The housing problem in Spain did not emerge with the 2008 crisis, but it was at that moment that it transformed into a major social conflict. If we had to pinpoint a starting point for this cycle, we could point to the approval of Law 6/1998, of April 13, on land use and valuations, promoted by the government of José María Aznar. This law marked a turning point by liberalizing large amounts of land and facilitating its conversion into a speculative asset, intensifying a prior process of housing commodification that had already been developing in previous decades.
Contents
1. The Bubble Decade (2000-2008): Ownership, Debt, and Depoliticization
3. The PAH and 15M cycle (2011-2014): organization, social legitimacy, and expansion
4. Institutionalization and reconfiguration (2014-2019)
5. From the mortgage crisis to the rental crisis (2019-post-pandemic)
The bubble decade (2000-2008): ownership, debt and depoliticization.
In the early 2000s, the housing model in Spain was based on three pillars: the mass development of owner-occupied housing, the financialization of access through mortgage loans, and a weak social rental housing system. Under the governments of José María Aznar and later José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, economic growth was heavily linked to the real estate sector.
Beyond its legal or urban planning dimensions, this transformation must be understood as part of a broader reconfiguration of Spanish capitalism, in which housing became a central axis of accumulation. The real estate boom was not only an economic phenomenon but also a mechanism for reorganizing class relations: large sectors of the working class were integrated into the accumulation cycle through long-term debt, linking their material reproduction to private housing ownership and the financial system.
Thus, access to housing ceased to be a matter of social rights or public policy and became subordinated to market forces. The figure of the small, mortgaged landlord became the dominant form of access, while alternatives such as affordable rent or public housing were weakened. This process contributed to dismantling more open forms of conflict, shifting social tensions to the private sphere, individual debt, and financial indiscipline.
However, this apparent integration contained a fundamental contradiction: the expansion of credit did not eliminate structural inequalities, but rather reconfigured them in new forms or camouflaged them within a bubble that served to enrich a minority. Dependence on wages, the precariousness of employment, and the financialization of daily life placed broad social strata in a position of latent vulnerability, which would explode with the 2008 crisis, directly linked to massive job losses and a reconfiguration of the labor market.
Before that, during this period prior to the bursting of the bubble, the conflict surrounding housing remained relatively disjointed, but it did not give rise to the emergence of the housing movement and the appearance of collectives such as the "Platform for Decent Housing" (2003) and "V for Housing" in 2006. Specific experiences that already denounced the price increase and speculation in demonstrations and specific actions, but without yet reaching levels of sustained mass mobilization.
During the first two decades of the 21st century, access to housing thus shifted from being structured around the expansion of bank credit and property ownership to becoming a field of social and class struggle, popular organization, and frontline political dispute. The crisis not only revealed the limitations of the real estate model but also ushered in a cycle of politicization in which housing ceased to be perceived as an individual aspiration and reappeared as a collective problem. However, strategic solutions to this problem would also encounter political limitations within our own sphere of influence.
Crisis, dispossession and the emergence of conflict (2008-2011)
The outbreak of the international financial crisis in 2008 led to the collapse of the economic model that had sustained Spanish growth for over a decade. The bursting of the housing bubble did not only affect the construction sector or the banking system: it severely impacted the living conditions of large segments of the working class, especially those who had been incorporated into the economic cycle through mortgage debt, temporary employment, and absolute dependence on wages.
The massive job losses were especially intense in highly precarious sectors linked to the real estate cycle itself-construction, hospitality, support services, and migrant work-leaving hundreds of thousands of families unable to make mortgage payments taken out during the years of financial expansion. Between 2008 and 2011, unemployment skyrocketed while foreclosures and evictions increased rapidly.
But the element that transformed this situation into a far-reaching social conflict was the profoundly violent nature of the Spanish mortgage system. Unlike in other countries, losing one's home did not mean canceling the debt: after eviction, families continued to carry financial burdens for life. The crisis thus revealed a reality that had remained partially hidden during the years of supposed prosperity: housing did not function as a guarantee of stability, but rather as a mechanism of economic subordination and social control.
