Housing as Financial Asset Fuels Eviction Protests in Europe
The Fair, the Camp, the Evicted Woman
The District trade show and summit in Madrid was billed as one of the largest real-estate events in Europe, attracting as many as 15,000 people ranging from investment firms to developers. Its size is part of its message. A building held as a financial asset is held for what it earns, whether through rent, through resale, or through both. A building held as housing is judged by whether somebody can live in it. The campaigners who came to Madrid reject the idea of housing as a financial asset outright, and they staged a counter-summit to argue for the other view.
The counter-summit brought campaigners from 140 organisations across the globe to the Spanish capital, intent on pushing back against the idea of housing as a financial asset. A counter-summit is a parallel gathering held by the people the official one does not seat. In Madrid that meant tenant unions, anti-eviction groups and housing campaigners rather than funds and developers. They travelled from Italy, Ireland, Portugal and further afield. What they are rejecting is a doctrine rather than a single policy. Under that doctrine a dwelling is an instrument. It can be bought, bundled with others, let out nightly, left empty, or sold on. Each of those choices is rational for whoever owns the building. None of them requires anybody to live there. The trade fair and the counter-summit offered two answers to one question: whose needs does a building serve?
Many of the campaigners arrived in Madrid as Maricarmen Abascal, an 87-year-old woman who uses a wheelchair, was being evicted from the apartment where she had lived for seven decades. Anger over the eviction gave way to days of protests and an encampment in the heart of Madrid. Teresa Mamede, a housing campaigner from Lisbon who travelled to Madrid for the counter-summit, put the point in the first person: “Nobody among us is safe from having this happen to them.” [1] The presence of campaigners from Italy to Ireland was a reminder of the global dimension of the crisis. Somebody removed from a flat at 87 has not simply been priced out of a neighbourhood. They have been expelled from the place where seven decades of their life happened.
Where the Numbers Bite
The numbers that produced this movement also show where the crisis bites hardest. Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical office, records what happened to housing costs across the bloc between 2010 and 2024. House prices rose 53% over that period. Rents rose 25%. The two figures measure different things. A price is what a buyer pays once. A rent is what a tenant pays every month. Both rose, and prices rose roughly twice as fast. That gap matters, because the ladder out of renting grew longer in the very years when the rent itself was climbing. The 53% and the 25% are averages across EU member states, and both hide the places where the numbers are far worse. The comparison spans fourteen years, long enough that the change describes a new price level rather than one bad year.
Those averages conceal a range that makes the phrase “the European housing crisis” misleading. Vienna remains a bright spot, its rental costs tempered by an ample stock of public housing. Public housing means homes owned or funded by the state and let at rents below what a private landlord would ask. Estonia sits at the other end: rents there rose 208% between 2010 and 2024, while Ireland and Hungary each saw increases of more than 100% over the same period. What exists is a set of national markets that have diverged sharply while sharing a currency and a labour market. The divergence has a practical consequence for policy. A rent rule that works in Vienna may change nothing in Tallinn. A tax on empty homes may matter enormously in one capital and barely register in another. The habitat of this crisis is national, even where the campaign against it is European.
Some of the soaring costs can be chalked up to what one researcher calls an “ever-intensifying social experiment”: letting finance capitalism try to deliver on the fundamental need for housing, and watching what comes out. Housing is fundamental in a specific sense: everyone requires it, and the requirement does not vary with income. The protests, the encampments and the election results can be read as the politics of that mismatch. “.
Who Gets to Live in the City
The crisis now moves through ballots, city halls and parliaments, and someone pays for it in the meantime. The cost is not spread evenly. Vulnerable people and minorities have been disproportionately affected by the market’s shortcomings. The political half of the story is that housing is now moving votes, and the warning circulating through European city halls is that the crisis could push voters into the arms of the far right. Jaume Collboni, the mayor of Barcelona, put the problem from inside the mainstream: “We cannot remain stuck in the rhetoric of defending democracy, inclusive societies and equal opportunities if people’s standard of living is getting worse.” [1] The organised answer has two levels. At the Madrid counter-summit, campaigners launched a pan-European alliance demanding indefinite rental contracts and rent control across the continent. An indefinite rental contract has no end date at which a tenant can simply be removed. Rent control is a legal cap on what a landlord may charge, fixed by a government rather than by a market. Both are structural demands: they change who holds the decision, not merely how much money changes hands. Earlier in the month, dozens of organisations launched a European Citizens’ Initiative, a petition mechanism that invites EU citizens to sign in support of a proposed measure. Their petition calls for EU-level measures to protect tenants, curb speculation and convert empty buildings into homes. That third demand is the most telling, because it treats vacancy as a housing problem rather than a property problem. The initiative states that housing emerges as the number one concern of citizens “in every European country, in every major survey, and across all age groups”. Its account of daily life is concrete: “We see and feel it every day: workers who can no longer afford the city they build, young people who cannot leave their parents’ home, tenants pushed out of their neighbourhoods after renovation, empty buildings while people sleep on the street.” The alliance and the petition are the same demand addressed to two different authorities: national parliaments and the European Union.
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