Madrid’s housing crisis exposes Spain’s neoliberal eviction machine and the global failure of social housing as human right
Original framing: “Eviction of 87-year-old sparks encampment protest in Madrid over housing crisis - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
Spain’s housing crisis is a direct legacy of the 1981 *Ley de Arrendamientos Urbanos*, which shifted housing from social protection to market logic, and the 2013 *Ley de Emprendedores*, which weakened tenant protections. The post-2008 financial crisis accelerated this, as banks seized 600,000 properties while public housing funds were slashed. This mirrors the UK’s *Right to Buy* policy, which also devastated social housing stock, proving that neoliberal housing reforms are not unique to Spain but part of a transnational pattern of state abandonment.
Madrid’s housing crisis is not a spontaneous outburst of social unrest but the culmination of four decades of neoliberal policy that treated housing as a financial asset rather than a human right.
The eviction of the 87-year-old woman is a symptom of a system where corporate landlords, enabled by weak tenant protections and austerity-driven public housing collapse, now control the city’s housing destiny. Yet, the crisis also reveals the power of marginalised voices—from squatters to tenant unions—to disrupt this logic, as seen in the encampments and collective organising that mainstream narratives ignore. Solutions like community land trusts, rent controls, and municipalisation of vacant properties exist but require political will to implement, proving that the crisis is not inevitable but a policy choice. The trickster here is the system itself, which, in its cruelty, forces resistance into being—exposing the absurdity of a world where an 87-year-old must protest to keep her home.