Thirty-three years later, Marga Aguilar never missed rent payments in her apartment in a modernist-style building in the heart of Barcelona. The owner of the building always treated her and the other tenants as if they were family and kept the rent reasonably.
However, when the owner recently passed away, 62-year-old Aguilar woke up brutally. The Dutch investment fund has plummeted to buy the building. This is because it is called Casadera Papalona and is crowned with a mosaic sculpture of butterflies. The tenant received an eviction notice and asked to leave next month.
“My feet started to leave,” said Aguilar, whose 92-year-old father moved with her during the pandemic. “We don't know where we're going. We can't afford to live anywhere else.”
Spain is rapidly facing a housing crisis that has become one of Europe's most severe. Since 2015, nearly a tenth of the country's housing stock has been picked by investors or converted to tourist rentals. Rarity helped raise prices much faster than wages, putting affordable homes out of reach for many.
The problem is complicated, perhaps not so much like Barcelona, which has become ground zero for the Spanish housing dilemma. And it's a melting pot of challenges to try to fix it. And with the summer tourist season approaching, cities face more urgency to find solutions.
Despite efforts to help residents achieve affordable housing, investors have found ways to avoid restrictions. As authorities scramble to address the scale of their predicament, experts warn that it will take time to change the long-standing issues.
“Housing must be the right thing, not the business,” said Salvador Ira, president of Catalonia, a Spanish region that includes Barcelona. “The need to deal with that is urgent.”
The misery of Barcelona reflects the pain that surges European cities. Residential real estate is becoming increasingly transformed into a financial asset by investors. The surge in global tourism and cross-border workers has landlords who support short-term rentals over protected long-term tenants. City needs more homes, but high costs and complex regulations have kept construction down. After the government sold them to raise cash, inventory in the shelter of struggled families in social housing that had once been left to shrink.
The issue of affordability has become one of the biggest drivers of inequality in Europe. According to EuroStat, rents in the European Union rose 20% in 10 years, while home prices rose by half. In 2023, one in ten Europeans spent more than 40% of their income on housing.
Wanting to reverse the trend, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, executive officer of the European Union, recently appointed Europe's first housing commissioner.
In Barcelona, the situation is considered to be very important, so mayor Jaume Collboni urged Brussels to treat them with the same ungency as Ukrainian defense in 14 other European cities, including Amsterdam, Budapest, Paris and Rome.
“Europe faces threats to our borders” from the Russian attacks, Korboni said in an interview from his glamorous office overlooking Plaza San Jarm in the historic centre of Barcelona. “But we also face internal threats, which has led to increased inequality due to the lack of affordable housing.”
Other European cities have been attacked by residential crunches, but Barcelona is whipped by it. Boasting the Sagrada Familia Cathedral and the Lalambra Promenade, this sun-kissed city attracts around 15 million visitors each year. Tens of thousands of foreign workers have recently migrated and strengthened the economy, but it has put pressure on them.
Housing rights are protected by the Spanish constitution. However, according to PWC, rental prices have increased 57% domestically since 2015 and since 2015, while home prices have increased 47%, while household incomes have increased just 33%. In Barcelona alone, rents have skyrocketed 68% over the course of 10 years.
Corboni, a socialist politician elected in 2023, moved quickly to apply the solution, starting with the rental price cap last March. Since then, rents have fallen on average by more than 6%. After a stormy year in which angry Spaniards protested for affordable housing, Barcelona will become the first European city to end its licensing of Airbnb housing, requiring owners to provide long-term accommodation on rent or sell by 2028.
“One shot, a boom: 10,000 flats will be brought back to the open market,” Kolboni said. “That's nearly 25,000 people who can once again live in Barcelona.”
Additionally, the Catalan government has deployed a plan to work with developers to build 50,000 affordable homes by 2030. They are also promoting the reduction of construction permit approval time by half. “If the market breaks, we need to intervene,” Ira said.
However, housing activists say these measures will do nothing to resolve the immediate crunch. They are instead pressing the government to force landlords and banks holding default mortgages to place 4 million empty homes in Spain and about 75,000 people in Barcelona.
“People get kicked out of their homes every day, and this is an immediate solution,” said Max Kernell, a spokesman for the Catalonian Socialist Housing Union. “There's a house already there, so why are you building it?”
Barcelona authorities are seeking other ways to keep renters home, such as buying the building from investors. Last year, the city spent 9 million euros to buy back Casa Orsola, a historic residence that Spanish investor Lioness Inversions photographed for 6 million euros in 2021.
However, housing activists and renters protested the move, saying that pain-causing investors are profiting from taxpayer money.
Property owners say many owners prefer to empty their homes as regulations protect tenants. “There is a shortage of homes as developers, homeowners and landlords have been criminalised,” said Hesús Encinar, founder of Idealista, Spain's largest real estate search website.
Tension can be seen in the laws of a country that Kolboni called “black holes,” which makes residents of buildings like Casa dela Papalona vulnerable. The law allows investors to purchase a building and convert it to temporary rentals. This offers leases for less than a year. Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has introduced a bill to kill the law, but faces opposition from lawmakers who are concerned about property rights.
The new Amsterdam developer, the fund that purchased the Casa de La Papallona, also known as Casa Fajol, has acquired hundreds of other Barcelona apartments for such use. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
In a nearby neighborhood, Inmobiriaria Gallardo, a developer run by a family owning Almirall, one of Spain's largest pharmaceutical companies, has taken advantage of a loophole in the Catalonian Housing Act, which opened briefly in 2023 to obtain a license to convert all residential apartments in an 11-storey building into tourist rentals.
“One day I noticed that some of our neighbors were getting more and more out there, and then more and more – there are 10 left in a week,” said Maite Martín, 63, a university employee who has lived in the building for 25 years.
Currently, a quarter of all apartments are on vacation. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
“This was a community of families and seniors who lived here for decades,” Martin said she was sitting at the table with two neighbors whom she said were surrounded by strangers. “The fabric is destroyed,” she added.
Martin recently had to dry laundry on the balcony to clean up vomiting from tourists at a party renting on her. Helped by the housing association, residents of her building and some tenants in Casa de la Papalona decided to stay in their homes as a form of protest.
In Spain, it has become a grassroots movement in Spain, particularly in Barcelona, where former mayor Ada Colau was elected on the housing activist platform. However, a backlash was formed, and the Catalan government tried to counter the movement.
Amidst the chaos, the government is moving forward by building more homes. On the hill above the heart of Barcelona, construction workers poured concrete for a day of recent weekdays and installed lighting, kitchens, showers and stairs in the shells of a five-storey building set aside by the Catalan government.
Private construction company Arcadia PLA had won a public bid of 1.8 million euros to create 15 energy-efficient, rent-bearing apartments that accommodate up to 60 people. The pipeline has 30 similar projects, many of which are large buildings of 60 apartments and are part of a wider plan to expand the area's social housing park, says Catalan government architect Carls Mass.
But given the magnitude of the crisis, he said there is a need to do more. “We need to find a way to move faster.”
Jose Bautista contributed the report.
