In the west of London it is common to pay more than 4,000 pounds a month –about 4,700 euros– for a three-bedroom apartment. With a lot of luck, sharing a four-bedroom apartment can allow you to lower the bill to just over 3,000 pounds –about 3,500 euros–. In Edinburgh, a five-bedroom apartment, also generally shared among students, twenty minutes' walk from the Royal Mile –the city's historic and tourist center–, does not go below 3,000 pounds: it is often a case of homes without double glazing, a serious shortcoming because winters in Scotland are long and harsh.

Knowing that a million homes will be missing across the country in two years—according to the Bank of Spain—builders and developers highlighted this Wednesday during the 5th National Housing Congress, held in Barcelona, the obstacles they face in "producing at the rate they historically" had done.

This morning began with a rumor that turned into a question: after Junts announced that it will not vote for the two housing decrees, will Pedro Sánchez announce the calling of elections? Because the scenario is favorable: the Maricarmen case has gone around the world (it has even reached the Pope), it has brought people out onto the streets; with the two decrees, the PSOE was siding with the people on the street, ergo if there has ever been a minimally favorable situation for the PSOE to call elections, it was this one. The Maricarmen case has erased Ceuta from the debate. With Ceuta you could not go to elections, but with Maricarmen you can. Now there is a clean cut: right and left.

At this exact moment that I am speaking to you, everything suggests that there will be no agreement between the Spanish government and its multiple and diverse partners. What is non-negotiable for Sumar and Podemos (with Esquerra and Bildu behind them), which is that all contracts must be extended, whoever the owner may be, is a red line for Junts, with the argument that the housing policy that has not been implemented should not be paid for by small owners.If this were to end like this, what would happen? Well, today the Spanish government would approve a decree in the council of ministers that is insufficient to get everyone's votes, and it will then have a few weeks to continue negotiating it, before taking it to a vote in the Congress of Deputies to validate it. But the housing problem has exploded definitively. And on a global scale. The law of the market, when vulture funds enter, is no longer the law of the market, but rather it transforms into the law of the jungle. And the whole society must protect itself. Even the Pope has spoken about it, during the course of his trip to France: “What is the problem with an elderly woman being evicted from her home?” How is it possible that an elderly woman with a disability is being evicted?, asked Leo XIV. That how is it possible? Well, as that person said: “It’s the market, my friend”. Demonstration yesterday evening in Barcelona, in front of the Congress Palace where Pedro Sánchez was speaking. The social fracture between those who live in properties they own and those who rent is getting bigger and bigger. And now, the people protesting are convinced that this is the moment to change things, because we cannot continue like this. 15 years ago, those of the 15-M movement were affected by mortgages. Now we have gone from those affected by mortgages to those affected by rent. In fifteen years, will it be those affected by homelessness? Because housing is a branch of a bigger problem: that of the working poor, that of households where, with two salaries, it is barely possible to make ends meet or have anything left in your pocket to save. That of wage devaluation. And all of it, aggravated by inflation. This morning we learned that, due to the rise in gasoline prices, this month of September the cost of living for families has climbed up to 4.9% more than the same month last year. Data from the National Statistics Institute (INE). The social crisis is a disaster, a state of unrest. The political derivative is Sánchez's inability to square the circle on the right and on the left. And the PP and Vox make people believe that the day they govern they will solve it.By the way, Maricarmen will return home. Urbagestión, the investment fund that owns Maricarmen Abascal's apartment, has reached an agreement with the neighbor's lawyers so that she can return home. She will have to pay around 30% of her pension, approximately 500 euros (similar to the amount she was paying until now), in a contract renewed for eight years."It is a historic milestone. It had never happened before," celebrated Maricarmen Abascal's lawyer and the Tenants' Union. Good morning.

