Spain’s Housing Crisis: Youth Call for a Strike
STATEMENT
European Left –European Left Youth Network (ELYN)
Housing cannot keep costing us our lives: moving towards a general strike in Spain
The European Left Youth Network (ELYN) stands in solidarity with the housing rights movement in Spain and calls on young people and youth organisations across the country to join the strike on 11 November, in response to the worsening housing crisis and the ever-rising cost of living. As housing becomes increasingly unaffordable, young people and working-class communities are being denied the fundamental right to a secure home.
From 26 September onwards onwards, tenants’ unions and other organisations within the housing rights movement in Spain have been able to mobilise people, especially young people across the country to protest and camp in public squares for more than three weeks defending housing as a right after a vulture fund secured the eviction of Mari Carmen, an 87-year-old pensioner from the home she had lived in since she was a child. She died following the eviction.
This tragic event was the last straw for Spain’s working class, which has suffered for years under a broken housing market controlled by speculation, private interests and the touristification of our cities and neighbourhoods. Unaffordable house prices and rents, neighbourhoods increasingly taken over by holiday and short-term rentals and the growing threat of eviction have become part of everyday life in Spanish neighbourhoods , while young people are unable to afford to build a life on their own.
Called in response to Parliament’s rejection of a bill that sought to strengthen protections for working-class people against housing speculation, this general strike aims to challenge a system that treats housing as a business that takes advantage of the working class, and continues to cost lives in the pursuit of profit. We therefore declare that we will not stand by and let another Mari Carmen suffer the same fate, in Spain or anywhere else in Europe.
We demand a structural response to end the working class’s struggle to afford a place to live. We demand real and effective public control of the housing market, recognising housing as a right and not as a commodity and building a system where everyone has the right to a home. This includes capping and controlling rents, ending speculative property purchases and the acquisition of homes for tourist use, expropriating properties for residential use, expanding public housing and putting an end to all kinds of evictions.
The struggle for housing rights in Spain is part of a broader European struggle for social justice, public services and a future free from poverty, inequality and militarisation. As movements across Europe prepare for the Stop ReArm Europe – Welfare, Not Warfare days of action around 20 November, the mobilisation in Spain on 11 November highlights the urgency of prioritising people’s needs over private profits and military spending. The demand for affordable housing belongs to the same wider struggle for a just transition, decent living conditions, peace and a society built around care rather than war.
ELYN stands in full solidarity with the organisations and young people fighting for a fairer system and calls on young people to continue to keep organising and mobilising to bring Spain to a standstill on 11 November. The working class and its youth are the ones who suffer inequality, who struggle to make it to the end of the month and who cannot afford a place to live. The only response is to unite, organise, and mobilise for the first general strike in Spain in more than ten years and the wider struggle for housing justice across Europe.
“From the housing mobilisations in Spain on 11 November to the European days of action around 20 November, our message remains clear: social rights, public services and people’s lives must come before profit and militarisation.
The youth of Spain can count on the European Left Youth Network.
Housing can not keep costing us our lives.“