Can Tenants’ Unions Challenge Neoliberal Housing Governance? The Emergence of a New Movement in Spain and Its Impact on Post-neoliberal Housing Policy

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses how tenants’ organizations approach the state for “post-neoliberal housing policy” that challenges decades of neoliberal housing governance. It introduces the concept of “counter-hegemonic legislative strategies” to illustrate how tenants’ movements in Spain have achieved this policy shift by influencing legislative changes. In contrast to traditional lobbying or representation-focused movements, unions aim to organize tenants offensively against the commodification of housing and capitalist relations, positioning themselves as counter-hegemonic forces. The paper outlines three mechanisms used to achieve this: turning tenant evictions and landlord threats into acts of civil disobedience; using the media strategically to shape narratives; and exploiting institutional windows of opportunity through alliances and political crises. While the legislative victories gained by these unions may fall short of their full demands, the paper emphasizes that their impact goes beyond political outcomes. Their activities contribute to contesting neoliberal housing trajectories, disrupting hegemonic governance, and reshaping the political landscape.

KEYWORDS:

• Tenants’ movements
• housing policy
• social movements outcomes
• policy analysis
• post-neoliberalism

Introduction

In June 2021, the Swedish government began to collapse in a row over introducing market rents in new housing production. Prime Minister Stefan Löfven attempted to free prices on new apartments, by removing regulations on rent negotiations, prompting the Left Party to threaten a vote of no confidence, which led to the fall of the government. Just two months later, elections were held in Germany. In Berlin, the SPD candidate and former mayor, Franziska Giffey, won the elections but was forced to form a coalition with the Greens and the Left Party in order to regain power. These elections also saw a referendum on the expropriation of the city’s corporate landlords. The Greens and the Left supported the measure, while the SPD opposed it. In order to form a government and gain the support of the Greens and the Left, the SPD would have to agree to start the expropriation process, despite their opposition, because the mayor’s office was subordinated to this policy. Two years earlier, in 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron approved a new cap measure. While he did not believe in it, he acknowledged that it was worth trying the experiment. Germany’s former conservative president, Angela Merkel, introduced a new rent control policy in 2015. Merkel had included the rent cap in her programme due to pressure from the housing movement, and when the SPD candidate “tried to turn what is normally a local political issue into a vote-winning campaign theme”.¹

The above cases all illustrate two global trends that have been growing over the last decade. Firstly, housing policy is an increasingly central issue in electoral campaigns and plays a major role in the legislative process. Secondly, tensions and conflicts over housing policy are increasingly leading to situations of ungovernability. How did this situation come about?

Contemporary neoliberal economies are increasingly constructed and stabilized through asset price inflation, where the asset becomes the primary basis of the economy – which prioritizes extraction rather than creation of value. Asset appraisal and rent accumulation via asset management then become a condition for capital accumulation (Adkins, Cooper, and Konings 2020; Birch and Muniesa, 2020; Christophers 2022). Housing financialisation has been central to this process over recent decades. A process in which the state has played a crucial role in producing a neoliberal institutional framework designed to make housing assetisation and rent extraction a cornerstone of the economy. The resolution to the 2008 Great Financial Crisis intensified this process, fostering various forms of Buy-To-Let housing investment that reinforced the role of rental housing as a driver of urban accumulation (Beswick et al. 2016; Farha 2017; Fernandez and Aalbers 2016; Gabor and Kohl 2022; Ronald and Kadi 2018). The crisis also progressively shifted housing trajectories from mortgaged homeownership to rental housing, giving rise to the growth of “Generation Rent”, which coincided with the increasing shift of capital towards rental markets (Aalbers et al. 2020; Byrne 2020; Waldron 2021). New housing landscapes were configured, characterized by the intensification of rent extraction from tenants through the private rental sector. Tenants are suffering increased secondary exploitation – understood to be the exploitation that occurs when a tenant becomes an inhabitant of a specific home, beyond the sphere of production (Marx 1991) – and having to face rent increases that indirectly reduce their disposable income and exacerbate situations related to housing unaffordability, insecurity, overburden, tenant evictions and displacements.

The post-2008 crisis resolution regime has thus fostered new struggles and the emergence of various forms of tenants’ organizations worldwide (Fields and Uffer 2016; González 2024; Gustafsson et al. 2019; Listerborn, Molina, and Richard 2020; Martínez and Gil 2022; Vilenica et al. 2020). Many of these directly address the state as being responsible for their situation, highlighting a number of ways in which the state has prompted and extended housing financialisation over the last few decades (August and Walks 2018; Gil and Martínez 2023; Fields and Uffer 2016).

However, this situation has also led to many of these organizations pushing for what has been framed as post-neoliberal housing policy (Byrne 2022; Hochstenbach 2023; Kadi et al. 2021; Schipper 2015). That is, policies that reduce the precarity, insecurity and exploitation of tenants, but which run counter to market logics and neoliberal housing policies. Passing post-neoliberal housing laws means passing laws that go against the global neoliberal trajectories of recent decades, thereby also reducing housing assetisation, rent extraction from housing, and housing financialisation in general. It is precisely due to the role of housing assetisation in contemporary societies that it is so difficult to transform the neoliberal legislative frameworks that support this system. In many cases, movements find it impossible to do so and therefore fail. Nevertheless, in some places they have managed to get post-neoliberal policies introduced in recent years. In others, the impossibility of obtaining full approval of post-neoliberal housing policies results in the creation of situations that threaten the set of structures, actors, discourses, and institutions that sustain neoliberal models of housing governance as a whole.

This paper investigates the conditions that must be met, in addition to the role that tenants’ movements play in pushing for post-neoliberal housing policies, and how these struggles may challenge neoliberal housing governance as a whole. We propose the concept of “counter-hegemonic legislative strategies” to illustrate how tenants’ movements in Spain have inspired and forced legislative changes that challenged neoliberal housing governance. The key to success is the ability of tenants’ organizations to configure themselves as counter-hegemonic powers that create, maintain, and escalate active social conflicts around housing. They do so through organized offensive tenant disobedience, by creating new narratives and by challenging the prevailing common sense around housing. These approaches are then translated into active political conflicts within the state and its Parliament, giving rise to situations of ungovernability. In a context in which the government was formed by an opposition coalition, where the majority party was not in favour of the tenants’ union’s policy proposals, the success of the latter hinged upon its ability to exploit institutional windows of opportunity: by forging alliances with the more favourable parties within the coalition and within the parliamentary opposition, by pushing their limits and by pressing for union-driven issues to be placed high on the legislative agenda, and by creating situations of political crisis and ungovernability.

As a result, while the unions’ post-neoliberal policy programme was far from being approved, their action succeeded in undermining neoliberal housing governance and created better conditions for further battles and changes. Overall, this work constitutes a novel contribution to the literature on the policy outcomes of housing movements, as well as the new debates on post-neoliberal housing policies, particularly by suggesting that: i) tenants’ movements are key to promoting the implementation of post-neoliberal housing policy; and ii) the fight for post-neoliberal policy is a means of further destabilizing neoliberal housing trajectories and governance. As indicated in recent research, this is a largely unexplored field of study (Byrne 2022; Kadi et al. 2021; Martínez 2019; Vollmer and Gutiérrez 2022).

The paper is structured as follows: the next section analyses the literature on post-neoliberal housing policy and tenants’ struggles, outcomes, and strategies; section three describes the methodological approach; in section four we theoretically explain the specifics of the concept of “counter-hegemonic legislative strategies”; and in section five we empirically analyse the outcomes of tenants’ unions in housing policy. Finally, in the discussion, the policy outcomes achieved by tenants’ unions will be discussed in relation to neoliberal housing governance.

The Fight for Post-Neoliberal Housing Policies

A main line of research within social movement studies is that of policy outcomes (Giugni 1999; Amenta and Caren 2004; Andrews, 2004). It has been extensively studied in relation to a range of movements, but in housing studies “the analysis of outcomes produced by housing movements has not enjoyed much attention by scholars” (Martínez 2019, 1588). This gap widens further where housing movement outcomes on policy are concerned, and particularly in terms of policy that challenges neoliberal policymaking. Three main lines of research can be identified here. First, a significant amount of literature analyses how housing movements react to policy changes that promote housing financialisation (Fields 2017; Gustafssin et al. 2019; Listerborn, Molina, and Richard 2020; Martínez and Gil 2022; Palomera 2018; Rolnik 2019; Sabaté 2020; Teresa 2016). A second line of research focuses on the various ways in which housing activism can disrupt the neoliberal housing model (Di Feliciantonio 2017; S. Gonick 2016; Lima 2021; Tattersall and Iveson 2022). A third line addresses housing movements and their far-reaching changes, including policy outcomes (Card 2022; Gutiérrez et al. 2023; Joubert and Hodkinson 2018; Martínez 2019; Mironova 2019; Marcuse 2012; Schipper 2015).

