Is Spain’s anti-eviction decree a fix for its housing crisis?

Spain’s left-wing coalition government has announced measures to ban evictions until 2030 to address the country’s housing crisis, after the forced removal of an 87-year-old woman last week triggered mass protests.

The new measures, ⁠including rolling over contracts and banning so-called vulture funds from the housing market, will be divided into two decrees to be voted on Friday in parliament, where Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s minority left government will face an uphill battle to secure support.

Spain’s housing crisis has driven a sharp political and social split between renters and property owners, with critics saying the proposed measures risk unfairly lumping small landlords who rely on rental income together with profit-driven real estate companies.

Health Minister Monica Garcia has framed parliament’s approval as non-negotiable, after a similar decree seeking to roll over rental contracts was blocked in April by right-leaning parties.

“Right-wing parties have to choose: either they’re with the citizens, or they’re with the foreign vulture funds,” she said on X on Wednesday. “Let them prove their patriotism beyond bracelets and flags.”

“And if they don’t, may it cost them dearly,” she added.

Why did the eviction of an elderly woman cause outrage?

The eviction of wheelchair user Maricarmen Abascal, who was removed from her home of more than seven decades on a stretcher last week, drew more than 10,000 protesters to the streets.

Abascal was living in the property in Madrid’s central Retiro neighbourhood under a rent-capped lease contract signed by her father in the 1950s. The property was then bought by the real estate and investment firm Urbagestion in 2018.

Urbagestion sought to terminate Abascal’s contract and evict her after raising her rent from 500 euros ($572) to 2,650 euros ($3,010) – nearly double her pension of €1,350 ($1,533) a month – according to Spanish newspaper El Pais.

When the police carried out her eviction on their fourth attempt on September 23, hundreds of activists who had been protesting against her losing a home she had lived in her entire life were waiting outside.

The videos of Abascal’s personal struggle made the rounds on social media, turning the 87-year-old into a symbol of Spain’s housing crisis.

Spontaneous demonstrations began the same day in front of a controversial luxury penthouse that the Madrid regional government, led by Isabel Diaz Ayuso of the conservative People’s Party (PP), recently purchased for unclear purposes.

Protesters cried out: “Ayuso’s penthouse for Maricarmen!” and “Shame! Shame!”

The platform #Niundesahuciomas (Not One More Eviction) called for simultaneous protests in Avila, Barcelona, Cadiz, Oviedo, Sevilla and Valencia.

Speaking at the recently concluded United Nations General Assembly, Sanchez, of the Socialist Party, described evictions as “a social tragedy that we cannot accept as a country” and blamed the local and regional governments of Madrid led by the People’s Party (PP).

Housing Minister Isabel Rodriguez Garcia said that the eviction “evidences the consequences of savage speculation and of rolling out the red carpet to the vultures and the speculators”.

According to data collected by the Bank of Spain reported by El Pais, real estate wealth now exceeds €7.4 trillion ($9.53 trillion), but the gains are far from evenly distributed. Property wealth is highly concentrated, with the richest 10 percent of households owning about one-third of all real estate wealth, while the bottom half owns only about 15 percent.

Additionally, the number of owners with two, five or more properties was found to have risen significantly, while the share of small owners with just one property declined.

The minister said the government was seeking to broaden the definition of what constitutes a vulture fund beyond large private equity funds to any fund or company that buys housing for speculation.

The minister named investment firm Urbagestion, which owns Abascal’s apartment, as an example of a firm that might fall into that category.

Abascal’s lawyer Beatriz Duro said on Tuesday that Urbagestion had offered a preliminary agreement that would allow her return to her home, paying 30 percent ⁠of her pension over the next eight years, equivalent to about 500 euros a month.

Why is there controversy over the proposed reforms?

Junts, the Catalan pro-independence party that would need to back the decree for it to pass, said on Tuesday it was still far from agreeing on all measures and wanted safeguards for small landlords, who make up the vast majority of property owners in Spain and who would be treated the same as large institutional investors.

The party’s parliamentary spokesperson Miriam Nogueras said the agreement left “small landlords out in the cold”.

“We all agreed that evictions – where the property is owned by a fund, a vulture fund, run by someone managing millions of euros – obviously need ⁠to be stopped,” she said on RTVE.

“Lumping together in this category those who have invested their savings in a flat, a restaurant or a property – putting them all in the same basket – is a mistake.”

Alberto Nunez Feijoo, the leader of the conservative PP, said “eight years adrift in housing policy aren’t fixed with an 11th-hour decree” and that his party would not support the legislation in parliament.

Feijoo had previously argued that tackling the housing crisis required dramatically increasing supply and offering major tax incentives for young buyers, opting for market expansion rather than government regulation.

Over the past decade, home prices have increased by almost 50 percent while not enough properties are available for rent. Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE) found the national housing price index more than doubled since 2014, with prices 2.3 times higher than in Madrid.

INE data also showed that the cost of housing was absorbing a large share of household income. In 2024, 28.1 percent of people renting a home at market rates were spending more than 40 percent of their disposable income on housing, compared with an average in the European Union of 19.2 percent.

Marta Soler Gallart, head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Barcelona, said that neither of the two decrees addresses the problem in the medium and long term.

“Models such as Vienna’s, with its low rents, are cited in support of these decrees, but it is overlooked that the Vienna model and others have low rents because of their long history of creating and maintaining public social housing,” Soler Gallart told Al Jazeera. “In Spain, however, public funds are invested in social housing which, after a while, the recipients sell at market price.”

Soler Gallart also said the new measures disadvantage small landlords by extending five-year tenancy agreements by a further two years and by providing an indefinite extension of their tenancy agreements.

“However, these extensions are not compulsory if the landlord can prove that they need the property for their own use,” she said.