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Maricarmen's Stretcher, Elif's Key: Europe's Housing Crisis and the Class of the Home

From Berlin to Madrid, from Barcelona to Istanbul: Housing in Whose Hands, Under Whose Control, to Whose Benefit?

Author: Oğuz Demirkapı
Maricarmen's Stretcher, Elif's Key: Europe's Housing Crisis and the Class of the Home

Maricarmen's Stretcher, Elif's Key: Europe's Housing Crisis and the Class of the Home

From Berlin to Madrid, from Barcelona to Istanbul: Housing in Whose Hands, Under Whose Control, to Whose Benefit?

Dear Young Comrades,

On the morning of Wednesday, 23 September 2026, around 10.30, a stretcher came out of number 46, Calle del Alcalde Sainz de Baranda, in Madrid's Retiro district. The woman on the stretcher was named María del Carmen Abascal. Everyone calls her Maricarmen. She is 87, 50 percent disabled, and has lived in the same flat since 1956 — that is, for seventy years. On the fourth attempt at eviction the police opened the door, fired tear gas at the crowd that filled the street, and carried Maricarmen from her home to hospital. That same evening in Madrid, even by the Government Delegation's figures, some ten thousand people marched. In thirteen Spanish cities they shouted "We are all Maricarmen."

The same week there was another scene in Berlin. On 20 September Elif Eralp, the candidate of Die Linke, now the city's first party, was calling the SPD and the Greens to coalition preliminary talks. The name of the heaviest file on the table was clear: the socialisation of more than 200,000 flats in Berlin, taken from the large real-estate companies.

There is a third scene as well. On 22–24 September a real-estate investment gathering called "The District" was held at Madrid's IFEMA fairground. Blackstone, Brookfield and Azora, among the world's largest housing investors, were there. Between 24 and 27 September, in the same city, the "El Barrio" (Neighbourhood) counter-summit organised by the Tenants' Union and the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and the City is still under way. From Buenos Aires to Lyon, from Los Angeles to Lisbon, tenants' organisations from sixty countries and regions are in Madrid.

The same week, the same continent, three tables: at one sit those who buy and sell the home like a stock-market paper. At one there is the stretcher of an old woman who has lost her home. At the third, a mayoral candidate trying to pull the home out of the market and give it back to the public. This piece was written to show that these three tables are parts of the same question.

We will talk first about concepts, then look at Europe's figures. Then we will go to Berlin, to Madrid, to Barcelona and to the other corners of the continent, and come back to Turkey. At the end we will gather it all and say how we see the housing crisis as a class programme, and how we will solve it.

This piece is the fourth link in our Berlin series. The earlier ones: A Class Soldier in Berlin: Elif Eralp (29 August), Elif Eralp: "We Wrote History, Comrades" (20 September) and What Awaits Elif Eralp? (24 September). In that last piece we said that behind the antisemitism debate lay an effort to block the expropriation programme itself. Now we look at that programme.

First the concept: Why is the home a problem?

The housing question is not new. When Friedrich Engels wrote the series titled The Housing Question in 1872, Europe's cities were filling with workers flowing into the factories. Engels says two things there, and both still hold today.

The first: a shortage of housing is not a chance defect of capitalism. The same order that gathers workers into the cities and turns land and buildings into commodities also turns shelter into a burden that the wage cannot cover.

The second: the bourgeoisie's method of "solving" the housing question is to pick the problem up from one place and set it down in another. Engels names this, after the prefect who rebuilt Paris with wide boulevards, the "Haussmann method." A poor neighbourhood is torn down, expensive avenues are put in its place, the poor are driven to another corner of the city. The problem is not solved; it changes place. Today this is called "urban transformation," "gentrification," or "touristification."

There are three concepts young comrades need to know:

Use-value and exchange-value. A home, for the person who lives in it, is shelter; that is its use-value. But on the market the home is an object of buying and selling; that is its exchange-value. The crisis begins where the home's exchange-value crushes its use-value. In Madrid, Maricarmen's flat was a life for the woman who lived in it. For the company Urbagestión it was an asset to be emptied and revalued.

Rent. The landowner draws an income without producing anything, merely by owning a place. Rent is a share transferred from the worker's wage to the landlord. Marx and Engels call this "secondary exploitation." Surplus value is taken once in the factory. The worker who comes home in the evening gives a part of what remains of the wage to someone else as rent.

Financialisation. In the last forty years the home has gone beyond being a property that yields rent and become an investment vehicle of the global financial market. The geographer David Harvey calls this "the secondary circuit of capital." Capital that cannot find a profitable field of investment in industry flows into concrete and land. The housing stock gathered cheaply from banks and states in the 2008 crisis sits today in the portfolios of funds like Blackstone. Once your landlord might have been a retired neighbour. Today it may be the shareholders of a fund in New York.