Our analytical approach to understanding the housing policy-making process can be situated as a “structural one involving a class-based analysis” (Clapham 2018, 168). This focus on a class perspective sees movements fighting for “radical reforms” (Marcuse, 2012) that seek redistribution to reduce the inequality that benefits one group of people at the expense of other groups that were previously better off. Within this approach, the aim is to identify causes in addition to symptoms, and three lines of housing studies research intertwine with our objectives.

First, we situate our analysis within recent debates on post-neoliberal housing policy (Byrne 2022; Hochstenbach 2023; Kadi et al. 2021; Schipper 2015). Kadi et al. (2021) have proposed a post-neoliberal analytical framework to identify policies “that strategically break with market-based policymaking” (2). For the authors, the main components of post-neoliberal housing policies are those that relate to the decommodification of formerly commodified sectors; measures that deepen housing affordability; and greater democratization of housing governance (decision-making bodies or decisions related to new housing policymaking within other bodies). In their study of post-neoliberal housing policy in New York, Berlin and Vienna, they recognize four elements that they identify as “structural factors that impede a genuinely post-neoliberal transformation” (15): neoliberal discourse and governance that are inscribed in local policy practices and institutions; the influence of the real estate industry and the financial sector; the fact that many dimensions of housing policy are decided at higher levels of government; and lastly, the results of macroeconomic dynamics and global capital flows. Byrne (2022) also draws on the post-neoliberal framework to analyse Ireland’s private rental sector policy. He argues that the crisis has prompted a profound transformation in this policy area, shifting away from “market rule” towards processes of decommodification and demarketisation designed to strengthen tenant protections. Despite this, he argues “that the dominance of a financialized, transnational political economy constrains post-neoliberalizing policy reforms at the national level in ways which are consistent with the reproduction of neoliberalism. There is thus a scalar tension at play between the level of national regulatory change and the transnational “rule regime” associated with neoliberal political economy” (3). From the perspective of our case study, it is precisely within this scalar tension that the struggle for post-neoliberal policies can generate broader processes that challenge neoliberal governance.

The second line of study relates to the strategies employed by tenants fighting for change, Mironova (2019) distinguishes between defensive and expansionist struggles. “Defensive housing struggles are those where the end goal is to defend an individual or a group, or a program, policy, or law against government or private action” (145), while expansionist struggles include “the expansion of regulatory frameworks that redistribute power to marginalized people” (147). Within expansionist struggles, in a “context of a hypercommodified real estate market, organizers employ the community right to stay put to fight for the expansion of legislative and policy protections from displacement” (147). Similarly, Card (2022) distinguishes between defensive and offensive policy strategies. Defensive policy strategies address the symptoms of housing precarity for tenants and conform to rules of the rental housing market status quo, and “tend to be more particularistic, softening the blow of dominant actors and inequalities” (20). In contrast, offensive policy strategies “address root causes and systematic operations of the housing system [… and] tend to be more universalistic and intervening generally in market controls, rights, or widespread redistribution” (20).

The third and final area of research examines how the strategies employed in tenant struggles actually succeed in modifying hegemonic housing policy. Card (2022) has analysed how new tenants’ organizations in Los Angeles and Berlin helped drive policy change. Policy episodes included a shift from defensive to offensive policies, from particular to universal market regulations, and new policy breakthroughs in cities such as agenda-setting, as well as adoption, implementation, and termination of tenant-friendly policies. Card shows that policy change happened through five mechanisms endogenous to the movement: i) making demands, ii) forming coalitions, iii) promoting people’s referendums, iv) engaging in collaborative dialogue with government officials, and v) transferring agents into government. However, two other factors exogenous to tenant movements also played an important role: i) the deployment of allied interest group resources, and ii) policy competition and transfer. Another interesting case is the study by Vollmer and Gutiérrez (2022) on the Berlin campaign entitled “Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co (DWE)”. The aim of this campaign was to promote a referendum on the expropriation of big landlords and to demand that around 250,000 their units be converted to social housing. The referendum was held on 26 September 2021 and 59% of eligible Berliners voted in favour of the measure. The victory at the ballot shows how the campaign “was successful in winning public support for its demands and thereby gained agenda responsiveness, putting housing back on the political agenda, and providing a concrete solution to the grievances of tenants” (50).

It is very surprising that this movement managed to gain enough public support for such a radical policy. Although the referendum victory did not immediately translate into policy approval, it had a huge impact on the institutional system. And, as the authors note, “only after the campaign for expropriation emerged, the government started to develop the [Berlin] rent cap” (58), which involved not only limiting rents but also reducing them. The authors attribute the campaign’s ability to win such public support to two exogenous and two endogenous factors. They describe the first of these as “the material basis of the tenant movement and the political terrain that the DWE campaign had to navigate”, while the second factors are “the organizational ecology and the organizational process of the campaign”. In this case, as in Card’s study (Card 2022), the movements’ success relied upon a series of both endogenous and exogenous factors.

Methodological Approach: Action-Research Scholarship

Our methodological approach involves the combination of specific activist research and more mainstream methods to gather information and gain in-depth knowledge of the issues in question (González 2024; Grazioli 2021; Hoffman 2019; Martínez and Lorenzi Fernandez 2012; Polanska and Richard 2021). Both authors are housing researchers that combine their research with a deep involvement in housing struggles. This is a common approach to housing research (García-Lamarca 2022; Mironova 2019; Vollmer and Gutiérrez 2022). However, research was not our motivation for approaching the object of study in question. We have each been part of our respective tenants’ unions (Javier Gil in Madrid and Jaime Palomera in Barcelona) for more than six years. During this time, we have allied ourselves with many others and participated in the collective efforts that have led to the formation of a full-fledged organization. Activities have included collective advisory assemblies and welcome sessions for people with rent-related problems; the organization of entire apartment buildings; negotiations with landlords; the preparation of smaller actions and larger demonstrations; and involvement in political strategy and union decision-making. Both of us have also acted as spokespeople for the organization, taking part in multiple televised debates, meeting and negotiations with political parties, and work in other domains of the public arena, alongside some of the highest representatives from the real estate sector, political parties, and the state. Furthermore, we have joined others who have been heavily involved in the legislative processes mentioned in this article.

In addition to this ethnographic immersion, during this period we have followed daily news on housing in the country, as well as reports about the housing market published by both the private sector – by real estate portals or consulting firms – and the public sector – such as the Bank of Spain or regional housing observatories. During these years, the different laws and norms that make up the Spanish real estate sector have been analysed in depth in order to determine how they influence the current housing situation. Using this array of qualitative methodologies has allowed us to develop a better grasp of how real estate processes have evolved over this time, with a detailed understanding of the role of the different actors involved, the production of social discourses around housing, the choices of different political groups regarding whether to adopt one type of policy or another, and the multiple tensions that have arisen around the broad field of housing. In short, our activism has led us to research and reflect on the housing issue with a militant objective, and to experience first-hand some of the phenomena we have studied. Moreover, during these years we have also studied some of these phenomena from an academic perspective (Gil and Martínez 2023; Martínez and Gil 2022; Palomera 2014a, 2014b; Vidal, Gil, and Martínez 2024, Vetta and Palomera 2020 within other publications).

Counter-Hegemonic Legislative Strategies That Challenge Neoliberal Housing Governance

Scholars have extensively demonstrated that the outcomes of movements do not depend solely on movement-controlled variables, but that contexts and political opportunity structures condition and are contingent upon them (Amenta 2005; Bosi, Giugni, and Uba 2016; Cress & Snow, 2000; Uba, 2009) This is also the case for housing movements, as several recent studies have shown (Card 2022; Holm 2021; Martínez and Gil 2022; Vollmer and Gutierrez 2022). The post-2008 crisis in Spain is a clear example of this.

