Affordable Housing in Spain Reaches Tipping Point

Author: Erina Bazán López

October 2, 2026

HRRC calls upon the Spanish government to immediately halt all evictions of vulnerable households without alternative housing, enshrine indefinite rental contracts with mandatory extensions into binding law, drastically reduce and freeze rental prices, expropriate residential assets hoarded by vulture funds and large corporate holders, and restore the constitutional right to decent housing as a guarantee rather than a commodity. 

Protester with banner reading "For the Right to Affordable Housing, Madrid" [Image credit: sydansalama/Flickr]

A network of social mobilization and urban encampments has spread to more than 20 Spanish cities to denounce the housing crisis and speculation in the rental market. The movement, centered in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, has escalated into a direct confrontation between tenant groups, investment funds, and government institutions. This conflict is unfolding against a backdrop of severe economic hardship for families and tenants, where in tight housing markets such as Madrid and Barcelona, vulnerable households and retirees are forced to spend more than 60% of their net income or pensions solely on residential rent, making housing the primary driver of social precariousness and instability in the country.

The incident that sparked the protests took place in Madrid’s Retiro neighborhood, where Maricarmen Abascal, an 87-year-old woman who had lived in her home since 1956, was forcibly evicted after seven years of legal battles. The property’s owner, the firm Urbagestión Desarrollo e Inversiones, sought to impose a 275% rent increase. Despite the peaceful resistance of more than 500 activists and residents who held a vigil at the building’s entrance, a contingent of riot police carried out the eviction, which culminated in the elderly woman being transported on a stretcher by emergency services (SAMUR) and admitted to Gregorio Marañón Hospital due to severe exhaustion. Public outrage intensified after it was revealed that the police raid took place just a hundred meters from a luxury penthouse that the regional government had acquired under questionable circumstances for six million euros, sparking a massive demonstration from Sol to the Congress of Deputies under the slogan “Not Another Maricarmen”, which led to the permanent erection of tents in the center of the capital. 

The human impact of this crisis exposes the structural vulnerability faced by senior tenants in the face of corporate profit-seeking, making it clear that Maricarmen’s eviction did not occur in isolation on a single day, but rather over the course of a protracted process of lawsuits and uncertainty that ultimately forced her to leave her familiar surroundings. At the same time, Puerta del Sol has become a bastion of urban resistance where dozens of young people, students, workers, and retirees are spending the night in more than 350 tents that extend beyond the boundaries of the public transit stations. This encampment has moved beyond passive protest to organizing direct actions in the surrounding streets, such as Navas de Tolosa Street, where the campers physically blocked an imminent eviction and secured a court-ordered postponement. 

The protest in Madrid quickly spread across the country under the slogan “Tomamos las plazas” (“We take the plazas”), coordinated by the Confederation of Tenants' Unions in at least 23 cities. In Barcelona, around 300 activists set up 60 tents in Plaza de Catalunya after blocking traffic on Avenida Diagonal. In Seville, rallies and overnight encampments were organized in the Plaza de la Encarnación to demand caps on the wealth of the super-rich, while in Málaga, more than a thousand protesters gathered in front of City Hall and set up nearly 70 camps in the Plaza de la Constitución. Similar assemblies and mass encampments took place in Cádiz, Zaragoza, Palma, Valencia, Granada, Donostia, Bilbao, Pamplona, A Coruña, Vigo, and Murcia. 

In response to mounting public pressure, the Council of Ministers urgently approved a 96-page real decreto (royal decree) on housing that establishes a moratorium on evictions for vulnerable households without alternative housing until 2030 and imposes restrictions on speculative purchases by investment funds. However, although the primary decree extends the temporary suspension of vulnerable evictions through 2030 and imposes a temporary moratorium on speculative corporate acquisitions through 2028, it relegates mandatory contract renewals to a secondary, highly vulnerable decree subject to parliamentary opposition, substituting permanent tenure with a twelve-month compensatory payout for lease terminations without justified cause or habitable alternative that are wept under the radar of the news and occur daily across the nation. Thus, the government’s decision to split the measures into two separate royal decrees was described as a “disgrace” and a “farce” by spokespeople for the Tenants’ Union, an organization founded in 2017 with more than 4,000 members. The advocacy groups allege that the split is intended to make it easier for parliamentary groups to overturn the most critical provision, which calls for the automatic and indefinite renewal of lease agreements. The inaction of the governing party on this issue has led to questions of its self-proclaimed progressiveness. Protesters chant “¿Dónde está el gobierno progresista?” (“Where is the progressive government?”) next to critiques like “¡Ayuso dimisión!” (“Ayuso resign!”), referring to the local Madrid government where these encampments and protests began.