Keep these three concepts in mind. Every figure and every event you see below shows how the three are bound to one another.

Europe in figures

According to April 2026 data from Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, in the ten years from 2015 to the last quarter of 2025 in the EU:

  • House prices rose 64.9 percent.
  • Rents rose 21.8 percent.
  • Rents rose in all 27 EU countries. The only country where house prices fell was Finland (3 percent).
  • The largest rises in house prices were in Hungary (290 percent), Portugal (180 percent), Lithuania (168 percent) and Bulgaria (157 percent).
  • The largest rises in rents were in Hungary (109 percent), Lithuania (88 percent), and Ireland and Poland (76 percent).

In the last quarter of 2025 alone, year on year, prices rose 5.5 percent and rents 3.2 percent.

The European Commission answered this picture in December 2025 with its first "European Affordable Housing Plan." According to Housing Commissioner Dan Jørgensen the continent needs 650,000 extra dwellings every year. The plan includes a legislative proposal on short-term (tourist) lets, rule changes that make it easier for states to aid social housing, and an expectation of 375 billion euros of investment from national and regional development banks by 2029.

On paper it looks good. But the language of the plan must be read carefully. The Commission defines the crisis essentially as a "shortage of supply" and sees the solution as "more construction." The role of speculation it sets aside, in Jørgensen's own words, as a matter "requiring further analysis." So the question asked is "how many homes are there?"; the question "in whose hands are the homes?" is not asked. Yet empty dwellings in Europe, dwellings turned into tourist flats, and dwellings held by funds as investment vehicles are measured in the millions. The problem is not only that there are too few homes. The real problem is that the home is in the wrong hands.

Berlin: What does Elif Eralp want to do?

A city of tenants

Berlin is Europe's tenants' capital. Four-fifths of those who live in the city are tenants. That is why the housing question in Berlin is not a "middle-class complaint"; it is the everyday life of the city's majority. In the 20 September election 53 percent of voters named "the housing market and rents" as the city's most important problem. Die Linke's vote rose from 12.2 percent at the previous election to 25.7 percent — more than double. Behind this leap, first of all, is rent.

In 2021 this city held a referendum that drew the world's attention. The question put by the initiative "Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen" (Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen and Co) was simple: should the housing of private companies with more than 3,000 flats be socialised? 56.4 percent of Berliners said "yes."

What happened then? The SPD mayors did not implement the result. An expert commission was set up. In 2023 the commission declared that this path was constitutional. But the file was left waiting again. For five years the people's decision sat in a drawer.

There had been an attempt before that as well. In 2020 a five-year rent-freeze law (the Mietendeckel) came into force in Berlin. In April 2021 the Federal Constitutional Court struck the law down. The ground was that rent law is a federal, not a Land, competence. Overnight tenants faced back-dated rent debts. This experience taught Berlin's tenants a bitter lesson: every law that tries to regulate the market can fall at the courthouse door so long as it does not touch the property relation.

Eralp's programme

Elif Eralp's campaign was built on these two experiences. The housing leg of the programme is this:

  • A rent freeze in public flats. Rents in the roughly 400,000 flats belonging to Berlin's public companies will be frozen for a year, then annual increases will be capped at 1 percent. Because this is the municipality's own property, it is a step that does not hit a court obstacle and can be applied at once.
  • A task force against rent profiteering. A special unit will be set up against rent demands by private landlords that exceed the legal limits. In Eralp's words: "Where rent is turned into a commodity, the mayor intervenes."
  • Socialisation. The result of the 2021 referendum will be implemented. Eralp speaks plainly: "If the Left governs, there will be socialisation."
  • New building. 7,500 affordable dwellings a year will be built by public hand.
How will socialisation work?

Here there is a legal detail young comrades need to know. Article 15 of Germany's constitution (the Basic Law) says that land, natural resources and means of production may, by law and against compensation, be transferred "to public ownership or to other forms of public economy." This article entered the constitution in 1949 as a trace of the strength of the labour movement in postwar Germany. For seventy years it was never used. In Berlin its first use is now on the agenda.

According to reports the Berlin House of Representatives passed a "socialisation framework law" in March 2026. This law sets the conditions under which Article 15 will be applied and will come into force in March 2028. Die Linke wants to pass the concrete socialisation law in the first half of the legislative term. The number of flats to be socialised is estimated at between 200,000 and 240,000. They are in the hands of about eight large companies. If this step is taken, the share of publicly owned housing in Berlin will rise from 20 percent to over 30 percent.