In 2008, Spain was one of the countries most affected by the Great Financial Crisis, due to the size of the real estate bubble in the preceding years. Between 2008 and 2013, hundreds of thousands of people were evicted, while the government bailed out banks with public funds and created SAREB, a “bad bank”, to reduce losses in the financial and real estate sector. In this context, there was a strong mobilization campaign against the government and the political and economic system as a whole, which became known as the 15 M Movement. It was during this period that the Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, or PAH) was set up and expanded throughout the country.

Over these years, the PAH became probably the strongest housing organization in the world, having been created as a response to the neoliberal management of the 2008 crisis. The PAH was based primarily on mutual support and empowerment amongst people who were heavily indebted and in the process of losing their homes. The organization was responsible for a long list of daily activities: 1. stopping evictions through civil disobedience; 2. protesting at the offices of the banks responsible for evictions; 3. fighting to get rid of the mortgage debt and negotiate a social rent rate (at approximately 25% of the market rate); 5. housing “repossessions”, i.e. squatting in buildings that ended up in the hands of the banks that had been bailed by the state yet continued to evict thousands of people; 6. specialized communications and media relations in order to influence public opinion; 7. forming alliances with other organizations and parties (García-Lamarca 2022; Gonick 2021; Gutiérrez et al. 2023; Martínez 2019; Cava and Manuel, 2019).

Finally, it should be noted that the PAH also pushed for legislative changes to transform neoliberal housing governance. Among its achievements at regional level, its greatest effort came in 2013 when it promoted a PLI (Popular Legislative Initiative) for mandatory “non-recourse debt”, the paralysis of evictions and the promotion of social renting. The PLI collected 1,402,854 signatures of support (it only needed half a million), but was rejected by the Partido Popular (who had absolute majority in Congress). The PAH was subsequently able to push for various regional housing policies throughout the country. Ultimately, “the PAH has been very successful in a number of aspects, although it has failed to achieve the most substantial legal changes it fought for” (Martínez 2019, 1590). The PAH case is highly illustrative of how a movement – even one with significant strength, support, and a high level of mobilization – depends on exogenous factors (such as parliamentary majorities) to achieve legislative changes. In fact, this assumption led many PAH leaders in 2015 to join the new political candidacies assembled around Podemos and other new municipalist platforms running for the local elections. The most illustrative cases are those of Ada Colau, the PAH’s spokesperson, who became the mayor of Barcelona for two terms (2015–2023), and Irene Montero, from PAH Madrid, who was a member of parliament between 2015 and 2023 and the Minister of Equality between 2020 and 2023.

This period also saw a series of policy reforms that transformed the crisis into a new cycle of real estate accumulation, as multiple research studies demonstrate (García-Lamarca 2021; Gil and Martínez 2023; Martínez and Gil 2022, Palomera 2018; Vives-Miró 2018; Yrigoy 2018). During this phase, the law for REITs (real estate investment trusts) was amended to grant them huge tax cuts, tenants’ rights were reduced, evictions facilitated, Golden Visas introduced, and public housing sold to Blackstone and Goldman Sachs. The aim was to boost the role of housing as an asset class for investors, and to attract international capital and private equity to the Spanish real estate sector. The reforms achieved their objective. From 2014 onwards, a cycle of growth in foreign direct investment in the Spanish real estate sector began, with the mass influx of funds such as Blackstone, Cerberus, Goldman Sachs, Oaktree, and Ares Management (Yrigoy 2018). These funds acquired housing portfolios from the Spanish banks at below market price, which were then rented to tenants. Buy-to-rent as a business also grew among the higher-income population (Boertien an López-Gay 2023; Vidal, Gil, and Martínez 2024). However, this cycle also caused rents to rise sharply, creating a new kind of housing crisis.

It is in this context that tenants’ unions emerged in Barcelona and Madrid, between 2016 and 2017. Both organizations reacted against the new speculative cycle and the exorbitant increases in rental prices in large cities. They each have an assembly structure, operating primarily thanks to the activism and voluntary work of their members, and are built on the organization and empowerment of tenants. They are independent from state institutions, political parties, and other organizations, depending exclusively on membership fees, which so far have allowed them to formally employ up to eight activists (5 in Barcelona, 3 in Madrid) to coordinate strategic areas.

Tenants’ unions have a very diverse repertoire of collective action, which can be categorized into at least six types:

1. Advising and organizing tenants (who are generally suffering some kind of abuse) in many different ways, from informing them of their rights to helping them to organize in order to confront their landlord.

2. Intervention strategies based on civil disobedience, such as Ens Quedem/Nos Quedamos (“Stay Put”) and Blocs en Lluita/Bloques en Lucha (“Buildings in Struggle”), which consist of partial rent strikes (i.e. refusal to pay the rent hike imposed by the landlord);

3. Brigadas Inquilinas (“Tenants’ Brigades”), door-to-door canvassing around apartment buildings owned by corporate landlords, and setting up information points on the street to inform the public about their active campaigns, the rental situation in the neighbourhood, and the general housing problem.

4. Direct actions against landlords, real estate agents and public administrations that are involved in a specific conflict, including peaceful protests and frequent sit-ins at their commercial offices.

5. Demonstrations and rallies of various kinds at urban, regional, and national level.

6. Alliances with other collectives around key struggles, such as May Day, platform capitalism, over-tourism, or the green transition.

7. Legislative battles to achieve structural changes in the housing system.

Here, we focus specifically on the seventh aspect of the tenants’ union repertoire, i.e. the battle for legislative changes. Since the unions were created, their priority has been to influence and directly draft housing policies through a bottom-up approach, in order to change the rules of the housing system. This type of action is a departure from those positions in some social movements that perceive the state as a monolithic and impenetrable bloc, at the service of capital alone. But they also move away from the idea of the union as a lobby, where all action is aimed at influencing the legislative framework, and where legal changes are seen as the ultimate goal. The action of tenants’ unions can be framed as non-state-centric (Gutiérrez 2017), where the aim is not representation or institutional integration, but rather to position themselves as a counter-power (Hard and Negri 2017; VVAA 2007).

The main objective of the unions is to organize tenants within relationships of mutual aid, where tenants’ struggles not only produce individual outcomes but also contribute to the formation of new political identities and subjectivation processes. From this perspective, tenants’ struggles also create tenants’ organizations and institutions, where the struggles become a means of accumulating power. These struggles produce new narratives and cultural frameworks around housing that collectively challenge the political economy of capitalist societies. In general, and within society, the struggle itself is a counter-power to the state and the market, which, from a position of weakness, facilitates the development of social unrest and protests aimed at an integral transformation of capitalist societies that transcends the housing issue. From this perspective, the political battles undertaken by unions are not solely about tenants’ rights, but also about disrupting urban accumulation, gaining strength as a popular power, and promoting a political crisis that ultimately challenges neoliberal governance (these three elements will be discussed in our conclusions).

From this perspective, tenant struggles acquire a double horizon (I. Gutiérrez et al. 2023). On the one hand, the union organizes many individual and isolated forms of discontent, resulting in the relationship between tenants and landlords becoming antagonistic. On the other hand, it transfers this antagonism to the state. Ultimately, everything that happens to tenants is the responsibility of the state, which defines the legal framework that shapes the exploitative relationship between tenants and landlords. Yet the union’s legislative proposals are not easily integrated. They form a corpus of measures that together promote the wholesale decommodification of the housing and land system. They therefore involve undermining the entire political and economic order and take the form of antagonistic legislative proposals. For this reason, these proposals are difficult to implement in their entirety, as they contradict the neoliberal legal framework that has been in place for the last few decades. The unions’ position vis-à-vis the state can therefore be inscribed in the traditions that consider the state to be under the control of capitalists, but also view it to be a disputed institution that can be influenced and shaped by popular struggles (Hardt and Negri 2017; Jessop 2015; Gutiérrez 2017; Poulantzas 2000).

Moreover, the parliamentary correlation of forces in general is unfavourable to radical and transformative movements, such as the new tenants’ unions. In this context, unions take advantage of changes in the context and structures of opportunity to promote institutional strategies that push the limits of what is possible. The main change within the PAH and tenants’ union contexts is that in 2018 there was a change of government, and since 2020 the new government has been sustained by a broad alliance of parties (those within the government coalition, in addition to the parliamentary groups supporting the coalition from outside). The Spanish case shows that the 2018 change of government opened up new political opportunities for legislative changes. As seen in other cases, political coalitions have been a necessary mechanism for policy change to occur (Card 2022; Holm 2021; Vollmer and Gutierrez 2022). However, it is also important to stress that, while some of the parties in the Spanish government and parliament were more favourable to the movement’s policies, they were a minority. In other words, the correlation of parliamentary forces remained unfavourable to tenants’ unions. The question is therefore how did these new organizations manage to win several key battles with the state, causing structural changes in neoliberal housing governance, and what is the overall outcome of the tenants’ policy struggle?

