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.

In s’Alguer, the cove where the new Estrella Damm advertisement was filmed, one person lives all year round. This is Miquel Carós (Palamós, 1948), who has been living for twelve years in one of the fishermen's houses with coloured doors in this spot of crystal-clear waters on the Costa Brava. Now he is no longer the sole inhabitant. Six years ago, another man settled there with his son. None of the three would be living there if Franco had not died on November 20, 1975. "It was close, the machines were already prepared to demolish the shacks, but since he died, everything stopped," he explains.