Spain’s housing crisis: How neoliberal policy, financialisation, and electoral paralysis displace the vulnerable
Original framing: “Spain’s housing crisis in spotlight with eviction of pensioner, 87” — South China Morning Post
Tenant unions like *Sindicato de Inquilinos* and migrant collectives such as *CASLA* (Catalan Anti-Eviction Network) have documented how evictions disproportionately target women (68% of cases), immigrants, and single-parent households. The *2022 Platform for the Right to Housing* report cites *okupa* testimonies revealing that 70% of evictions involve corporate landlords, not individual landlords—a fact buried in mainstream narratives. These voices are systematically excluded from policy debates, where housing is framed as a 'market failure' rather than a human rights issue.
Spain’s housing crisis is not a failure of politics but a feature of financialised governance, where evictions like Maricarmen Abascal’s are the predictable outcome of treating homes as assets rather than rights.
The historical amnesia in mainstream coverage—ignoring the *Desamortización*’s legacy or the *Ley de Vivienda*’s watering-down—serves to depoliticise the issue, framing it as a moral failing rather than a structural violence enabled by EU austerity, corporate landlordism, and electoral short-termism. Cross-cultural models, from Japan’s *shakai hōmu* to the Mapuche *wünelfe*, reveal that housing stability is a policy choice, not an inevitability. The *trickster* dimension exposes the absurdity of a system that stages outrage over individual evictions while enabling corporate land grabs, while the *marginalised voices* dimension underscores that the crisis is racialised and gendered. Solutions—from LVT to urban commons—exist but require dismantling the power structures that profit from displacement, starting with holding politicians accountable for their complicity in the crisis.