In order to explain how tenants’ unions in Spain managed to have post-neoliberal legislation passed in spite of an unfavourable correlation of parliamentary forces between 2019 and 2023, we introduce the concept of counter-hegemonic legislative strategies. The key to success was the ability of tenants’ organizations to configure themselves as counter-hegemonic powers that sustained active social conflicts around housing. These were then translated into active political conflicts in parliament, producing situations of ungovernability. Three mechanisms were involved in triggering this process, as follows:

Organised Offensive Tenant Disobedience

Tenants’ housing problems are resolved through organized offensive civil disobedience, which directly interferes with the urban accumulation process, fosters counter-power formation and challenges neoliberal housing governance. The strategy is not about finding mechanisms to ensure housing stability for individual tenants. It is about organizing and involving those tenants in the union and, through this union-based struggle, confronting landlords and the legal framework that supports them in order to achieve housing stability. Once organized with the union, the goal is to Stay Put and not abandon the dwelling nor accept a higher rental price, even if this occurs in illegal circumstances of contract expiry. This means disobeying the neoliberal legislation that allows rent extraction and exploitation of the tenant by the landlord. Even if the law is on the landlord’s side, the aim is to use tenant disobedience to put pressure on the landlord to negotiate a solution to the problem. In this way, tenant struggles expose the political mechanisms that sustain their situation, as well as how these situations would not occur with a different policy in place.

The basic framework of these campaigns is to highlight that the problem is not the tenant, but both housing commodification and the law that protects the landlord. For instance, the problem is not that people cannot pay exorbitant rents, but that landlords are legally allowed to raise the price as much as they want after a few years, or to evict them without justification. Against the backdrop of this neoliberal legislative framework – which is denounced as unfair – unions use the collective right to stay put and organize political campaigns with the aim of gaining support, spreading awareness of housing injustices, and delegitimising housing laws. Thus, they promote the need for legislative changes to put an end to these and other forms of exploitation, while challenging housing commodification and rent extraction as legitimate economic mechanisms.

We therefore witness how the defensive response – of providing assistance to tenants – is transformed into an expansive (Mironova 2019) or offensive approach (Card 2022), since the solution to the problem involves the expansion of legislative and policy transformations. If implemented, these changes consequently entail a redistribution of power.

Strategic Use of Social and Mainstream Media

Tenants’ unions have had a significant impact on social networks (continuous viral social sharing of content), which has helped their conflicts and demands find their way onto the media agenda. Since their creation, tenants’ unions have benefited from the support of very strong spokespeople who have helped them become a reference for the mass media on all housing issues. This has led to a constant presence in the media and a debate over the common sense of housing governance, which in many cases has gone beyond contesting neoliberal reasoning by challenging the specific concepts of private property and market intervention.

Social and mainstream media have been used to disseminate information regarding many cases in which tenants have been threatened by their landlords, or were suffering excessive rent increases or evictions. These tenants had organized with their union to stay put and fight for decent rents. Their struggles have always been discursively linked to neoliberal housing governance as the root cause, and unions therefore presented the narrative that the only way to solve tenants’ problems was to approve post-neoliberal housing policies (such as rent control and more secure contracts, or by fighting against vacant units and short-term or tourist rentals).

The strong media presence has also made it possible to highlight all the political mechanisms that shape neoliberal housing governance. It has exposed the politicians, institutions, agencies, and actors responsible for it and the way in which operate, while simultaneously proposing and disseminating alternative policy solutions. Rent control is one clear example of this process: prior to the creation of tenants’ unions, there was no debate around this topic, whereas now surveys show that this policy has strong societal support.

Tenants’ unions have thus managed to generate an atmosphere of permanent media agitation, which in turn has facilitated cultural changes relating to neoliberal housing governance. These cultural changes are a prerequisite for legislative change to occur and for legislative strategies to be deployed.

Exploiting Institutional Windows of Opportunity

Government coalitions are becoming a necessary but insufficient condition for radical housing policy changes, when at least one of the parties are in favour of the unions’ policy proposal. The role of the movement and its capacity to exploit institutional windows of opportunity becomes paramount in any policy shift. This is particularly true in Spain, since only the minority groups within government coalitions (in Spain and Catalonia) have supported the movement’s policies.

At Spanish national level, the minority government coalition that ruled between 2019 and 2023 can be divided into two main groups. The largest group, led by PSOE and supported by 120 MPs, had control of the ministries of Economy and Urban Agenda, which included Housing. They acted as a bulwark of the interests of large and medium rentiers respectively, generally proposed welfare policies, and often disagreed with each other. This group was not sensitive to union pressure, even if their public campaigns took their toll. It was much closer to the financial and real estate lobbies, and sensitive to pressure from the other parties within the coalition and those that supported it from outside, as it needed them to govern beyond the housing sphere (for example, to approve the general state budget).

The other group within the coalition was led by Unidas Podemos with 35 MPs, and it controlled the Ministry of Social Rights. It often shared interests with the leftist opposition groups ERC-Sobiranistes, EH Bildu, Más País-Equo, CUP-PR, Més Compromís and BNG, which had 24 MPs between them. These parties were very sensitive to pressure from unions and their public campaigns, and eventually took on a large share of the demands made by tenants and disenfranchised populations as their own.

Four phases of housing-related legislation can be identified during the cycle between 2019 and 2023, during which the same housing policy sequence was repeated: 1. PSOE presents itself as a party in favour of legislative reforms in housing, which actually constitute pro-market changes that do not alter power structures and inequalities; 2. Union struggles produce a social framework that gives the coalition and opposition parties the legitimacy not to accept PSOE’s proposals and to negotiate so that the latter shifts its initial position to a more favourable one; 3. The unions put pressure on the coalition and opposition parties to make housing a legislative priority and to not accept PSOE’s position, so that they are prepared to take union demands through to their conclusion. As a result, the class conflict between rentiers and tenants is also reproduced within the state, and this is linked to the unions’ momentum, but also to the competition among various forces permeable to the unions’ political agenda.

The Impact of Tenants’ Unions on Housing Policy

The next section analyses the different housing policies that have been approved as a result of the emergence of tenants’ unions and their struggles. These organizations have undertaken other forms of activity – particularly the dissemination of their own diagnoses and narrative – that have also played a role in transforming the debate around the housing crisis and the discussion on housing policies, but that are not addressed in this paper due to lack of space (Palomera 2018). The housing policies analysed in the following sections have subsequently altered the rules of the rental market and changed the way in which its different actors (landlords and tenant organizations) manage and operate their struggles.

Reform of the Urban Rental Law (2019)

In 2013, the conservative government under the Partido Popular – which had full control of the state parliament – unilaterally reformed the Urban Rental Law (Ley de Arrendamientos Urbanos, or LAU). This reform is among the policies approved to attract global corporate landlords to the Spanish territory and boost a new cycle of speculation. Its aim was to subordinate tenants’ rights to the new REIT regime, approved a few months earlier (Gil and Martínez 2023; Palomera 2018) and governing the rules relating to Spanish Real Estate Investment Trusts (Sociedades Anónimas Cotizadas de Inversión Inmobiliaria, or SOCIMI). The reform involved reducing rental contract periods from five to three years, allowing rent increases higher than the Consumer Price Index (CPI) during the term of the contract, speeding up eviction processes and eliminating multiple tenants’ rights, including the right of first refusal.

In June 2018, there was a change in government following a vote of no confidence, with PSOE replacing the conservative government of the Partido Popular. In December 2018, the new cabinet proposed amending the rental law by decree, the primary outcome of which was to increase rental contract periods from three to five years, while allowing for price increases during the contract that exceeded the CPI. A superficial reading might lead to the conclusion that this was achieved as a result of the PSOE party’s agenda. However, this political shift is inextricable from the fast growth of tenants’ unions and the initial impact of the “Stay Put” campaign over previous months. By the end of 2018, they had gained a regular voice in the media, showcasing many stories of abuse and struggle, thus influencing the public agenda and that of progressive parties including Unidas Podemos, Esquerra Republicana and Bildu, which began to incorporate the unions’ narrative and political proposals within their programmes.