It is proposed that a public body be set up to finance this, and that this body pay the compensation with credit. The compensation will in time be paid back from the rents of these flats.

The compensation contradiction

There is a contradiction set out in ZDF's report, and we must see it plainly. To bring rents down in earnest, the compensation has to be low. If compensation is paid at market value, the debt is loaded onto the tenants' backs and rents do not fall. But if compensation is kept low, the companies go to court and the legal risk grows. In 2024 Berlin's Court of Audit had already asked whether a compensation far below market value would stand up in court.

This looks like a legal contradiction, but it is in fact a class contradiction. The question is this: will companies be paid once more for a property that has already been valued many times over by the rents tenants have paid? Will the sanctity of the right of property be set above the right to housing? The law cannot settle this question. The balance of social forces settles this question.

The obstacles on the table

Eralp faces three obstacles. The SPD is against socialisation. The Greens support it in principle but are using the antisemitism debate as a bargaining chip. Chancellor Friedrich Merz, at the head of the federal government, has announced that he will prepare a federal law to block socialisation. So Berlin's tenants are face to face not only with the coalition table in their own city but with the federal state above Berlin.

Die Linke's Berlin co-chairs Kerstin Wolter and Maximilian Schirmer invited the SPD and the Greens to preliminary talks this week. If today's Friday party congress gives its approval, the real coalition negotiations may begin next week.

A note of self-criticism

We must be honest with young comrades. The left has a share in Berlin's present housing crisis. In 2004 the Berlin Senate, jointly governed by the SPD and the PDS, the forerunner of Die Linke, sold the city's public housing company GSW, with its roughly 65,000 flats, to funds tied to Cerberus and Goldman Sachs. The ground was a budget deficit. Those sold flats are today part of the stock that is to be socialised. So Eralp is today trying to take back homes that were once put on the market with the left's signature as well.

This past does not diminish Eralp. On the contrary, it shows why today's programme is so important. Social democracy and the "realistic left," when they came to office, sold public property in the name of budget discipline. Eralp's programme is a turn against that line. But whether that turn will last will be decided not by the election result but by tenant organisation in the street.

Madrid: Maricarmen's stretcher

The event

Let us gather Maricarmen's story from Euronews, eldiario.es and the other sources:

  • The tenancy contract was made in 1956 in her father's name. Maricarmen grew up in that home, lived with her mother and father, and cared for them.
  • After her mother died in 2008 the contract passed to her. But in March 2026 Spain's Supreme Court ruled that this transfer was invalid.
  • In 2018 a company named Urbagestión Desarrollo e Inversión bought the building. It is an investment company with offices in Valladolid and Madrid and fewer than seven employees. That is, not a giant fund but a mid-sized real-estate venture.
  • Maricarmen's rent was about 500 euros. According to marksist.org's compilation, the company used a legal loophole to raise the rent first to 2,650 euros a month, then "reduced" it to 1,650 euros. In the words of Cadena SER presenter Aimar Bretos, that is three times the old rent. Maricarmen's pension is about 1,300 euros. So the rent demanded is 126 percent of her monthly income.
  • An offer to buy the flat was also made: about 247,000 euros. For an 87-year-old disabled retired woman this offer was a mockery.
  • In June 2026 the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights called for the eviction to be halted. The Spanish state did not heed that call.
  • The first eviction attempt was in October 2025, the later ones in June 2026. Each time the Tenants' Union and the neighbours gathered at the door. On the fourth attempt, on 23 September, the police used gas on the crowd that had gathered overnight and carried the eviction through.
  • The company is seeking 10,000 euros in damages from the Madrid Tenants' Union, which organised the resistance.
Evening: In front of the penthouse

On the evening of the eviction thousands gathered in Chamberí, in front of a penthouse flat that the regional government's public company Planifica Madrid had bought for 6.3 million euros and could not sell. The slogans were "Madrid is not for sale," "Ayuso resign," and the sharpest of them, "Ayuso's penthouse for Maricarmen." The Tenants' Union said the Madrid regional government is run "by vulture funds and for vulture funds."

The actions were not confined to Madrid. Coordinated by the Confederation of Tenants' Unions, people came into the street in thirteen cities including Barcelona, Seville, Valencia, Málaga, Palma and Toledo. The slogan of the two hundred who gathered in Oviedo said this piece's whole thesis in a single line: "Rentiers guilty, government responsible." The Cantabria Housing Union also called an action in Santander on the evening of 29 September.

A few days earlier Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the Community of Madrid, had said, defending housing investment: people come to Madrid "to be homeowners, to be entrepreneurs, to be investors."