You already know that today is a day we started at the very top, first thing in the morning with the tick-tock of a countdown so that tomorrow the housing decree-law can be approved. It is a tense countdown, with about 500 people camping in Madrid, in about eighty tents, in a repetition of what was the 15-M, which have appeared after the emotional impact of the eviction of the 87-year-old lady from Madrid, Maricarmen. The majority of the campers are young, and the protests in Barcelona have blocked some streets early in the morning, and will continue until the evening, when Pedro Sánchez will come to present some awards at the Palace of Congresses located at the top of the Diagonal and will be met with a citizen protest called by the Tenants' Union.That is why yesterday Pedro Sánchez wanted to calm the nerves with an announcement that aimed to be empathetic:Pedro Sánchez: “Maricarmen, I have a message for you. The government is working against the clock to bring the royal decree-law on housing on Tuesday. And I ask the parliamentary groups that we make one last effort so that it is validated in the national Parliament, for Maricarmen and for the millions of Spaniards who suffer from the housing crisis. Because it is not a question of ideology, it is a question of humanity”.The problem, President Sánchez, is that it is indeed a question of ideology. If it were only a matter of humanity, it would already be solved. The problem for Sánchez is that he needs the votes of parties like Podemos and Sumar, who see landlords as a whole, and he needs the votes of Junts and the PNV, who want protection for small landlords. Consider that, in Catalonia, approximately 90% of rental housing is in the hands of small holders. A small holder is considered to be any individual or company that owns fewer than 5 properties in stressed areas.Yesterday, a very direct source from Junts told me that they were not optimistic. “If it depended on the PSOE and us it would be easy, but with Sumar/Podem and their ideological entrenchment everything becomes complicated”. For Junts, the red line for not agreeing to the decree is that vulture funds and large real estate companies are lumped together with small property owners, and that the cost of suspending evictions is passed on to the small property owner. The idea is that “what the vulnerable tenant cannot pay the landlord, the State should pay”.Well, based on what has emerged this morning, among the measures that the Spanish government has confirmed to ARA are being negotiated are: protecting against evictions (the fine print remains to be seen), prohibiting speculative housing purchases by vulture funds (this measure could gather consensus from both the left and Junts and the PNB), stabilizing rental contracts (this is one of the main demands of the Tenants' Union, which wants indefinite contracts, but Junts and the PNB do not view this measure favorably), and tax bonuses for tenants (Junts requested this, but it remains to be seen if Sumar and Podemos, who were reluctant, will also accept it).In short, we have protests underway, including a 15-M style encampment and a decree law that is being negotiated with urgency, to stop the blow. But we have lost fifteen years. Because it is not that we are in the same place as the 15-M, but that we are worse off, because 15 years have passed and there is a lack of affordable housing. When it turns out that housing is personal and social stability and means birth rates, the failure is collective.I do not know if the decree will have the votes, it remains to be seen whether it will lean more to the right or to the left, and it must find a balance that will require everyone to compromise. But it will be a stopgap, a temporary solution. That is the tragedy. Now, it is clear that we are at a political and social turning point, because there are people of all ages who have no idea where they will live when their contract expires. Good morning.

The pressure on the streets for the Spanish government to approve the new housing decree to curb evictions has increased this weekend. The citizen mobilization has been an indisputable success. As the promoters of the demonstration and the encampment at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid have said themselves, it cannot be compared to the 15-M of 2011. There is less underlying ideological movement and more concrete demands. In reality, the current cry has a perfectly describable objective: to resolve access to housing, which has become the main cause of precariousness and inequality. And it responds to a very generalized malaise that is interclass and intergenerational. The image of Maricarmen Abascal, 87 years old, being evicted on a stretcher from the apartment where she has lived all her life, has made an impact on public opinion: many elderly citizens have imagined themselves in her situation, and many young people and adults have projected their own grandmother or mother onto her.

Two years ago, one of the spokespersons for the Madrid Renters' Union, Valeria Racu, uttered a sentence that—though we didn't know it at the time—these days we remember with sadness. It was a program of Espejo público that began with the story of a pensioner named Maricarmen, the owner of an apartment whose tenant had stopped paying rent and was subletting the rooms. After acknowledging that, undoubtedly, it was a difficult situation, Racu asked to talk about another Maricarmen: "A Maricarmen I know […], who is facing eviction because a company has bought her building to invest in it".

It is deeply embarrassing that the eviction of this elderly lady in Madrid was necessary for everyone to suddenly rush to action. Firstly, because it is not serious, and secondly, for those who claim they have been warning us for a long time, because an anti-eviction decree will soften the blow, but it is not the solution to the housing problem.