One of those early stories featured the “121 families of Sant Joan Despí” (a small city on the outskirts of Barcelona) and their confrontation with Goldman Sachs, which lasted several months. The real estate giant had acquired their building during the mortgage crisis years and was attempting to impose rent increases of 70% on average. In the face of this situation, many households started to organize by holding meetings in several carparks and by joining the Union. They created banners during collective workshops and hung them from their balconies, forming what they liked to call a “community” in the process. They held a general assembly during which they unanimously decided to stay put once their contracts expired, to keep paying the same rent, and to keep fighting until they achieved a fair negotiation. Finally, after what many claim to be the biggest demonstration in Sant Joan Despí since the 1970s, Goldman Sachs accepted a collective bargaining process, with the Union representing all of its tenant members – this was the first such process in Spanish history to take place between a corporate landlord and a tenant organization. Though Spanish laws do not currently include any kind of framework for collective bargaining outside the labour market, the new rental conditions of those 121 households were collectively negotiated by three union representatives. In the end, Goldman Sachs and the building residents reached an agreement on a moderate rent increase.²

In hindsight, and with the experience of the hundreds of subsequent victories (not just against funds like Blackstone, Cerberus, Optimum or Azora, but also a wide range of large and small landlords), some residents argue they could have achieved a better deal: no increase at all. However, one can hardly overestimate the importance of the early battles fought, and victories gained by the Stay Put campaign. Indeed, they prefigured and de facto implemented – on a small scale – many of the housing policies that the unions included in their programme for the entire population: rent control; banning no-fault evictions; enforcing obligatory repairs; and the right to collective bargaining and to strike action.

The PSOE government responded directly to some of these proposals in the reform it put forward by decree in December 2018. However, theirs was an extremely watered down version, and therefore publicly deemed by the unions to be insufficient and unacceptable. After a series of failed negotiations with the Ministry of Urban Agenda, the unions met with the political parties whose vote the government needed in order for the reform to be approved.³ During these meetings the parties in question were urged to vote against it and to join the unions in demanding a new and truly effective decree. The day before the vote, the unions joined with other housing organizations to call for mobilization, and in Barcelona they occupied the headquarters of the governing party.⁴ These actions also gave them coverage in the national media – including TVE and La Sexta—, thereby legitimizing the left-wing parties’ decision to vote against the law. This pressure was fundamental for the law not to be passed, and for the parties to the left of the government to vote against it, resulting in the new Urban Rental Law failing to enter into force.

Three weeks later, an important event took place around a Bloque en Lucha in Madrid, called #Argumosa11. This was the first building organized by the Madrid Union, as part of the Stay Put campaign. It was located on a main street in the charismatic neighbourhood of Lavapiés. This area of the city had been suffering accelerated gentrification for 20 years. But it had also become a place of resistance and squatted social centres, and home to networks of political organization closely linked to the “Right to the City” struggles. This was one of the areas where rents first began to rise excessively after 2013, in addition to being one of the major centres of Airbnb growth. The inhabitants of Argumosa 11 had been living in the building for dozens of years – some had been in the neighbourhood all their lives – and were part of the working classes that inhabited the neighbourhood long before gentrification began. All of these elements helped this case to become an icon of resistance against rental increases and speculation, receiving considerable popular support and media attention.

On February 22, within a 24-hour notice period and after preventing over a dozen evictions from the building, four families were simultaneously evicted from the building. The eviction was transformed into a huge protest action,⁵ during which hundreds of people went out onto the street in an attempt to stop it. Dozens locked themselves in and barricaded the building to prevent the police from entering,⁶ and four people were arrested. A huge police deployment (including a helicopter) laid siege to the building and the surrounding area. The eviction lasted hours, with the mainstream media broadcasting live throughout. The impact on social media was also enormous, with the situation becoming a Trending Topic on Twitter worldwide. After the eviction took place, the President of the Spanish Government tweeted: “Today, 4 families have lost their homes due to the evictions in #Argumosa11. This time, the political system has been too slow to act, and society is still waiting for answers. Those answers cannot wait. All political forces must come to an agreement and put an end to the housing drama in Spain”.⁷

In the following days, the government once again met with tenants’ unions and progressive parties (primarily Unidas Podemos) and finally approved a modified version of the rental law reform they had presented in December.⁸ While still a long way from the proposals put forward by the unions, this new decree came one step closer to some of them with clearer improvements made to tenant protections.⁹ The duration of rental contracts increased from three years to five (for private property owners) or seven (for legal entity ownership), with the crucial provision that rental price increases during the contract period could not exceed the CPI. In addition to a range of minor measures, the new law extended the notice period that landlords must give tenants of their intention not to renew a contract – from one month to four – while restricting the size of rental deposits and making it much easier for tenants to retrieve deposits retained by landlords without just cause or evidence.

This change reversed a key element of the neoliberal housing policies approved in 2013. Before this date, REITs had been obliged to retain ownership of the property for seven years, in addition to renting it out. The 2013 REITs reform had reduced this compulsory term to three years, so the LAU was subsequently reformed to reduce the rental period from five to three, bringing it in line with REITs legislation (Gil and Martínez 2023). By extending corporate housing contracts to seven years, the 2019 reform would hinder capital circulation through the Spanish rental sector by reducing its turnover rate and therefore reducing its investment opportunities, particularly for highly opportunistic and speculative investments (based on buying low and selling high, and profiting from the appreciation of property over short periods).

Later that year, Domo Gestora, a two-year-old REIT, decided to abandon the REIT legal regime due to the extension of contracts from three to seven years. The company’s model was based on “keeping the homes for three years as rentals and then selling them, thus obtaining valued returns and dividends for shareholders, which now, by forcing it to keep the apartments for seven years as rentals, have gone up in smoke”.¹⁰ The 2019 LAU reform clearly illustrates how, by using multiple repertoires, a movement can have an impact on the legislative system and affect the potential for capital accumulation through rental housing.

Measures in the Context of the COVID-19 Crisis

The unions may have never expressed it in so many words – in order to be more persuasive – but the Stay Put campaign launched in early 2018 was about getting people to join partial rent strikes. Each time an organized group of tenants decided to reject a rent increase introduced at the end of their contract, and to keep paying the same price, that group was in effect withdrawing part of the money claimed by the landlord. In doing so, the unions had been de facto regulating the rental prices paid by some of their members, whilst simultaneously pushing for a comprehensive policy of rent control and promoting a narrative in the media that presented these actions as legitimate and progressive. However, the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 took the Stay Put strategy to a new level.

During the pandemic, Spain implemented very strict lockdown measures, which included restrictions on movement, closure of non-essential businesses, and restrictions on public gatherings. Lockdown rules in Spain were particularly stringent, requiring people to stay at home except for essential activities such as buying groceries or seeking medical attention. Immediately, the unions decided to send a public message to anyone whose jobs and incomes were disappearing as a result: “If we don’t get paid, we don’t pay”.¹¹ The idea was simple: if you are told to stay home in the name of collective health, and if this means that you do not get paid, then you have the right to stop paying rent on the 1st of April, and to ask the government to cancel rents for all citizens in this situation. Against the backdrop of social fears and physical isolation, the unions issued a call for collective solidarity and political audacity. The media impact was enormous and union spokespeople appeared in most mainstream media to defend the campaign. The campaign’s political narrative was very successful, and it was widely accepted during the exceptional measures introduced during the Covid crisis.

However, executing the idea was an entirely different story. Though the situation for many people was extremely dire, organizing a rent strike via online communication only – without the face-to-face assemblies and physical spaces of connection needed to build trust and empowerment – proved extremely challenging. For several months, many rent strike online meetings were organized across Spain. Dozens of activists from the tenants’ unions and the housing movement dedicated countless hours and days of their lives to advise others by means of pre-arranged video calls. More than 16,000 households contacted the unions and expressed an interest in stopping their rent payment and joining the strike.¹² While many used negotiation tactics based on the Stay Put toolkit developed by the unions and the housing movement to achieve rent reductions or cancellations, it is very hard to estimate how many people actually went on strike and how many stopped paying their rent at the risk of falling into arrears with their landlord.

Nevertheless, the campaign had an enormous impact on the government, which since January 2020 had been formed by the two aforementioned parties: PSOE and Unidas Podemos (UP). The rent strikes were a constant presence on the agenda of cabinet negotiations regarding the package of COVID-19 emergency measures, and the issue was used by UP Vice-President and ministers convince PSOE ministers to agree to certain policies (particularly the Ministry of Economy, who was in close contact with the financial and real estate lobbies). While the government remained a long way from suspending rent for households where jobs and incomes had been lost, it approved a series of temporary housing policies (in particular, a ban on all rent-related evictions) that would have been unthinkable without the campaign, according to ministers on both sides of the government.