This sentence is a class manifesto. It does not see the worker, the waiter, the cleaner, the nurse, the student who come to Madrid. It describes Madrid only as a city of investors. And that description matches, one to one, the reality of a city that on the same day put its seventy-year tenant into the street on a stretcher.

The figures

According to the Spanish property site Idealista, rents in Madrid in August 2026 hit a historic peak of 23.3 euros per square metre. The rise in a year was 5.1 percent. The Spanish average is 15.1 euros. On this reckoning the asking rent for an 80-square-metre flat in Madrid is about 1,864 euros. That is more than the monthly income of a person working for the minimum wage in Spain.

The most striking side of the figure is where the rise is. In Salamanca, the city's most expensive district, the square metre is 28.3 euros. But the fastest rise is in working-class districts: 12.5 percent a year in Villaverde, 10.3 percent in Carabanchel. So the Haussmann method is at work. The poor pushed from the centre go to the edge, and the rent comes after them.

Why now?

Maricarmen's contract was a remnant of a regime in Spain called renta antigua (old rent). Under Franco and after, tenants' contracts were extended indefinitely and rents were capped. In 1985 a decree named after Miguel Boyer, economy minister of the PSOE government, abolished mandatory extension for new contracts. Rents were left to the market. From that day on, old tenants became, in the eyes of the new owners, "an obstacle to be cleared."

There is a social-democratic lesson here as well. The first large step that opened housing to the market in Spain came not from the right but from a government that called itself socialist.

Spain's big picture: Empty homes, full streets

Maricarmen is not a single case; she is the last link in a long chain. According to figures from Spain's General Council of the Judiciary, in the 2008–2014 crisis some 600,000 mortgage foreclosures were opened and nearly 380,000 of them ended in eviction. A significant share of the homes the banks seized passed cheaply to funds after the crisis, through the banks the state had rescued and through the "bad bank."

Today's picture is still more striking. According to marksist.org's compilation, more than 3.8 million of Spain's 26.8 million dwellings are completely empty. Banks, real-estate investment trusts and investment funds hold between 400,000 and 500,000 dwellings. So in Spain, on one side, there are tenants put into the street on stretchers; on the other, millions of empty homes behind locked doors, waiting to rise in value. There is no stronger proof needed to break the fairy tale that "there are not enough homes."

The tenants' movement answered this picture in April 2025 with simultaneous actions in forty cities. The slogan was "An end to the housing trade," and the demands were clear: rents cut by as much as 50 percent, 3.8 million empty dwellings opened for use, and evictions banned.

Today there is a similar picture. In Spain the PSOE–Sumar government's decree extending tenants' contracts was defeated in the Congress of Deputies on 29 April 2026 by the votes of the PP, Vox and Junts. The decree protected more than a million tenant households. The right and the party of the Catalan bourgeoisie united on the landlords' side.

But it would also be wrong to load the whole of the blame onto the right. The protection brought in during the pandemic and extended thereafter, which halted the eviction of vulnerable tenants, ended in February 2026. The government's new decree to restore this protection was prepared in July 2026 but has been sitting for months. Coalition partner Sumar wants contract extensions, a cap on rent increases, and measures against speculative use. The decree is planned to come to the Council of Ministers on Tuesday, 29 September. So Maricarmen was left unprotected because of a decree waiting on the table of a government that calls itself "progressive." That is why the slogan shouted in Madrid's streets — "Where is the progressive government?" — is just.

The counter-summit: Neighbourhood against fund

That Maricarmen's eviction fell in the same week as the real-estate gathering at the fair is a coincidence, but a meaningful one. At the The District fair at IFEMA the large funds were discussing how to run Spain's and Europe's housing stock more profitably. In the same days the "El Barrio" counter-summit, according to Tercera Información, brought together tenants' organisations from sixty countries and regions. The counter-summit's slogan is summed up in a sentence: "Rentierism crosses borders at ease." Then the organisation of tenants must cross borders as well.

Barcelona: The limits of social democracy

The end of tourist flats?