At the local institutional level, the Community of Madrid and the City Council demanded that the encampment in Sol be cleared within 48 hours, citing the alleged presence of cobblestones and large knives, a demand that was rejected by the Government Delegation, which prioritized the protection of the constitutional right to assembly. These two governments are led by the two main, largest and most longstanding political parties in Spain since its transition to democracy. The lack of anything approaching effective attempts to mitigate the main concern of the population they are serving shows why 74% of Spanish citizens believe that their politicians won’t keep their promises. Next year, the country will undergo general elections, and the only two parties to have ever held absolute majorities keep showing they lack the spine, interest and capability to give the people of Spain what they need.

In response to the civil unrest catalyzed by the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal, the Sindicato de Inquilinas (Tenants’ Union) drafted the 'Decreto Maricarmen', which is a comprehensive legislative proposal demanding mandatory indefinite rental agreements, an immediate 50% reduction and freezing of rental prices, a permanent ban on evictions of vulnerable households, and the expropriation of residential assets held by vulture funds. They also demand the modification of the Urban Leasing Law to eradicate fraud in seasonal or room rentals, the prohibition of speculative operations, and the expropriation of homes hoarded by large holders and vulture funds. To achieve these objectives, the movement has called for collective protests across Spain and intensified pressure on the CCOO and UGT trade unions with the aim of escalating the protests into a general strike over rents and the cost of living that would paralyze the country.

They believe that, ultimately, so long as they decline to expropriate corporate-held housing stock or regulate seasonal and room-rental loopholes, the state perpetuates a model that treats residential property as a high-yield financial asset rather than a constitutionally protected right. This regulatory inadequacy is further underscored by official judicial metrics published by the Consejo General del Poder Judicial (General Counsel of the Judiciary) (CGPJ), which demonstrate a profound structural shift in the nature of housing displacement over the past decade. Whereas mortgage foreclosures dominated the post-2008 financial crisis, court-ordered removals linked to rental lease defaults now constitute three out of every four evictions nationwide. During the first quarter of 2026 alone, Spanish courts executed over 4,000 evictions, 2,600 of which stemmed directly from non-payment of rent under the Urban Leases Act (LAU), compared to just 971 mortgage foreclosures. Geographically concentrated in high-pressure regions such as Catalonia, Andalusia, Valencia, and Madrid, where 582 evictions occurred in the first quarter, this relentless rate of displacement has severely eroded public trust. Survey data from the Center for Sociological Research (CIS) indicates that 86% of citizens believe the constitutional right to decent housing remains unfulfilled.    

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Glossary

• Bastion - something that keeps or defends a belief or a way of life that is disappearing or threatened.

• Catalyzed - to make something start happening or start being successful.

• Compensatory - given or paid to someone in exchange for something that has been lost or damaged, or to pay for something that has been done.

• Eviction – Possession proceedings refer to the court process by which a property owner seeks to recover possession of a property from a person who occupies it without a legal right to remain there, ... Eviction is … the physical enforcement of the court decision, namely the effective removal of the occupant once a final ruling has been issued in favour of the owner.

• Expropriation (Spain) - Property can only be subject to expropriation if justified grounds of public interest apply and owners affected by the compulsory purchase receive compensation.

• Imminent - (esp. of something unpleasant) likely to happen very soon.

• Moratorium - a stopping of an activity for an agreed amount of time.

• Postponement - a delay to an event because someone plans or decides that it should happen at a later date or time.

• Precariousness - the dangerous state of not being in a safe position or not being held in place firmly.

• Protracted - lasting for a long time, or made to continue longer than necessary.

• Social mobilization - coordinated actions and processes designed to engage and involve all relevant segments of society in order to create an enabling environment and effect positive behaviour and social change.

• Speculation - the act of buying something hoping that its value will increase and then selling at this higher price in order to make a profit.

• Speculative - bought or done in order to make a profit in the future.

• Vulnerable - able to be easily physically or mentally hurt, influenced, or attacked.

• Vulture funds - investment funds whose activity is based on speculation. In other words, they only invest when there are signs of potential bankruptcy or poor financial performance, especially in the housing sector , though not exclusively.