Spain’s housing crisis got catapulted back into the spotlight this week, but in truth it’s been a dreadful market for years now.
“Todos somos Maricarmen” (“We’re all Maricarmen”) is one the most common slogans seen in protests over recent days, in reference to the 87-year-old disabled woman evicted from her lifelong Madrid flat this week after a vulture fund quintupled her rent.
Seeing an abuela kicked out of her home due to corporate greed has hit a nerve with the Spanish public.
There are thousands of other Spaniards apart from Maricarmen being evicted from their rental properties when investment firms hike rents, as well as some truly deplorable conditions and eye-watering prices for tenants in general.
Spanish radio station Cadena Ser ran an interview-based article with a property lawyer on Thursday in which they spoke of how corridors - not rooms - were being rented out for €500 or €600 in the Balearic Islands.
Affordable housing is so lacking in the archipelago that renters would rather put up with 'hallway living' than sue the landlords for fear of ending up in the street.
Other news articles from the last three or four years have denounced so-called pisos colmena (hive flats) with more than a dozen people crammed into them. In some cases they’ve been adapted to resemble Japanese capsule hotels, where glorified two-square-metre ‘coffins’ are rented out for €200 or €300 a month in cities like Barcelona.
That’s a bargain compared with the €500 that tenants pay in Ibiza for sharing not just a bedroom, but a bed.
“Hopefully not with a complete stranger!” you may inquire. Well, with the new trend of ‘hot bedding’, where workers in Spain’s big cities take turns to use the same bed (usually based around work shifts), getting under the covers with another exploited tenant isn’t necessary.
These may be some of the more extreme situations but the vast majority of tenants in Spain are struggling with a rental market that appears to have no price ceiling and no moral compass.
Rents have almost doubled in a decade. In Barcelona, Madrid and Palma de Mallorca, finding a rental that’s fit for habitation and under €1,000 is practically impossible.
Spain is by no means the only country struggling with a housing crisis, but it is striking how little impact legislation brought in to combat price gouging and other abuses has had.
A housing bill rolled out in 2023 which introduced rental caps had the adverse effect of reducing Spain’s long-term rental supply while driving up demand, as landlords chose the more lucrative Airbnb market.
Long-term contracts masquerading as seasonal or temporary rentals that on paper last a maximum of 11 months have since become fairly mainstream, as they allow landlords to circumvent the stronger rights full-time tenants enjoy.
Over the past two years, right-wing parties have twice voted down legislation aimed at regulating the temporary market.
The ruling Socialists are by no means innocent either. A week before Maricarmen was booted out of her flat in Madrid, the PSOE abstained in a vote in Congress to ban vulture funds from buying any more properties in Spain. It had been proposed by their junior coalition partner, hard-left Sumar, and again the PP, Vox and Catalan nationalists Junts voted against it.
READ ALSO: 'It's the law of the jungle' - Pensioner's eviction exposes Spain's housing crisis
Other housing laws never seem to get very far either. In July, Sánchez and Housing Minister Isabel Rodríguez decided to postpone a vote until September for a new tenant-protecting bill, fearing they wouldn’t have enough MPs on their side for it to pass. September is almost done and the bill has been somewhat forgotten.
Spain’s bureaucratic labyrinth is also preventing the country from building anywhere near the amount of social housing it needs to pull itself out of the crisis, with red tape taking longer than actual construction.
The country used to have plenty of public housing to go around, but successive right and left-wing governments ensured that this stock was slowly sold off to private buyers.
READ MORE: How privatising 2.7 million public flats caused the housing crisis
Over a million properties in Spain are now in the hands of people or companies with 10 or more properties, and giant investment funds such as the US’s Blackstone are being allowed to take an even bigger share of the pie.
That’s not to say that ordinary Spaniards who’ve inherited a couple of family properties are not riding the wave of sky-high rents and living off the spoils.
Ultimately, it is up to Spanish parties across the political spectrum to vote in laws which control a rental market that does not care for Maricarmen or any of Spain's nine million tenants.
READ ALSO: Blackrock and Blackstone - The 'unknown' multinationals controlling Spain
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