The Rent Control Law of the Tenants Union (2020)

More importantly, the strike and its “Cancel Rent” slogan provided an enormous boost for the fight for rent control, which had been growing since the emergence of the unions. This debate was particularly intense in Barcelona and Catalonia. Similarly to what had happened with the PSOE Government in 2018, in May 2019 the Catalan Executive tried to pass an urgent decree-law, allegedly to regulate rent prices. The tenants’ union publicly rejected this, arguing that it was a “fake decree” because it would have no effect on the lives of tenants. As it had done in the Spanish Parliament in 2018, the union launched a powerful campaign and convinced the leftist opposition parties within parliament to vote against this new decree, and to instead demand an efficient form of rent control. The decree was subsequently repealed.

The Catalan Tenants’ Union did not stop there, and in late 2019 it initiated discussions with the Catalan Government to begin co-writing a new rent control law. Again, the fact that the responsible departments accepted this is more than a question of political will, but is also due to the enormous strength and support that the union had been gathering. By September 2019, when negotiations on the new rent control law started between the union and the Catalan Government, more than one thousand people in Barcelona and other Catalan cities had already joined the Stay Put campaign. Just a few months earlier, in April 2019, a mass demonstration led by the tenants’ unions and the housing movement (in several cities across Spain, but particularly strong in Barcelona) had declared that it was time to “burst the bubble” and had highlighted rent control as the top priority.

In March 2020, after dozens of work sessions held and agreements reached between the negotiating teams of the Government and the Union (all of which were discussed and approved by the Plenary of the Catalan Tenants’ Union), the final text of the law was almost ready and had been approved by the two sides. However, the outbreak of the pandemic and launch of the Union’s Cancel Rent campaign quickly brought the unprecedented bargaining process with the regional government to a standstill. Furthermore, the global crisis made it even more difficult to explain why rents were still “so damn high”, while the productive economy ground to a halt and jobs vanished. This period was also indelibly marked by a collective struggle that made a huge impact on the public, particularly through the Catalan media: a series of Bloques en Lucha (“Buildings in Struggle”) organized against the private equity fund Azora (in seven cities in Catalunya and one other in Madrid) to stop the firm from introducing exponential rent rises. Besides the active resistance of more than 200 households, this struggle involved various actions such as the occupation of the company’s headquarters, a large demonstration in Badalona (a city on the outskirts of Barcelona) and persuading five city councils and the Catalan Parliament to approve motions that rejected Azora’s practices and demanded that the fund reach an agreement with residents regarding fair rental prices.

Alongside the many other actions related in one way or another to the Stay Put campaign, all of the above generated significant support within Barcelona and Catalonia as a whole. They also gave the Union enough power to negotiate a more ambitious legal text than the one that had almost been agreed upon prior to the pandemic. In July 2020, therefore, the Union agreed to launch one of the most ambitious forms of rent control in the world to that date, and managed to persuade the majority of the Catalan parliament to approve it. Again, the process followed the same pattern as previously described: the parliamentary correlation of forces was not favourable to the tenants’ union, as the majority of groups opposed an ambitious form of rent control. Most people thought it was an impossible mission. However, through a combination of continuous action, huge public pressure, and the shrewd exploitation of tensions between political parties, the Union managed to rally a majority comprising four groups: the three openly in favour (ERC with 32 MPs, Podemos with 8 MPs, and CUP with 4) and a decisive fourth group (Junts Per Catalunya, with 34 MPs), which was not in favour of the reform but ultimately could not afford to vote against it. After a lengthy parliamentary negotiation with intense daily coverage, the law was finally approved in September 2020, and it came to be seen by all members of the tenants’ union as their law.

The Llei 11/2020 de mesures urgents en matèria de contenció de rendes en els contractes d’arrendament d’habitatge¹³ can be briefly summarized as follows:

1. Rent control became immediately effective in Barcelona and 61 other cities, virtually encompassing most of the tenant population of Catalonia. These cities had to decide whether to renew it after the first year – which they did. Meanwhile, other cities that had not been initially included asked to be able to control rents in their markets.

2. The general rule was that rents could not be increased, and that those exceeding the official price index (based on hundreds of thousands of registered rental contracts) needed to be reduced when the contract was renewed.

3. This regulation affected all housing units, regardless of whether there was a change of tenant, i.e. it included vacancy control. 4) In terms of enforcement, the law was very strict. Firstly, all contracts needed to show three figures: the previous rental price, the new one, and that shown by the official price index. If this information was not accurately displayed, the tenant could file an administrative complaint with the Housing Department, with a fine of up to €9,000. Secondly, if the contents of the rental contract failed to comply with the precepts of the law in any way, administrative fines could range between €3,000 and €90,000.

According to empirical evidence, the rent control launched by the union reduced average rents paid by about 4% to 6% (Jofre-Monseny, Martinez-Mazza, and Segu 2023). Finance and real estate associations claimed that this was due to the pandemic, but the data shows that in those cities without rent control, prices either decreased by a minimal amount or actually rose. Moreover, contrary to claims that rent control would “destroy the supply of rental units”, there is no evidence of any reduction in the supply of rental units, as measured by the number of signed and concluded agreements or the active stock of rental units. However, real estate associations organized and succeeded in persuading PP (the main right-wing party) to take the law to the Constitutional Court. Led by the coalition’s PSOE-controlled ministries, the Spanish Government achieved the same. In April 2022, a year and a half after its approval, the law was declared unconstitutional on the grounds that Catalonia did not have the powers to regulate rent prices and only the Spanish state had the authority to do so – in the same way what had happened with Berlin’s rent freeze just a year earlier.

While a setback for the unions and tenants in general, this situation created a great deal of uneasiness and anger among the PSOE-controlled ministries against rent control: the union had demonstrated that it was perfectly possible to implement such a policy in Catalonia, and that it could have beneficial effects. The seed had been planted and now all the pressure was on the Spanish Government, which eventually approved its own – softer – type of rent control just a year later.

Right to Housing Law

As previously mentioned, a coalition government was formed in Spain in January 2020, composed of PSOE and Unidas Podemos (UP). While both parties committed to a full series of housing policies within the Government Agreement, rent control was the key element of that negotiation. This was related not only to the strength of the unions, but also to the fact that UP, a party that counted former PAH activists among its leaders, was very permeable to the movement and its political agenda: the end of no-fault evictions; the ban on tenant fees (making it illegal for a letting agent to charge you fees when you rent a new property, or renew your tenancy); the proposal to expropriate the vacant units in the hands of large landlords; the creation of a true public housing system, as well as other measures. However, from the very first cabinet meetings, PSOE showed enormous reluctance to approve not only rent control but any of these other policies. Instead, it used its power within the government (through the Ministry of Urban Agenda, which is responsible for housing) to impose an alternative legislative process that would lead to a new law—Ley por el Derecho a la Vivienda (“Right to Housing Law”)—, which included many other aspects and was sufficient to defuse union demands. Since then, a permanent battle has been fought between the two parties (and their respective ministries) over each of the proposals made by the Tenants’ Unions, including those they had agreed upon in the Government Agreement.

Indeed, while PSOE had committed to incorporating a rent control policy in the 2020 Government Agreement, it actually spent four years attempting to avoid or postpone it. This had to do not only with the Ministry of Urban Agenda but also and especially with the Ministry of Economy – a true power within the state, with a neoliberal tradition going back to the 1980s. This Ministry made every effort to boycott the agreement – both publicly through open statements, and privately through internal reports opposing this policy. Moreover, both ministries were under the constant influence of corporate landlords and other actors from the real estate sector, which was in the process of a nationwide reorganization. In April 2020, Blackstone and other key funds created a new landlords’ organization, known as ASVAL, the “Association of Rental Property Owners”. Shortly after this, the largest and most representative organizations within the real estate sector merged into one, under the name FIABCI, to gain a more powerful voice. In fact, both ASVAL and FIABCI selected as their spokesperson and main lobbyist none other than the former Mayor of Barcelona, former Minister of Industry, Tourism and Trade, former Executive Director of UN-Habitat and illustrious member of the PSOE Party, Joan Clos. His ties with PSOE made him a direct source of pressure on the current government.