In the film Umberto D. (directed in 1952 by Vittorio de Sica, a director who dared to portray poverty, and starring Carlo Battisti) there is a very harsh scene. The protagonist of the film is a retired civil servant who cannot survive on the meager pension he has been left with and who finds himself pushed to beg on the street. Because he is ashamed, the man leaves a little dog with his hat, which begs for him. At first glance it is a tender image, but if one stops to think about it even for a moment, it is devastating. It portrays the poverty of so many people who never imagined they would find themselves driven to it and who do not know how to face the situation, because they cannot overcome the astonishment – and the shame, too – of finding themselves in it.The market, left to its own logic without any kind of correction, tirelessly expands the spaces of marginality or makes the poverty threshold higher and higher, so that an increasingly broad sector of the population falls into it. People who in principle should be in a position to afford a dignified life (wage earners or self-employed, or those who retire after contributing throughout a long working life) discover all of a sudden that this is not the case. Their incomes are below prices, and if they do not have an environment that supports them, they soon find themselves driven to poverty.This week, the cases of Maricarmen in Madrid (the 87-year-old woman, in poor health and with low income, who was evicted from her home while protesters were repressed in a new episode of police brutality) and Olga in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat (a 54-year-old woman, mother of two daughters –one of them a minor–, who committed suicide because she could not bear to lose her home), have filled newspapers, television news and social networks, and have drawn everyone's attention to the so-called housing crisis, which in reality is nothing more than a result of an economic system based on two things: greed and aporophobia. Put another way: the pathological relationship with money that consists of considering it a superior good (in relation to the rights of citizens, and also in the abstract, as a kind of deity), and the hatred of the poor.People have, or we have, a fear of being poor for many reasons, but one of the main ones is that we know we will come to be hated. Not just belittled, ridiculed, humiliated, violated, or persecuted: but also hated. Above all else, hated. The image of the poor person acts as a reflection of what we never want to be: that is why, when we encounter them on the streets, we turn our heads or quicken our pace. No one will reproach us for it. The poor person is fearsome, dark, and repugnant, because they personify the negation of prosperity. The message for those who cannot pay the prices imposed by uncontrolled speculators is that, in addition to their home and their belongings, they have lost their dignity and the consideration of a human being. The poverty-stranglers have always existed; now, however, they boast of being the leaders of the new capitalism. They have many self-justifying theories, but a single fundamental principle: to hate the poor.

Yesterday, an 87-year-old woman was evicted from her home because she could not afford the rent increase from 500 to 2,750 euros. Since this eviction happened in Madrid, where the loudspeaker resonates louder –also in Catalonia–, this image of this lady, whose name is Maricarmen, has become the symbol of the wreckage that the real estate market is causing in the lives of thousands of people.Between 7,000 and 8,000 evictions take place in Catalonia every year. The vast majority are due to non-payment of rent (approximately 75%). Everything is legal: there is a law, which the judge applies, with the protection of the police. It is legal, but it is neither ethical nor decent. And this is when all eyes turn towards politics, so that it may correct what we call the abuses of the market. But for decades now, the market has been winning over politics. Here and everywhere else. And there is no need for a dramatic eviction like yesterday's to verify its effects: how many young people cannot emancipate themselves from their parents' house because they cannot afford rent –with the consequent effect that this has on their future expectations, of living as a couple, of starting their own family, of having children–? How many families have had to leave their lifelong neighborhood or city because they cannot afford to live there?The remote and immediate causes of the housing crisis have been long debated. You hear from developers and they point out that there are few building plots, you hear from the real estate sector and it says there is a lack of supply, you hear everyone saying that public housing has not been built, you hear from small landlords and they say they do not want to be treated like large holders, like vulture funds and speculators, and having to carry out, out of their own pockets, the housing policies that governments have not implemented. The problem is that the real estate market is eating away at everyone's life. Do you remember the case of that teacher from Mallorca who worked in Ibiza and every day took a plane to go teach classes in Ibiza because it was more cost-effective to take a plane than to pay rent? Well, that's it.The effects on collective morale, the loss of trust in democracy, and the increase in lack of solidarity are enormous. Here and everywhere. If there is a globalized problem, it is housing. In this context, yesterday Pedro Sánchez took a photo with the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, which he finished with the following phrase: “The powerful fear us”. It is the type of statement that should be made with actions rather than words, especially when the facts contradict you. A bad day to say “The powerful fear us”, because it is not true. The image of Maricarmen from yesterday is one of great social violence.Yes, politics has its codes, and international alliances are highly sought after, the photo with Mamdani is sought after, but the housing problem surpasses them all, even the political leaders with the greatest social conscience.Good morning

