Pearl River Over the last couple of years in talking to ACORN organizers in the UK and Europe, I’ve often heard tidbits about tenants organizing with some strength and success in Barcelona, Spain. In Brussels last month, I barely missed meeting one of the leaders and organizers of the tenants’ union there, when it turned out, as I was meeting near the train station with an ACORN organizer, he was across town staying at my colleague’s house. Recently, an article in Shelterforce was helpful in filling in some of the blanks about what tenants there are facing, and where things stand.
The Sindicat de Llogateres i Llogaters or Tenants Union is a serious piece of work. In November 2024, they pulled out 170,000 supporters by their count to a protest rally. In another instance they had more than 800 stand firm against one tenant’s eviction after a four-year battle with a new landlord trying to convert the building into short-term rentals and triple the rents, eventually forcing the city to buyout the speculator and maintain the building for the tenants. Not surprisingly, leaders of the tenant union now advise tenants to stay put and squat in their properties, rather than moving. Huge props for their work on these fights and their ability to mobilize their base!
On the policy side, it’s a harder battle to win real relief for tenants, despite progress on rent controls, partially because of the surge of short-term rentals for tourists. The main rental control regulation in Barcelona, somewhat similar to what we had originally won in Edinburgh focused on all properties in “stressed” neighborhoods. In Scotland, we had problems winning the designations and enforcing the level of increases. In Barcelona, they have won hard caps set by the Spanish tax authorities, rather than an inflation index, which is a win. From what I gather, there is a separate rental rule outside of those areas which applies to new rents set by large landlords, which are defined as “individual or legal entity that owns more than ten urban residential properties or a built-up area of more than 1,500 square meters for residential use (excluding garages and storage).
Despite all of this great work, the rents have held pretty steady from reports on current data since controls took effect. Worse, short-term rentals are thriving in the loophole, since they were not covered by the controls. As Shelterforce further reports,
Official data from the Catalan regional government published in December 2024 shows modest declines in rental prices year-over-year—a 1.1 percent average drop across all regulated areas and a 3.2 percent drop in Barcelona. At the same time, the number of new leases has decreased. This suggests that the law has helped renters gain some ground, and that many landlords opted to renew their tenants’ leases instead of terminating them and hiking rents. However, popular rental platforms like Idealista and Fotocasa report that listing prices spiked in 2024. On Idealista, listing prices increased by 12 percent in Catalunya, with a 14 percent spike in Barcelona. This is in part due to the rise of short-term rentals. Before the law passed, the Sindicat pushed unsuccessfully to make the rules apply to short-term rentals. Without that safeguard, according to data from the Catalan Land Institute, these rentals increased by 37.5 percent between Q3 2023 and 2024. Tenants looking for a home in Barcelona and other stressed zones will find that many listings are only available for 11 months or less at exorbitant prices set with affluent digital nomads in mind.
There have been some victories more recently in Scotland around short-term rentals and in Brighton, England as well. Certainly, this continues to be an issue in many US cities from New York to New Orleans and beyond, but it continues to be a problem.
There’s a lot to learn from the Barcelona experience, and this is obviously a tenants’ union to be reckoned with seriously, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that tenants are still in an existential battle in cities across the world where every victory is hard fought and waged over shifting terrain that is difficult to holdfast.