Spain’s Housing Crisis Is a Warning to Democrats - Newsweek

Spain has been rocked by housing protests since the eviction last month of an 87-year-old disabled woman from her home of seven decades, intensifying demands for stronger renters’ rights and adding to the pressure on Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who called a snap election on Monday.

Rumors that the socialist prime minister might be taking such a move started growing over the weekend after the Spanish parliament rejected two decree laws aimed at addressing the country’s housing crisis. In a televised address on Monday, Sánchez said a snap election was necessary to end the deadlock in parliament, even though the move is risky for his coalition government.

"We need to renew people’s support," Sánchez said. "We need to mobilize and win a much larger progressive majority in ​parliament, one that will allow us to overcome vested interests, deliver new social advances and continue transforming Spain."

The premier also admitted to having disappointed some voters despite years of intervention to improve housing affordability in the country.

"I also know that part of ​that social majority is dissatisfied today," he said, promising to work for Spain to remain "a bastion of openness, social justice and environmental responsibility."

It is a warning for Democrats in the U.S., who are facing a similar housing affordability crisis and proposing similar solutions to those supported by Sánchez and his government—including introducing rent control.

The protests rocking Spain erupted after Maricarmen Abascal, an 87-year-old disabled woman, was forcibly evicted from her home of 71 years on September 23. Abascal said she was removed from her Madrid home because she was unable to afford a massive rent hike by her landlord—from €500 ($572) per month to €2,650 ($2,970). Abascal's monthly pension is reportedly €1,350.

Despite hundreds of protesters gathering at the house to try to prevent the eviction, images of Abascal being taken away on a stretcher made the rounds online, fueling anger against the unsustainable costs of renting across Spain.

After days of demonstrations, Sánchez’s Cabinet agreed on housing relief measures offering better protections for renters—later blocked by parliament. The investment company that owns Abascal’s apartment, Urbagestión, offered a new contract to her asking for a similar amount of rent to what she paid before the recent price hike.

But Abascal’s eviction was the catalyst for years of anger that has been building since the 2008 crash, when the country’s housing crisis started.

Unlike the U.S., Spain has a constitutional right to housing, with Article 47 of Spain’s Constitution recognizing that all Spaniards have the right to enjoy "decent and adequate" housing. It is up to the government to create the "conditions necessary to make that right effective."

Despite this, Spain is in the midst of a housing affordability crisis very much like that faced by the U.S. and similarly driven by a chronic shortage of supply. According to estimates by the Bank of Spain, the country would need 750,000 new homes to fix the existing supply gap, with big cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Alicante, Valencia, Murcia and Málaga needing the most new construction. The gap in these cities is the biggest in the nation, according to the central bank, estimated at 52.5 percent.

For a country which has enshrined the right to housing in its constitution, Spain also has surprisingly little social housing. Despite measures taken by Sánchez's government, estimates put social housing at between 1.5 percent to 3.3 percent of all available housing stock, although significant regional differences exist.

Another pressing issue has been the growing presence of Airbnb and other short-term rentals in the housing market, where they are accused of exacerbating the current shortage by snatching away homes from locals, increasing rental costs and displacing communities.

In May 2025, the Spanish government ordered the removal of nearly 66,000 unlicensed or non-compliant short-term rental listings and fined Airbnb a €64 million (roughly $72 million) for regulatory breaches in December of that year. However, many Spaniards remain frustrated about overtourism.

Protesters are now calling for a halt to tenant evictions and better protection for renters, including indefinite tenancy agreements, tighter regulation of seasonal and tourist rentals, and restrictions on property purchases by investment funds.

Without a majority in parliament, the two housing decrees proposed by Sánchez’s government meeting many of these demands failed to pass. One would have suspended evictions of vulnerable tenants until 2030, given a two-year extension to rental leases due to expire before 2028, and increased taxes for tourist apartments while also restricting "vulture funds" from buying up residential properties in the country. The other would have approved the automatic renewal of rental contracts.