Elif Eralp and Zohran Mamdani have won the elections in two global cities, with indisputable historical and global reach, and with an agenda for intervention in the housing market. In the case of Berlin, everyone is talking about the expropriations that Eralp wants to carry out, which are the result of a deliberate process backed by a referendum. The citizens of Berlin were asked if they would approve the expropriation of the property of the 12 large landlords with more than 3,000 apartments in the city, with a potential impact on 243,000 rental apartments out of 1.5 million apartments in the city. The detractors of the measure argue that the expropriations will create legal uncertainty and that a harmful message is being sent to investors. They do not speak of the residents who live there, of the economic need to provide stability to city workers so that there is dynamism, and of the duty of the property to carry out proper maintenance of all these apartments. In a 2018 presentation by the Housing Agency of Catalonia, the case of a portfolio of 16,000 apartments that BBVA had sold to the investment fund Cerberus was analyzed: the portfolio consisted of 4,995 empty apartments, 2,351 occupied, 4,000 rented, 1,306 ceded, and about 3,306 without possession. These are mostly apartments accumulated through mortgage foreclosures (families who could not meet their mortgage payments). The concentration of property is a very recent phenomenon in cities, and it is a very important morphological change, because the development structure we have in mind (what we learned at architecture school) is no longer in style: there are no longer small commercial companies building simultaneously next to each other, with ten-year real estate cycles, like at the genesis of the Eixample. It has reached a point where the properties of a single holder are spread across different cities and countries and portfolios of thousands of apartments are traded in transactions where often the condition of the apartment and the building is deplorable. But they don't even visit them. Also in Madrid, as I read in Infobae, the data from the AVS deposits indicate that there is a concentration of property in the hands of a few operators: more than 80% of rental apartments are in the hands of some funds and companies that own 5 or more apartments.

The mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, met a few days ago with his counterpart from New York, Zohran Mamdani, on the occasion of the U20 or Urban 20, a summit of mayors from 34 G-20 cities. From the very moment of the resounding electoral victory that brought him to the mayoralty of New York, Mamdani became a global progressive icon and a kind of anti-Trump counterpower (although that is more for show than anything else), and therefore photos with him are highly prized by European left-wing leaders. Collboni got his photo with Mamdani and something more: the endorsement of the New York mayor for Mayors for Housing, an international alliance of mayors committed to promoting policies against the housing crisis, which Barcelona has already led at a European level and which now seeks to expand internationally.It cannot be said that the U20 was not productive for Collboni nor that he arrived there empty-handed. Barcelona was the only city from the Spanish state to participate and was able to contribute the regulation of rental prices, the total ban on tourist rentals, or the expropriation of vacant homes, measures that have certainly been approved (but are not being applied, or not enough, in one of the preferred cities for vulture funds and large speculators, both banking and non-banking). The Mamdani administration has, for its part, approved the freezing of rent prices for rent-controlled apartments or the creation of public supermarkets to guarantee access for poor families to basic products; Collboni committed to opening the first of these supermarkets by the year 2027 in the Barcelona neighborhood of La Marina.All of this comes to be a kind of alliance of mayors against speculation and it is very good. But it is difficult to maintain the spirit that animates the assumption of these commitments while disregarding the protests this past Sunday against the airport expansion, a great mobilization that also took place in Palma and Ibiza, where it had the dimensions of a historic demonstration. The protests are based on a clear finding: the expansions of El Prat, as well as Son Sant Joan, as well as Es Codolar are being done to increase the touristification of Barcelona, Mallorca, and Ibiza. And the increase in the touristification of Barcelona, Mallorca, and Ibiza is directly linked to the lack of control over prices and housing speculation, which is, in fact, one of the direct consequences. The fabulous extractive machine that is Aena may hide behind the need to have infrastructure that is competitive with other large international airports, but this does not take away even a bit of the seriousness of a system failure—the housing crisis—that has also acquired an international dimension and that is especially suffocating in intensely touristified zones like Catalonia (especially Barcelona) or the Balearic Islands (especially Mallorca and Ibiza). Double standards do nothing at all to alleviate this failure.

