Barcelona’s Socialist mayor has returned from New York with plans for an international alliance against housing “speculation” – and even municipal grocery shops inspired by New York. Given Barcelona’s record on housing, a little scepticism seems appropriate.

Barcelona mayor Jaume Collboni has been in New York rubbing shoulders with fellow big-city mayors at the Urban20 summit, where housing affordability, climate change and migration were high on the agenda.

His big idea is to build a global alliance of cities to tackle housing problems by confronting what he describes as global actors such as speculative investment funds and tourist-rental platforms. New York, Toronto and Mexico City are already involved, with the first working meeting planned for Barcelona in November.

Barcelona’s awkward housing record

There is an irony here. Barcelona has overwhelmingly been governed by the left since the restoration of democracy after Franco. If housing policies have failed, they were left-wing policies.

Socialist mayors ran the city continuously from 1979 to 2011. Centre-right nationalist Xavier Trias governed from 2011 to 2015, followed by eight years of hard-left Barcelona en Comú under Ada Colau, before Socialist Jaume Collboni took over in 2023. Trias is the only mayor outside those two leftist political camps during the last 47 years.

And when was housing most affordable during recent decades? Broadly speaking, during the four-year Trias interlude, when house prices and rents were around their post-crash lows. Of course, that was largely thanks to Spain’s great property bust rather than the brilliance of Trias, but the timing is nevertheless awkward for the idea that more intervention from the left is the obvious answer.

Two very different diagnoses

The Barcelona City Hall account of Collboni’s New York speech makes the ideological divide particularly clear.

Collboni argues that Barcelona is “changing the rules of the housing market” to turn housing into a constitutional and human right rather than a financial asset. He identifies insufficient regulation and protection, speculative investment funds and tourist-rental platforms among the forces driving residents out of the city.

There is another diagnosis: Barcelona simply does not have enough housing for the number of people who want to live there. And everything the left – who control Barcelona, Catalonia, and Spain – does, makes it worse. Thanks to their policies, the quantity and quality of homes for rent in the city is in a downward spiral.

Even a recent report published by Barcelona’s own Economic and Social Council identifies the collapse in housing construction since the 2008 crisis as one factor behind the imbalance between supply and demand, whilst noting that household formation and the use of existing homes also matter.

That distinction is important. If insufficient regulation and speculation are fundamentally responsible, more regulation makes sense. If inadequate supply is the underlying problem, policies that discourage investment, landlords and the creation of additional homes risk making matters worse.

Barcelona nevertheless presents its interventions as examples for other cities. Collboni highlighted rent controls, which he says have reduced rents by 5%, and the planned extinction of more than 10,000 tourist-flat licences from 2028, which City Hall expects to return those properties to residential use.

To be fair, the council is also building public housing. Projects include 1,151 protected homes scheduled across 19 developments and much larger schemes planned for subsequent years (whilst private house building has collapsed to zero). But Barcelona’s housing shortage has been decades in the making and the central question remains whether the city is creating enough additional homes, quickly enough, to accommodate demand.

From housing to groceries

Collboni has also returned from New York enthused by another interventionist idea: affordable shops selling basic goods, with a Barcelona pilot planned for the La Marina district in 2027 and inspired partly by New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plans for city-owned grocery stores.

The theory is attractive enough: use municipal involvement to reduce the cost of essentials. The obvious risk is that subsidised shops compete with existing neighbourhood retailers who have to pay commercial rents, wages and taxes without City Hall standing behind them. Barcelona could end up spending public money competing with precisely the small local businesses politicians usually claim to cherish.

It is a relatively minor initiative, but it fits the broader philosophy rather neatly: faced with high prices, intervene in the market rather than asking first why supply is constrained and what could be done to increase it.

The international solution

Collboni goes further still. He argues that solving housing problems is necessary to restore confidence in democracy and counter political extremism, and wants mayors around the world to share policies and act collectively against global housing actors.

International cooperation between cities might be useful. But there is also something faintly depressing about mayors of cities suffering severe housing-affordability problems gathering internationally to present their own policies as models for others.

Barcelona has had left-wing mayors for 43 of the last 47 years. Whatever one thinks of their intentions, housing has become progressively harder for many residents to access. New York and other major cities face their own severe affordability problems.

Perhaps their mayors really will discover the answer by swapping ideas at international conferences. But Barcelona residents might reasonably prefer something less glamorous: more homes.

Until supply catches up with demand, no amount of talk about speculation, global alliances, the “right to stay” or changing the rules of the market is going to make Barcelona’s fundamental housing shortage disappear. Indeed, under Collboni in Barcelona, and Mamdani in New York, it will only get worse.