In that context, many people experienced a stark contrast between the promises of social mobility linked to homeownership and the harsh realities of the crisis. The image of the "integrated homeowner" began to crumble in the face of foreclosures, unemployment, and the ensuing poverty. The financialization of housing then revealed its true nature: thousands of working families evicted from their homes while banks were bailed out with public funds.
It is precisely in this context that a new cycle of social organization around housing begins to emerge. In 2009, the Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) was founded, initially in Barcelona, driven by activists from neighborhood struggles and prior housing rights movements. Its emergence marked a significant shift in how housing conflicts were addressed: in contrast to the individual isolation of those in debt, the PAHs built collective spaces where people could share experiences, defend one another, and politicize a situation that until then had often been experienced through guilt or personal failure.
Open assemblies, collective advice, and the first eviction stoppages began to spread a simple yet profoundly disruptive idea for the time: if the problem was collective, the response had to be collective as well. Eviction gradually ceased to be perceived as a private tragedy and became a visible expression of the social crisis and the effects of the Spanish real estate model on the working class.
In cities like Madrid, the increase in evictions particularly affected working-class neighborhoods and urban peripheries where debt had taken hold most heavily in previous years. It was there that networks of solidarity, mutual support, and resistance began to form, later connecting with the assembly-based dynamics fostered by the 15M Movement.
The 2008 crisis did not automatically generate an organized housing movement, but it did create the material conditions for its immediate emergence. The combination of impoverishment, loss of housing, institutional discrediting, and the shattering of expectations of stability opened a new scenario of social conflict in which housing became central to the class struggles in the Spanish state, a position it has held to this day.
3. The PAH cycle and the 15M movement (2011-2014): organization, social legitimacy and expansion
The emergence of the 15M Movement represented a qualitative leap in the political and social landscape that emerged after the crisis. The squares, encampments, and popular assemblies expressed a pent-up discontent with unemployment, precarious work, corruption, and the loss of hope experienced by broad sectors of the working population, especially young people and those hardest hit by the mortgage crisis. In this context, the struggle for housing found fertile ground to expand and take root socially.
The Platforms of People Affected by Mortgages (PAHs) multiplied throughout the country and began to consolidate themselves as one of the most recognizable expressions of the new cycle of mobilization. Their ability to combine mutual support, direct action, and social legitimacy allowed them to partially break the isolation suffered by thousands of families affected by foreclosures and evictions. The image of neighbors halting evictions, collectively confronting court officials and police, or publicly denouncing banks, generated widespread public support.
One of the most significant elements of this period was precisely the creation of spaces where people without prior political experience began to organize collectively around immediate material problems. Housing assemblies became places of everyday politicization, collective learning, and practical solidarity, especially in working-class neighborhoods and urban peripheries. In cities like Madrid, many PAH (Platform of People Affected by Mortgages) and housing assemblies grew closely linked to the dynamics opened up by the 15M movement, occupied social spaces, and the community networks that emerged in the neighborhoods.
During these years, the movement succeeded in placing the housing issue at the center of public debate. The campaign for the Popular Legislative Initiative (ILP) on debt relief through property surrender, presented in 2013 with over a million signatures, was probably the greatest example of this capacity for social mobilization. Although its main demands were blocked institutionally, the campaign demonstrated the extent to which the housing problem had ceased to be perceived as an individual issue and had become a political conflict of widespread scope.
At the same time, this growth also revealed some of the limitations that would characterize the political cycle. The centrality of the social emergency and the immediate need to respond to evictions often pushed the movement toward dynamics focused on managing conflict on a case-by-case basis. The PAH's enormous social legitimacy thus coexisted with difficulties in consolidating more stable class-based organizational structures capable of overcoming the reactive logic imposed by the housing crisis.
Despite these contradictions, the period between 2011 and 2014 left a profound mark. Housing became a central arena of social conflict, and thousands of people experienced self-organization and collective struggle that would shape the subsequent development of the housing movement in Spain.