To understand where we are in terms of housing, we need to take a long-term view. It is often alleged that building a public housing stock is very slow, that a lot of money is needed to have land reserves, and that many years of continuous investment would be required to reach the target of 15% affordable housing in cities. However, in a country like Spain, historically very exposed to bricks and mortar, the state has intervened on many occasions to rescue the markets: from 2008 to 2014, public and European funds were invested to save the banks and savings banks after the bursting of the real estate bubble; in 2012, Sareb was created to manage "toxic assets"; all kinds of facilities were given to SOCIMIs (real estate investment trusts), and the Urban Leasing Act (LAU) was reformed, generalizing the signing of rental contracts to only three years. A large part of those decisions explains why finding a rental home now is a miracle.The story of Sareb can be explained from a macroeconomic perspective or from the point of view of cities: these are two opposing visions. I will explain it from this local perspective.Very close to my house, in a newly created neighborhood, there is a very large plot of land with weeds, delimited by some large stones, which has been empty for years. Before, it was fields, and since the approval of a partial plan in 2002, new streets have been made that give rise to plots intended for six-story blocks, but of low density, because the buildings are very far apart from each other. Only 10% of the development is destined for social housing, as in many planning schemes of that time.The burst of the real estate bubble in 2008 caused land prices to soar as they transitioned from fields to building plots, and some developers got their fingers burned. In anticipation that prices would not return to those values, Sareb was created to prevent the correction in land and apartment prices from leading to bank failures. Thus, the plot next to my house passed into the hands of the bad bank, and many of my neighbors do not know that urban planning proposes a block for 58 apartments there. Sareb has held it in its portfolio for years and no private developer has wanted to develop it, despite it being ready-to-build land. The market has not responded as expected.In an attempt to mobilize a package of land such as the one next to my house, Sareb held a tender called the Vienna Plan, which was supposed to allow for the construction of 3,770 affordable homes throughout Spain for developers who would collect the rents for 80 years. The tender, however, remained deserted: no operator saw itself capable of promoting affordable rental apartments in dozens of different municipalities, each pending its own licensing and permit procedures, with the uncertainty of construction costs rampant due to the pandemic, and later the wars in Ukraine and Iran.

Room rentals are one of the loopholes that landlords in Catalonia have found to bypass rent caps. Consequently, in December, Parliament approved a law to regulate seasonal and room rentals, a pioneering initiative in Spain.

Classic developers often complain that building social housing is very expensive and slow due to bureaucracy, and that is why they do not build it. Having to process dozens of permits, documents to be validated in different departments, with sometimes conflicting criteria, chaining processes that do not advance if a procedure gets stuck... All this creates volumes of uncertainty that translate into delays and, ultimately, loss of money. In free-market housing, this is not a barrier, because these are costs that are passed on to the sale price. But in social housing, with affordable prices for tenants, it puts many operations at risk. And this, above all, penalizes social promoters and small operators the most. If 50,000 social housing units need to be built, and they are not being built at the expected pace, perhaps we should make it easier for ourselves. I have been lucky enough to be able to lead the development of two social housing buildings, and I can state that the following actions would eliminate barriers to the construction of social housing:1. Land management. In social housing projects, most of the plots are free transfers from developers to city councils or land purchased expressly. In the first case, the compensation boards must leave the plots clean, decontaminated, and urbanize the surrounding streets on time. In the second, it is necessary to carry out demolitions, often complicated by the impact on neighboring properties. Therefore, before being able to place a crane, social housing projects must wait for actions that must be carried out by other agents.2. Lack of clarity in the regulations. There are many sentences in the norms, decrees, and ordinances that give rise to different interpretations. The problem is not whether a civil servant or a private company grants the license; the barrier arises when the person who has the power to stop a certain project always takes it in the most restrictive way possible. Then professional judgment loses its meaning. And a warning: private companies that grant licenses will not take risks, and will always go for the most unfavorable interpretation. It is this lack of clarity that delays the granting of licenses, because good developers will logically always try to defend the interpretations that give more room for good architecture.3. Administrative fragmentation. When a project is submitted, it is accompanied by various annexes: the heritage issue, railway impacts, telecommunications, waste, fires, transport... It is logical that 21st-century cities demand controls over all networks, but perhaps the administration itself could accompany social promoters in all these procedures to recall the public interest of reducing deadlines.