Thus, throughout the whole term (2020–2023), public pressure from the funds against any housing policy shift grew in parallel with that of the new tenant organizations. Blackstone repeatedly threatened to “leave Spain” during the public debates that took place for each of the legislative changes covered in this article.¹⁴ In 2019, when the President of Spain visited the United States, he privately met with Wall Street leaders, including Kenneth Caplan, head of Blackstone’s real estate division. The President told them that they would not have to worry about the Right to Housing Law or rent control,¹⁵ sparking enormous indignation back in Spain. In other words, the class conflict that had started in the neighbourhoods of Barcelona and Madrid, between “Buildings in Struggle” and unethical landlords, was also internalized by the state, in the clash between the Ministries of Economy and Urban Agenda (PSOE), on the one hand, and the Ministry of Social Rights (UP) and leftist opposition parties on the other.

In order to overcome the enormous opposition to their objectives, Tenants’ Unions adopted two strategies besides their regular actions. The first was to draft and approve its own rent control law in Catalonia, as explained above. While the Catalan Tenants’ Union knew that it might be declared unconstitutional, it did what the PSOE ministries said could not be done, actually protecting 140,000 households with rent-controlled contracts, and putting enormous pressure on the government.

The second strategy was to rally a broad range of social movements, third sector organizations and trade unions in Spain behind a unitary programme. This was initially achieved through a manifesto, and later (in 2021) by means of a platform launched in collaboration with PAH and the Homeless People’s Movement: the “Initiative for a Law that Guarantees the Right to Housing”. Since then, various types of action have been taken to press for the law to be passed, including demonstrations, press conferences or social media campaigns featuring celebrities calling for the law to be passed.

One of the most important pressure actions by this platform was to draft and register the so-called “Movements’ Law”. In September 2021, after months of work, the Ley de Garantía del Derecho a la Vivienda Digna y Adecuada (“Law to Guarantee the Right to Dignified and Adequate Housing”) was presented. This law included 108 articles and provided for measures such as the aforementioned and many others included by other organizations. The Government’s reaction was immediate, and a month later, in October, the government presented its own “Right to Housing Law”. Thus, on 15 December, when the parliamentary processing of the Movements’ Law was voted on in Congress, PSOE voted against it together with the right-wing opposition parties, claiming that the government had already registered its own law. Faced with this situation, the platform’s next step was to persuade Podemos and the left-wing opposition parties to register a total of 60 amendments – drafted by the platform – to the government’s law.

It cannot be overemphasized that, while the legislative activities of the tenants’ unions never ceased, they were always accompanied by actions of civil disobedience and pressure. At the end of September 2022, the Madrid Union stormed a speech being delivered by Joan Clos.¹⁶ The purpose of the action was to denounce how Blackstone and other funds where unlawfully lobbying the government, and how Joan Clos was using his contacts within PSOE for this purpose. The following day, the Barcelona Union disrupted a civic ceremony at which the Minister of Urban Agenda responsible for government housing policy was speaking.¹⁷ Activists shouted “Regulate Rents” and urged the Minister, Raquel Sanchez, to support this policy. A few months earlier, on 21 July, both unions had simultaneously occupied two Blackstone hotels in the centre of Madrid and Barcelona, to protest against the fund’s rent increases while pushing for price regulation.¹⁸

Four years later, the Right to Housing Law was finally approved by the Spanish Government in May 2023.¹⁹ In the final weeks of the negotiations, the unions succeeded in securing two fundamental changes: the criteria for declaring an area as “a stressed housing market zone” were relaxed, and it was forbidden for tenants to pay for real estate intermediary services when hired by the landlord. The final text is contradictory, which in turn reflects the contradictory class interests that led to it.²⁰ It includes a form of rent control that the 17 autonomous communities have the right to implement, which is basically inspired by the Catalan Law drafted by the tenants’ union. However, this contains certain loopholes that cast a shadow of doubt over its potential effects (for instance, temporary rentals of less than a year are not included). It bans tenant fees, but it does not address no-fault evictions, thus perpetuating the insecurity related to rental tenancies. It includes measures to delay and make evictions more difficult, but does nothing to prevent them. It puts an end to the Spanish tradition of building social housing that after a few years can be sold off at market value (Palomera, 2014a), and mentions promoting social housing for rent, but makes it compulsory for the state to increase the budget. While “bad bank” SAREB has been de facto nationalized, the law does not transfer its real estate properties to regional governments so that they can expand their social housing stock (these properties continue to be managed according to market criteria).

Discussion

This paper explores the policy outcomes of action taken by tenants’ movements in Spain and Catalonia. We have proposed the concept of “counter-hegemonic legislative strategies” to illustrate how tenants’ movements were a key factor in promoting the implementation of post-neoliberal housing policy, and how these struggles were a means for further destabilization of neoliberal housing trajectories and governance.

Tenants’ unions have the unique nature of operating in a non-state-centric manner, since their aim is not to lobby, nor represent or integrate institutions. Their aim is to organize tenants in an offensive manner that confronts housing commodification in particular, and capitalist relations in general. They configure themselves as counter-power forces, where legislative struggle is just one of their multiple repertoires of action. Through the concept of counter-hegemonic legislative strategies, we aim to explain the particularities of this process, which was triggered through three mechanisms:

1. The transformation of tenant displacements and landlord threats into a form of offensive organized civil disobedience that directly disrupts the urban accumulation process, fosters counter-power formation, and pushes for the expansion of policy reforms in a way that redistributes power and challenges neoliberal housing governance.

2. The strategic use of social and mainstream media, thereby putting union struggles and demands on the media agenda, highlighting all the political mechanisms that shape neoliberal housing governance, proposing and disseminating alternative policy solutions, and contesting the common sense and hegemonic narratives of housing governance.

3. The exploitation of institutional windows of opportunity based on various government coalitions and alliances. By applying pressure and creating situations of political crisis and ungovernability, these result in pushing party boundaries and placing union-driven issues high on the legislative agenda. The unions’ success can therefore be explained by the multiple repertoires they employed, in addition to exogenous contextual factors.

While the unions were able to get policies passed that contradicted decades of neoliberal housing governance, they were also severely limited, as the content of these policies fell short of the unions’ full demands. But as a non-state-centric movement, in which legislative struggle is only one repertoire of action among many others, the unions’ legislative struggles cannot be measured in terms of legislative success alone. They should be analysed in terms of how they promote the unions’ configuration as counter-hegemonic forces with the scope of challenging neoliberal housing governance, where policy outcomes are just one dimension among others. From this perspective, we identify three main outcomes of the policy struggle.

First, from the point of view of the post-neoliberal policy frame, our work shows similar results to other studies (Byrne 2022; Hochstenbach 2023; Kadi et al. 2021): policies that partially undermine the neoliberal housing trajectory have been approved, but neoliberal housing governance overall – including macroeconomic financial dynamics, transnational political economic structures, or lobbying and ties within the real estate industry, political parties and governments – present resilient obstacles to the development of a new political agenda that genuinely puts an end to the neoliberal hegemony in housing. From the perspective of the economic cycle in which they were approved, these policies run counter to the policy reforms that transformed the 2008 crisis into a new cycle of real estate accumulation (Gil and Martínez 2023; García-Lamarca 2021; Martínez and Gil 2022; Palomera 2018; Vives-Miró 2018; Yrigoy 2018). Therefore they disrupt and create barriers to the development of the post-2008 urban accumulation fix, which has led its major beneficiaries – asset managers such as Blackstone – to react by creating landlord organizations to lobby and campaign against these policies. From this perspective, these policies challenge the neoliberal housing trajectory and run counter to hegemonic neoliberal housing governance.

Secondly, these policies are a means of accumulating union power, as they allow unions to tackle new battles and expand the scope of these, in addition to stepping up their struggles. This also translates into union growth in terms of regional coverage, resources, and membership. For example, the 2019 legal reform extended the notice period that landlords must give tenants in the event of a non-renewal – from one month to four. After the shock of receiving a non-renewal notice from the landlord, tenants should contact the union, get informed, organize along with their other neighbours (in the case of entire buildings) and organize with the union in order to prepare the campaign to “stay put”. Time is a resource that works against both tenants and the union, and when there is more time to organize tenants before the Stay Put campaign begins, more tenants are likely to join the campaign, thereby amassing more power. With this reform, the minimum time available to organize tenants is increased fourfold, creating a much more favourable context for tenants to organize themselves and stay put. In addition, this reform also increased the duration of rental contracts from three to five years (if the owner was a private individual) or to seven years (if the owner was a legal entity). Joining the Stay Put campaign means breaking the law, confronting the landlord, dedicating time to organizing, attending meetings and events, and appearing in the media, among many other commitments. It involves a high level of exposure and commitment, which takes time and creates stress. Extending the lease from three to five/seven years makes it much more worthwhile to stand up to the landlord and join the Stay Put campaign, because the effort is outweighed by the reward when the battle is won (a longer period of secure housing stability). Extending the length of the contract therefore also creates a more favourable context for the organization of tenant groups and actions.

