford rent. This accounts for 40 percent of housing changes among tenants in Madrid and Barcelona.
Rents have increased by 74 percent in Spain over the past decade, a record figure overshadowed by the even greater increases in the major cities. In Barcelona, average rents rose by 10 percent in just one year, nearing €1,200 per month in 2024, while the minimum wage barely exceeds €1,100. In the Madrid region, rents increased by 14 percent. In Spain’s most expensive areas — which, in addition to Catalonia and Madrid, include the Balearic and Canary Islands — renting a flat consumes more than 100 percent of a young person’s income. The only alternatives for most young people are living with their parents — the average age of leaving the parental home in Spain is 30.4 years, one of the highest in Europe — or indefinitely flat-sharing. However, this is not just a problem for the young: according to a report from the Urban Research Institute (IDRA) in Barcelona, most tenants in Madrid and Barcelona are over thirty-four years old.
The rise in rents only halted in Catalonia during the period when a regional housing law that capped rents in expensive areas was in effect. Within three months, the law reduced prices in these areas by 5 percent. However, in 2022, Spain’s Constitutional Court annulled the most important provisions of the Catalan law, claiming it encroached on central state powers — and rents went up again.
Homeowners, Not Proletarians
To understand Spain’s current housing crisis, it’s worth looking back to Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, which sought to quell social unrest by enabling middle- and working-class homeownership. As Francoist minister José Luis de Arrese put it, “We don’t want a Spain of proletarians but of homeowners.” The strategy largely succeeded: today more than 70 percent of Spaniards own their homes, usually under lengthy mortgages.
The dictatorship’s political objective led to a housing policy focused on building homes for sale on the free market — a policy continued by democratic governments. The result: real estate speculation has been fueled by the state for decades, and the Spanish public housing stock constitutes less than 2 percent of the total, compared to a European average exceeding 9 percent, and 25 percent in countries such as Austria, where the state is expected to provide affordable housing to millions of citizens and counteracts speculative dynamics.
The 2008 crisis shattered Spain’s model, which had relied on risky mortgages akin to the US subprime loans that brought down its financial system. In Spain, mortgage defaults led to a wave of evictions affecting nearly 700,000 people in the decade following the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Instead of seizing the opportunity to radically overhaul a failed housing policy, in 2012 a conservative government headed by the Partido Popular passed a law exempting real estate investment trusts from corporate taxes. According to housing expert Javier Gil from the National Distance Education University (UNED),
The government’s goal was to artificially increase the sector’s profitability to attract massive investment flows, restore the financial–real estate sector as the engine of the Spanish economy, and preserve the privileges of the country’s rentier-financier oligarchies.
This regulation has drawn powerful investment funds. Jaime Palomera, director of the IDRA Housing and City Area, explains: “Nearly half of the properties registered in recent years belong to owners with at least eight properties, and in the last decade, the number of large landlords has risen by 20 percent.” Most allocate their properties to the rental market, where profitability is exceptionally high.
The situation is worsened by the proliferation of tourist apartments in the most visited cities and the Canary and Balearic Islands. Over 300,000 housing units in Spain are dedicated to short-term, high-priced rentals rather than residential leasing. Even the housing minister admitted that “tourist rentals significantly impact prices.”
Without any effective regulation in place, rents have continued climbing. In 2017, activists in Madrid and Barcelona created Spain’s first tenant unions to demand legal rent caps.
The Struggle for Affordable Rent
On November 23, 2024, more than 120,000 people marched in Barcelona demanding a 50 percent rent reduction, indefinite contracts, and effective anti-speculation measures. Organized by the Catalan Tenants’ Union, it was the largest protest in years. Similar marches had occurred in Madrid and Valencia months earlier. These massive demonstrations — rare against a government formed by PSOE and Sumar, an alliance aligned with social movements — highlighted the tenant movement’s strength.
The mobilizations’ success also exposed the limitations of the 2023 Housing Law promoted by Sánchez’s government. The norm banned rent increases for new contracts but only mandated reductions for landlords owning more than ten properties. Besides, many landlords are circumventing regulations by using seasonal rental contracts, and regional governments led by the Partido Popular are obstructing the law’s implementation.
Consequently, rents remain unaffordable for most people. The Partido Popular has proposed several market-oriented measures on housing, such as public guarantees and tax benefits for landlords. However, the social pressure on the conservative parties is weak on this issue.
By contrast, discontent with the PSOE-Sumar government has been fueled by controversial statements from housing minister Isabel Rodríguez, who owns seven properties. In September 2024, she called for “attending to and caring for” landlords and appealed to their solidarity to lower rents. Valeria Racu, spokesperson for the Madrid Tenants’ Union, retorted that “she should go to one of her many houses” and resign.
This month, Prime Minister Sánchez attempted to quell the storm by announcing a series of measures: a new public housing company, tax exemptions for landlords renting affordably, and restrictions on non-EU foreign-property purchases to curb speculative buying. However, the Catalan Tenants’ Union rejected these reforms, stating they offered “no real measures to lower rent prices.” Regarding speculative purchases, they called the announcement “irrelevant,” as major buyers are primarily large French and German landlords. Additionally Sánchez did not address seasonal rentals, which now constitute 30 percent of the market in major cities and are beyond the Housing Law’s scope.
Following the successful autumn protests, housing rights organizations have begun campaigning for rent strikes. The mere mention of this tactic — largely unfamiliar in Spain — sparked public debate. The Secure Rental Foundation, linked to landlords, claimed a rent payment halt by 40 percent of tenants would cause annual losses exceeding €18 billion, reflecting growing fears of a tenant rebellion. Media discussions have invoked memories of the successful rent strikes of the 1930s during Spain’s Second Republic. One of the most famous strikes occurred in May 1931 when over 100,000 tenants withheld rent, winning better conditions.
So far, rent strikes have been limited to a handful of buildings in Madrid and Barcelona. However, tenant union activists are going door-to-door explaining what a rent strike is and why it could be the only means to curb price increases. This prospect would be a nightmare for Sánchez’s government, as its rhetoric on the right to housing fails to convince millions of tenants struggling to make ends meet.