Mark Stücklin
Barcelona’s housing crisis is not an accident. It’s the inevitable result of years of disastrous policymaking by a city hall that seems determined to make a bad situation worse.
A city bursting at the seams
Barcelona’s structural problem is simple: demand vastly exceeds supply. Immigration-driven population growth has fuelled constant demand for homes in a small city squeezed between the sea and the Collserola hills, where buildable land is scarce. The logical response would be to make it easier and more attractive to build and renovate housing in and around the city, and to improve transport links so people can live in the suburbs while still working in Barcelona.
But that’s not what the city’s political class is doing.
Banning foreigners and imaginary “speculators”
This week’s city council meetings made that painfully clear. First, the Socialist Party (PSC) proposed calling on the Spanish government and the EU to ban non-EU foreign non-residents from buying property in Barcelona — a measure the city doesn’t even have the power to implement. The idea itself, first floated by Pedro Sánchez back in January, has gone nowhere in Madrid because it wouldn’t solve anything and would likely create new problems. The proposal failed to pass in Barcelona too, but it reveals a mindset: when faced with a shortage of homes, blame outsiders.
In the same session, the council voted to explore ways to ban “speculative” housing investment — another gesture with no practical purpose. There are no property speculators in Barcelona. The risks are too high, the taxes too heavy, and the returns too low. But “speculators” make a convenient scapegoat for the left, a mythical enemy to distract from the real policy failures that caused the crisis in the first place.
Policies that strangle supply
Those failures are not hard to spot. The city’s 30% social housing quota on new developments has effectively killed new home building, as projects become financially unviable. Rent controls have driven landlords out of the market, leading to a collapse in the supply of long-term rental housing. Today, it is almost impossible to find a standard lease in Barcelona.
Every intervention has reduced supply, discouraged investment, and pushed prices higher — precisely the opposite of what was intended. Yet rather than admit these policies have failed, the same politicians are now doubling down by talking about banning foreigners and “speculators”.
The wrong people in charge
Barcelona doesn’t need more prohibitions — it needs more homes. The only realistic path out of this mess is to make building and investing in housing easier, faster, and cheaper. That means cutting red tape, encouraging renovation, and attracting private capital into build-to-rent and buy-to-let projects.
But with the current crop of ideologues in charge, don’t expect that to happen. Under their watch, Barcelona’s housing market will only get more dysfunctional.