4. Institutionalization and reconfiguration (2014-2019)
From 2014 onwards, the cycle that began after the crisis and the 15M movement entered a new phase. The decline of the mobilizations, coupled with the rise of electoral and institutional expectations, shifted a significant portion of the energy accumulated in social movements towards the parliamentary and municipal arenas. The emergence of Podemos and various municipalist candidacies largely reflected this attempt to translate the social discontent that had arisen in previous years into institutional representation, through a neo-reformist approach whose effects are still being felt today.
The housing movement was not left out of this process. Many of its most visible figures, organizational leaders, and activists became integrated-directly or indirectly-into institutional projects, especially in cities like Madrid and Barcelona. The arrival of municipalist candidates in various city councils generated widespread expectations regarding the possibility of transforming housing policies from within the institutions and ushering in a new era after the worst years of the mortgage crisis.
However, this shift also had significant consequences for the movement itself. In many cases, the logic of mobilization and self-organization lost its centrality to dynamics more oriented toward institutional dialogue, administrative mediation, or the technical management of housing conflicts. Part of the organizational structure built during previous years entered a phase of partial demobilization, while the resolution of housing problems largely returned to the realm of political representation.
At the same time, the housing problem itself was changing shape. While the massive foreclosures of the first stage of the crisis were declining, a new offensive linked to the rental market, urban speculation, and the influx of investment funds into working-class neighborhoods was beginning to take hold. The expansion of tourist resorts, rising rents, and the displacement of working-class residents gradually transformed the landscape of the conflict, especially in large urban centers.
In this context, new organizational tools began to emerge, such as tenants' unions and housing spaces with a more stable orientation toward the collective organization of conflict. These experiences incorporated some of the legacy accumulated by the PAH (Platform of People Affected by Mortgages), but also expressed the need to adapt to a new social and economic landscape.
The contradictions of this period also brought to light some deeper limitations of the previous cycle. The enormous social legitimacy achieved by the movement did not always translate into the consolidation of class structures capable of sustaining high levels of political and organizational independence from institutions. The integration of much of the conflict into institutional and electoral frameworks tended to displace broader horizons of social transformation, reducing in many cases the struggle for housing to partial demands or reforms manageable within the existing political and economic system.
While the period between 2014 and 2019 can be understood as a phase of retreat, it was also a time of transition and reconfiguration in which the housing movement began to face new problems, new forms of exploitation, and new strategic questions about how to rebuild popular organization beyond the limits imposed by the institutionalization of conflict.
5. From the mortgage crisis to the rental crisis (2019-post-pandemic)
At the end of the decade and just before the COVID-19 pandemic, the housing conflict had changed in form, though not in its essence. While in the years following 2008 the most visible image of the crisis had been that of foreclosures and evictions linked to bank debt, the new scenario was marked by rising rents, urban speculation, and the growing inability of large sectors of the working class-especially young people, migrants, and precarious workers-to maintain a stable life in major cities.
In cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Granada, Seville, and Valencia, the continuous rise in rents coincided with stagnant wages, precarious employment, and processes of touristification that displaced working-class residents from entire neighborhoods. Access to housing ceased to be primarily linked to mortgaged property and became increasingly characterized by exorbitant rents, contracts-at best-that were temporary, overcrowded rooms, and constant residential insecurity. For many people, paying rent began to consume a disproportionate portion of their income, solidifying a situation of dependency and structural vulnerability.
In this context, tenants' unions and various housing organizations began to expand, attempting to respond to this new phase of the housing conflict. Many of these initiatives incorporated tools inherited from the PAH (Platform of People Affected by Mortgages) movement-open assemblies, collective support, eviction stoppages, and negotiations with landlords-but adapted to a reality marked by the rental market and the growing presence of investment funds and large property owners.
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this situation. Lockdowns and the economic crisis highlighted the extent to which housing was central to the survival of the working class. While millions were trapped in precarious conditions or abruptly lost their income, real estate rents continued to function as a mechanism of economic extraction, even amidst the social emergency.
