Tens of thousands protest nationwide housing crisis in more than 40 Spanish cities

Tens of thousands of Spaniards took to the streets in 40 cities across the country on Saturday to protest housing speculation. 

“Housing should be a right, not a commodity for speculation,” protest organizers said.

“However, investment funds and landlords continue to accumulate profits while thousands of people are evicted, displaced from their neighborhoods, or forced to live in inhumane conditions.”

Media reports said around 150,000 protesters showed up in Madrid, while protest organizers claimed another 100,000 people turned out in Barcelona.

The organizers — a collection of tenants’ rights and left-leaning organizations — accuse the government of turning housing “into a business model.”

The protest, which took place under the motto, “Let’s End the Housing Business,” focused on Spain’s housing crisis, with organizers demanding forced rent reductions, expropriation and the creation of more social housing.

“Exhorbitant rents,” they write, “are the main cause of impoverishment of the working class and a barrier to accessing housing.” They accuse a small minority of property owners of “suffocating a large part of society.”

Spain’s history of real estate speculation and its lack of completed affordable housing over the past decade have caused rents to double during that time.

Foreign ownership of properties and tourism have supercharged the problem. As tourism explodes across Spain, locals in Barcelona, Madrid, Malaga, Mallorca and Valencia have been priced out of the market by visitors and the real estate speculators catering to them.

Rents in Barcelona, for instance, have increased 60% in just the past five years. The city has now decided to phase-out all short-term apartment rental licenses by 2028.

Spaniards spending over 40% of income on rent alone

Spain’s government estimates it needs to build at least 600,000 new apartments to get a handle on what it calls “a social emergency.” In 2024, 100,000 new homes were completed.

But organizers like Gonzalo Alvarez of the Tenants’ Syndicate (Sindicato de Inquilinas e Inquilinos) said “there is a lack of housing because homes are being hijacked — on the one hand tourist flats, and on the other hand all the empty flats belonging to vulture funds and the banks. So there’s no need to build more, it’s not necessary.”

Instances in which investors allow apartments to fall into disrepair to evict renters has become a common problem, meaning that many tenants are forced to live in squalid conditions because landlords refuse to maintain properties with an eye to increasing prices down the road.

Spain’s Central Bank recently reported that 40% of renters spend around 40% of their total income on housing. And despite salaries rising by 20% over the past 10 years, these have failed to keep pace with doubling rents. This has made housing the number one concern occupying Spanish voters. 

Opponents of the protest movement see measures like the threat of rent strikes as hostile and escalatory, accusing organizers of being radical leftists opposed to the idea of private property ownership while masquerading under the guise of supporting housing equity.

Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has imposed rent caps as well as proposing bans and/or so-called 100% supertaxes on foreign property ownership as a way to tackle the problem.

At a recent ribbon-cutting ceremony for social housing units in Sevilla, Sanchez said Spaniards, “want us to act, they want the housing market to operate according to the law of reason, of social justice: they want to insure that vulture funds and speculators are not doing whatever they like.” 

On Saturday, tenants amplified their calls for slashing rents, the revamping of 3.8 million vacant homes, the banning of eviction companies and the establishment of eviction protections for those who have no alternative housing.