It is unclear whether the gamble now taken by the prime minister with the snap election on November 29 will allow for similar legislation to be approved.

The U.S. housing shortage originated in the years following the 2008 housing crash, when the nation built way fewer homes than needed, and was exacerbated by the home-buying frenzy unleashed by historically low borrowing costs during the pandemic.

The current gap is estimated at between 3.7 million and 10 million units, with the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) reporting a shortage of 7.2 million affordable rental homes available to renters with extremely low incomes, those with incomes at or below 30 percent of area median income or the federal poverty guideline, whichever is greater.

While stubbornly high mortgage rates—now back above the 7 percent mark, at 7.28 percent—and still-rising home prices are keeping U.S. homebuyers on the sidelines of the market, forcing them to stay in the rental market longer than they would otherwise, experts agree that the housing shortage is still playing the biggest role in the ongoing crisis.

Congress passed legislation earlier this year trying to boost homebuilding but lingering economic uncertainty and a sluggish housing market have actually put a damper on new construction.

Only 1.128 million units were completed at an annualized rate in August, according to Census data, 27.1 percent below the level reported a year earlier. This is the stock that becomes immediately available to buyers or renters in the U.S. market, suggesting a step back for these categories in August.

As with the federal government in the U.S., the Spanish government cannot simply impose its full housing agenda uniformly across Spain, as the country has a decentralized system where individual regions are responsible for their own policies.

But Sánchez, who has been Spain’s prime minister since June 2018, has tried to shape the country’s housing policies over the past decade. His government has passed legislation extending rental contracts (from three to five years in 2018), introducing and then expanding protections against evictions for economically vulnerable households, particularly during COVID, and increased funding for rental assistance, including for young people.

The protests now erupting across Spain, however, raise questions about whether these actions were enough, and whether tenant protections and rent controls—the same policies pushed by some Democrats in the U.S.— can solve the housing crisis without a significant increase in homebuilding.

In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani made freezing rents and improving affordability for residents signature policies in his victorious campaign for the city’s top job. These ideas proved not only to have the enthusiastic backing of voters, but to be quickly achievable.

In June, the Rent Guidelines Board approved a 0 percent increase for one- and two-year lease renewals beginning between October 1, 2026, and September 30, 2027, effectively freezing the rent for roughly one million units across New York City. At the same time, the mayor has also promised to build 200,000 new affordable homes in the city while preserving another 200,000 existing affordable homes as part of his Block by Block plan, released in May. The strategy includes making zoning changes to increase supply and speed up affordable housing construction.

It is a two-pronged approach that takes into consideration the provision of rapid relief to struggling tenants and addressing the long-term need for new construction. The problem is that one is immediate, while the other is long, laborious, likely costly—and most important, yet to materialize.

Housing is going to be a particular thorny issue for Democrats, as blue states and cities from Los Angeles to Boston to New York have become among the most expensive in the country for accommodation and significantly lag behind red states like Florida and Texas for new construction.

Democratic-led California has long suffered from a scarcity of affordable housing, as strict regulations and high construction and other development costs have made building new homes particularly difficult—a problem that has been pointed at as one of the reasons many residents have left the state over the past decade.

California’s midtier homes are worth roughly $775,000 in 2026, more than twice the national figure, according to the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Housing experts agree that expanding supply is the only way out of the ongoing housing affordability crisis in the U.S. It is just not the easy, quick win lawmakers can sell themselves on to win an election. The current affordable housing gap is so vast that it would take over a century to be fixed at the current pace of construction in 38 of the country’s 51 biggest metropolitan areas, according to a July study by the National Multifamily Housing Council and NYU Urban Lab.

The shortage will not be fixed quickly unless significant reform is introduced, the study concluded, with a solution being at least two generations away. The gap could be closed within a generation but only if the U.S. introduces broad local deregulation to lower production costs and boost new construction projects, pushes for the development of new subsidized rental housing, expands rental assistance programs and taps into the 14 million homes currently sitting vacant on the market.

Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Ben Kelly and Tony Phillips.