The 50,000 Plan is the great promise of Salvador Illa's government. Two years after the announcement of the measure, the Minister of Territory, Sílvia Paneque, assured, in an interview on Catalunya Ràdio this Friday, that there are "practically" 10,000 apartments "finished," and that 28,000 more are "in projection." The data, however, do not coincide with those held by Catalan builders, who confirm that "there are only 3,000 apartments put out to tender and awarded", in the words of the president of the Chamber of Construction Contractors of Catalonia (CCOC), Lluís Moreno, this same Friday in the ARA.

The housing crisis is also a drag on business growth. This is according to a report prepared by the SME Observatory of the Catalan employers' association of small and medium-sized enterprises, Pimec, which indicates that one out of every two businesses in the country has renounced applying growth measures – from expanding staff to opening new production centers – due to the residential pressure suffered by both the company and the workers.

I celebrate that the Congress of Architecture has once again put housing at the center: “We declare that housing is a right, not a mere economic return. This right is non-negotiable”,says the Barcelona Declaration. It is an ambitious slogan, because houses are very valuable spaces, it is difficult to be able to pay for them with the effort of work, they consume many resources and their production is central to urban economies. Housing has become a luxury because cities have discarded other ways of planning, building and living.The congress has featured the participation of Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, who are probably the European architects who have done the most, throughout their careers, to demonstrate that inhabiting is not only a right, but that it should be a pleasure. And this may cost not much more. It is not a matter of means, nor of BIM software, nor of material execution price. It has to do with the ambition to offer the best spaces in the neighborhoods where we intervene, and it requires observing, designing, and taking risks.I had Jean-Philippe Vassal as a professor for a year when I went on Erasmus to the School of Architecture in Versailles, and I have a clear and fond memory of him: I never heard him pontificate, what he taught was a reasoning very close to what he built and what he has been building for the last twenty years. Vassal's course was initially disconcerting because it didn't ask for a specific solution for a given plot. During the first classes, he simply suggested that we students go around the city taking photographs of curious spaces, with unforeseen uses. When you are given so much freedom, it becomes very difficult to stand in front of a classroom and explain a personal discovery. Then we would conceptually travel to Africa, to the desert, or to Djema-el-Fnaa square in Marrakech, to understand what makes a space comfortable without anyone having applied a design or an imitated style. Finally, the course project consisted of proposing a place and intervening in it to improve it. It was difficult, but he did with us what he proposed in his office: intervening without the safety net provided by regulations and ordinances. Opening our gaze allows us to discover trees that create cathedral-like spaces, simply with a cadence between the trunks and selective pruning of branches. Or, as they have done with exquisite precision, converting greenhouses into fantastic and economical homes.

A few days ago, the governor of the Bank of Spain, José Luis Escrivá, warned that housing is a true national emergency. He is not wrong. This problem, which is a growing concern for citizens, has become the main source of growth in social inequality. Whichever data you look at, the diagnosis is always the same: there is more demand than supply, expensive and practically inaccessible for a large part of the population. And of the supply that exists, some is in the hands of non-residents or are apartments used for tourist rentals. In total, there are about 900,000 across the country, according to data from the Bank of Spain.

The writer Llucia Ramis says she is “acollonada” because despite having been able to afford a mortgage for an apartment, after years of going from one rental to another, who knows if one day she won't be able to pay the installment. We thank the writer and the interviewer, Laura Serra, for having contributed to popularizing this Mallorcan way of being “acollonida” in Catalonia and, at the same time, we regret that this opportunity to enrich vocabulary arises from the harsh reality of real estate. Because if anyone wants to read a very well-explained summary of the great contemporary unease that affording a place to live has become, they should read the interview.