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Spain's escalating housing crisis is casting a long shadow over Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his Socialist government. Despite efforts to address the issue, frustration is mounting among citizens struggling to find affordable housing.
"Finding a place to rent has now become a minefield, especially for the young," 24-year-old Juan Lozano told AFP.
Lozano was one of around 22,000 protesters who thronged central Madrid on Sunday to vent their anger at spiralling costs and the scarcity of new homes as well as threaten landlords with a rent strike.
Housing has been an unsolvable conundrum for successive governments in Spain, which remains scarred by a 2008 property market crash that accompanied the global recession. But since the Covid-19 pandemic, the crisis has become "unsustainable", Lozano said.
The price of a square metre for rent has soared by 82 percent over the past 10 years, according to online property platform Idealista.
That increase comfortably outstripped average wages, which only creeped up by 17 percent in the same time, according to Spain's national statistics institute, making finding a home mission impossible for low-income households.
Compounding the problem is the dearth of social housing, which only makes up 2.5 percent of the total stock compared with an EU average of 9.3 percent. The crisis has dogged Sanchez's fragile minority government which prides itself on defending the working classes, as tensions simmer with left-wing allies in parliament and exasperated citizens grow increasingly impatient.
Trade union CCOO said access to housing had become a "fantasy for large parts of society" and urged the state to enshrine the right to "a decent and suitable home" in the constitution.
The government introduced a landmark law in May last year that plans to boost social housing, cap rents in areas with the greatest market squeeze and punishments for owners who leave their properties empty.
But the legislation has so far failed to rein in galloping rent hikes, which hit 10.2 percent year-on-year between July and September with peaks of 15 percent in large cities such as Madrid and Valencia.
The Bank of Spain says 600,000 new homes are needed by the end of 2025 to meet the population's needs but estimates fewer than 100,000 are built each year.
Lewis Musonye