The measures implemented during those years-partial eviction moratoriums, minor reforms to the Urban Leases Law, and subsequent attempts to regulate rent-barely altered the structural foundations of the problem. Although they introduced certain time limits or containment mechanisms, they did not challenge the power of the real estate market, the concentration of property ownership, or the speculative logic that underlies the housing model in Spain.
At the same time, the renewed expansion of the housing movement brought back to the forefront strategic debates that had already surfaced during the previous cycle. The ability to generate mutual support and respond to urgent situations remained one of the movement's main strengths, but dynamics focused almost exclusively on managing individual cases or on institutional dialogue also reappeared. The organizational legacy of the PAH (Platform of People Affected by Mortgages) remained very much present, both in its successes and in some of its limitations.
In this sense, part of the movement began to raise the need to move beyond interventions solely focused on the housing emergency or limited reformist perspectives. The housing issue once again demonstrated that the problem could not be understood in isolation, separate from job insecurity, migration policies, the gender gap, or the very workings of contemporary capitalism.
The experience accumulated over these two decades thus leaves an open contradiction. On the one hand, the housing movement has managed to build significant levels of social legitimacy, self-organization, and resilience. On the other, it continues to face the constant risk of institutionalization, fragmentation, and absorption within political frameworks incapable of challenging the structural foundations of the economic model. Without a broader class perspective, connected to other spaces of social and labor conflict, the struggles for housing risk being reduced to forms of partial management of precarity, easily integrated into a system that continues to treat housing as a business for the profit of the dominant class.
6. Towards a housing confederation as an expression of a class struggle with an anti-capitalist horizon.
The first two decades of the 21st century have transformed housing into one of the main areas of social conflict in Spain. From the bursting of the housing bubble to the post-pandemic rental crisis, the housing movement has been able to articulate forms of solidarity, resistance, and grassroots organization that profoundly shaped an entire political generation. The PAH (Platform of People Affected by Mortgages), neighborhood assemblies, anti-eviction pickets, and tenants' unions succeeded in breaking the isolation of thousands of people and placing at the center a reality that for years had been presented as an individual failure rather than a structural consequence of the capitalist housing model.
At the same time, the experience accumulated during this cycle also yields lessons and contradictions that cannot be ignored. The centrality of the housing emergency and the logic of managing specific cases allowed for the maintenance of broad networks of mutual support, but at many points hindered the consolidation of more stable political and organizational structures capable of moving beyond immediate response. Similarly, the integration of a significant part of the movement into institutional and electoral dynamics ended up displacing much of the accumulated strength into spaces subject to the limitations of the political system itself, weakening organizational autonomy and reducing the potential for deeper transformation.
In the current context of increasing precarity, rent-seeking, and a generalized rise in the cost of living, the housing issue once again raises the need to rebuild organizational tools with deeper social roots, a class perspective, and the capacity for sustained confrontation. The new housing and neighborhood unions that have emerged in various regions partially express this quest: spaces that attempt to overcome the fragmentation of the previous cycle and connect the housing problem with other forms of exploitation affecting the working class, from job insecurity to institutional racism, patriarchal violence, and the urban displacement of migrant and impoverished populations.
In this sense, the need to move towards broader forms of coordination is becoming increasingly urgent. Building a large Housing Confederation-territorial, combative, and based on self-organization-could be an important step in overcoming some of the limitations of the previous cycle. This would not be merely a collection of collectives or platforms, but rather a tool capable of uniting housing unions, neighborhood organizations, and expressions of class-based unionism within a common structure, with the capacity to generate sustained conflict and build popular class power from below. Faced with bureaucratization, institutional co-optation, or organizational fragmentation, the challenge remains to build a housing movement with deep roots in neighborhoods and workplaces, capable not only of resisting the effects of the real estate market, but also of confronting the system with the material conditions that make its existence possible.
Ángel Malatesta, a member of Liza.
https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2026/06/28/dos-decadas-del-movimiento-por-la-vivienda-de-la-burbuja-inmobiliaria-al-conflicto-social-y-de-clase-de-los-alquileres/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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