Abstract

In Spain, rising rents are only the latest symptom of a broader housing crisis that has affected the country since 2008. The social consequences in terms of evictions, mortgage repossessions and difficulties in accessing affordable housing overlap with the effects of urban transformations, mass-tourism and gentrification linked to the so-called Spanish model. Historically, legal reforms have been used to foster deregulation, financialisation and the commodification of housing. After the bursting of the housing bubble that caused the 2008 mortgage crisis, Spanish governments prioritised the rescue and reorganisation of the financial sector, paving the way for a new phase of speculation. By making rental contracts more flexible and providing tax advantages to international real estate companies, the legal reforms passed during the height of the mortgage crisis contributed to the creation of a «rental bubble». Therefore, considering the main housing legislative reforms passed in Spain before and after the global financial crisis, I argue that they contributed to the precarisation of the right to housing. However, analysing the response of social movements, I also suggest that, by using a counter-narrative based on the right to housing, grassroots organizations were able to legitimise practices of everyday resistance to housing precarity and to contribute to a change, at least partially and especially in Catalonia, of the legal framework to guarantee the right to housing. This analysis shows how the use of legal reforms in the housing crisis can be considered ambivalent.