Moreover, the ban on tenant fees included in the 2019 reform (which was subsequently extended in the new law of 2023) opened up a battlefield for unions. For instance, in early 2023, the Barcelona Union entered into a dispute with an agent and landlord after they charged illegal fees to more than 400 households (totalling 200,000 euros). Months later, the union managed to recover that money and made the agent pay additional compensation for the damages caused, valued at 50,000 euros. Another example is that of the 2% cap on active contracts, which was introduced during the inflation crisis. Many landlords tried to increase rent by more than 2%. This allowed the union to campaign and open a new front in the conflict, reaching more tenants, confronting more landlords, organizing tenants in more buildings, and growing in terms of participant and member numbers. The most notorious battle was fought in three buildings in Madrid owned by the same landlord. The union managed to get the landlord to pay back a total of 25,000 euros to the tenants, which quickly showed tenants how successful the union’s actions could be. Something similar happened when rent control was approved in Catalonia, between 2020 and 2022. Many landlords tried to avoid it, but when the union intervened, success for the tenants was usually guaranteed. Thus, these legislative changes tend to improve the political position of the unions, which in the long run facilitates their accumulation of power.

Thirdly, union struggles contributed to producing tensions of representation within certain political parties and governments. The unions forced all political parties and governments (at all administrative levels) to position themselves in different ways: continuous campaigning, strong media presence, and various political actions (including the presentation of the unions’ own laws). Those who refused to adopt these policies were publicly singled out as responsible for or complicit with the housing crisis. At different stages, protests were organized at their party headquarters, and some of their leaders were subjected to escraches (demonstrations involving public harassment). Union campaigns defined antagonistic cultural frames – such as “You’re either with the tenants/people or with the corporate financial landlords”, and “Stand with landlords from the higher-income population or stand with tenants from the lower-income population” – which made governments and parties appear to be political instruments used by landlords and the financial-real estate nexus.

Ultimately, this kind of action demonstrates that the legislative changes that can “solve” the housing issue depend on political will, and that certain parties and governments are unwilling to demonstrate this. The counter-hegemonic legislative strategies employed by unions thus create two parallel processes. On the one hand, they cause some parties and governments to lose legitimacy and support in society on housing issues. On the other hand, a new narrative around housing emerges, making some political parties and governments responsible for housing problems, alongside rogue landlords, speculators and financial institutions. The result is a process of disaffection between parties and their voters, which can lead to tensions and even crises of representation. In the Spanish case, this was clearly seen when PSOE at national level and in Catalonia blocked the union’s measures on rent controls, but when these were approved in Catalonia, all of the region’s large municipalities applied them (when they could have chosen not to). Similarly, the large municipalities of Madrid – governed by PSOE with Podemos – passed the motions promoted by the union in favour of rent control. Something similar occurred in Berlin with the expropriation referendum and the SPD. The SPD positioned itself against the measure, while the results indicated that most of its voters came out in favour of expropriation (the bloc of votes in favour of expropriation was very similar to the bloc of votes received by the three left-wing parties: SPD, The Greens, The Left). Union policy struggles therefore contribute to the formation of a wider crisis of representation. This may contribute to a wider hegemonic crisis of the dominant bloc arising on the union fringes, which always spark social outbursts that lead to transformative changes in structure of society.

Our study fills an important gap in the analysis of outcomes produced by housing movements and in debates regarding post-neoliberal housing policies. In particular, it does so by linking the adoption of post-neoliberal policies to tenant struggles. In a context where rental housing is central to both urban accumulation and social inequality and impoverishment, conflicts over this issue become increasingly important and central to electoral agendas and government stability. This is why movements have a crucial role to play in promoting such policies when institutional windows of opportunities are opened. In fact, Kadi et al. (2021) have stated that if housing movements grow further and their demands continue to escalate, governments will be forced to address these structural arrangements in order to maintain legitimacy. From our perspective, our research provides a detailed discussion of how conditions, opportunities and movement strategies can lead to structural changes, by causing tensions within governments and challenging the legitimacy of political parties. The proposed analytical framework assumes that post-neoliberal policy reform clashes with decades of neoliberal housing governance. These conflicts may create trends towards tensions within the political status quo, which may lead to scenarios of political or governmental crisis. When housing movements manage to foster situations of ungovernability due to political tensions over housing policy, this is precisely the outcome that opens up institutional opportunities for further-reaching changes in neoliberal housing governance. Tenants and housing movements have an important role to play under these circumstances, as demonstrated by the framework of counter-hegemonic legislative strategies. In fact, as noted in the first paragraph of this paper, housing policy is increasingly a central element of government crises and instability. From this point of view, it is important to point out the role of movements within these crises and, in particular, how movements can produce and intensify them in order to implement and radicalize a post-neoliberal policy agenda.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the FORMAS [The Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development] [2019-00349].

Notes

1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-election-rents-idUSBRE9590OD20130610.

2. https://sindicatdellogateres.org/es/casi-150-familias-vs-goldman-sachs-o-como-la-union-gana-el-primer-round-al-titan-financiero-de-wall-street/.

3. https://www.inquilinato.org/pinchar-la-burbuja-del-alquiler-aun-es-posible/.

4. https://www.elperiodico.com/es/politica/20190121/sindicat-llogaters-ocupa-sede-psc-7258238.

5. https://www.elsaltodiario.com/derechos-humanos/detenidos-resistencia-desahucio-simultaneo-viviendas-argumosa-11.

6. https://twitter.com/InquilinatoMad/status/1098866401417166849?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1098866401417166849%7Ctwgr%5E704e294419a026795c276e37b8152dabd77f17c1%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.elconfidencial.com%2Fespana%2Fmadrid%2F2019-02-23%2Fargumosa-lavapies-desahucios-alquiler-proindivisos_1842490%2F.

7. https://twitter.com/sanchezcastejon/status/1098931825857187841?s=20.

8. Real Decreto-ley 7/2019, de 1 de marzo, de medidas urgentes en materia de vivienda y alquiler. https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2019–3108.

9. https://www.inquilinato.org/el-gobierno-del-estado-aprueba-un-decreto-de-alquileres-necesario-pero-insuficiente-te-explicamos-como-nos-afectara/.

10. https://www.elconfidencial.com/empresas/2019-11-20/domo-deja-regimen-socimi-cambio-ley-alquileres_2344396/.

11. https://www.20minutos.es/noticia/4217569/0/inquilinos-huelga-alquileres-no-cobramos-no-pagamos/.

12. https://www.inquilinato.org/mas-de-16–000-inquilinas-van-a-la-huelga-en-80-comites-repartidos-en-20-provincias/.

13. https://justicia.gencat.cat/ca/departament/Normativa/normativasectorial/legislacio_civil_catalana/llei-11–2020-mesures-urgents-rendes-habitatge/index.html.

14. https://www.elconfidencial.com/empresas/2021-03-23/blackstone-revisa-cartera-alquiler-pisos-venta-presion-regulatoria_3001171/.

15. https://elpais.com/espana/2021-07-21/sanchez-presume-en-eeuu-de-que-en-espana-no-hay-movimiento-antivacunas-y-pide-no-ideologizar-la-pandemia.html.

16. https://twitter.com/InquilinatoMad/status/1570469143605874698.

17. https://www.elmundo.es/cataluna/2022/09/16/63246740e4d4d8974e8b45f7.html.

18. https://www.elsaltodiario.com/vivienda/sindicatos-inquilinos-toman-dos-hoteles-blackstone-madrid-y-barcelona.

19. Ley 12/2023, de 24 de mayo, por el derecho a la vivienda. https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2023–12203.

20. https://www.inquilinato.org/la-ley-no-bajara-los-precios-del-alquiler-pero-nuestra-lucha-ha-abierto-brecha/.