Over the last ten years Barcelona has been the laboratory of Europe's housing struggle. In 2015 the housing-rights activist Ada Colau was elected mayor. Since 2023 the city has been run by Jaume Collboni of the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC). According to Público Collboni has made a turn to the left from his party's traditional line:

  • Tourist-flat licences end in 2028. The licences of the city's roughly 10,000 tourist flats will not be renewed. That means a stock equal to a year's housing construction returning to tenants.
  • A cap on seasonal lets. Collboni now also argues for a price cap on short-term lets. This is the acceptance of a warning tenants' unions have made for years. Because landlords who want to escape the rent cap let the flats as "seasonal." Four-tenths of rental listings in Barcelona are now seasonal.
  • Casa Orsola. In 2021 a fund named Lioness Inversiones bought this building in the Eixample and planned to put the tenants out and let the flats as luxury seasonal rentals at 2,800 euros a month. The tenants and Sindicat de Llogateres (the Catalan Tenants' Union) resisted for years. The eviction of the teacher Josep Torrent was stopped at the door twice. In the end, in February 2025, the municipality and the Hàbitat3 foundation bought the building for 9.2 million euros. Collboni said, "No tenant will have to leave."
Does the rent cap work?

Under Spain's Housing Law, rents can be capped in places declared "stressed areas." Catalonia used this path in 2024. The result? According to El Español's July 2026 report rents in Barcelona fell 7.6 percent in the last year and the square metre came down to 19.1 euros. There is no other large city in Spain where rents have fallen. Catalonia's president Salvador Illa reminds us that in areas where the cap was not applied, rents rose 9.5 percent.

This is an important gain. But with two warnings. First, in other regions where the cap was applied (Navarre, Galicia, the Basque Country) rents did not fall. So the cap alone is not a magic solution. Second, landlords turn to seasonal lets and to sale in order to escape the cap, and the number of rental listings falls. To regulate the market is also to produce the market's own escape routes.

The tenants' union's criticism

Sindicat de Llogateres celebrated the purchase of Casa Orsola as a victory but also made a criticism: instead of punishing the speculator the municipality "rescued" him; the fund sold the building at a profit. This criticism shows very well the limit of social-democratic housing policy. The public tries to solve the crisis the market has produced on the market's terms — that is, by paying the speculator.

There is another debate over the rule that 30 percent of new buildings must be affordable housing. The rule brought in under Colau is to be loosened. Barcelona en Comú warns that this would open some 4,000 buildings and 157,000 people to speculation.

The general-strike debate

When the rent-extension decree fell in the Congress in Madrid on 29 April, Sindicat de Llogateres called a "general strike for housing." Their slogans: "We do not want to go on living like this: living is costing us our lives." According to a large survey the union conducted in June 2026, 82 percent of Catalans are ready to join a general strike for housing. The Confederation of Tenants' Unions also launched a wave of actions in 24 cities.

This is a development young comrades should dwell on. The housing struggle is putting on the agenda the joining of the tenants' union and the workers' union — that is, of the organisation in the sphere of life and the organisation in the sphere of production. Rent and the wage are two sides of the same coin. If we win one and lose the other, in the end we win nothing.

Europe's other corners

Berlin and Spain are not alone. In every corner of the continent another version of the same story is being lived.

Portugal and Lisbon. Portugal, where house prices have risen 180 percent in ten years, is one of the countries where the crisis is sharpest. The "golden visa" programme brought in in 2012 (a residence permit for those who buy housing) and the boom in tourist lets emptied Lisbon's historic neighbourhoods of their own people. The "A House to Live In" movement has brought tens of thousands into the street across the country many times since 2023. In Portugal the average rent swallows a large part of the minimum wage. Students were also in the street in March 2026 over housing and fees.

The Canary Islands. The "Canarias tiene un límite" (the Canaries have a limit) movement brought the islands into the street twice in 2024. On islands that receive more than 18 million tourists a year, as the people say, "the lowest wages, the highest food prices and impossible housing" are lived together. In May 2026 the movement put to the regional government a proposal for a moratorium on new hotels and beds. The anti-tourism actions in Mallorca, Málaga and Barcelona are part of the same line.

Ireland. In Ireland, where rents have risen 76 percent in ten years, a large share of the young cannot leave their parents' home until their thirties. Dublin is one of Europe's most expensive rental markets. European Union leaders have scheduled a meeting for November 2026 to talk about the housing crisis. Brussels Signal's headline sums it up well: "No rush."

Hungary and Poland. In Hungary house prices have risen 290 percent in ten years, rents 109 percent. The housing-loan supports the Orbán government gave under the name of "family policy" inflated demand and pushed prices up. The right-populist ideology of the "homeowner family" in fact filled the tills of the lending banks and the contractors. In Poland rents have risen 76 percent. In Eastern Europe homeownership rates are above 90 percent, but this is a legacy of the housing stock from the socialist period and is no longer within reach for the young.

Vienna: The other road is possible. There is a counter-example as well. In Austria's capital Vienna more than half of the city's residents live in housing belonging to the municipality or to non-profit cooperatives. The root of this is the "Red Vienna" of the 1920s. In those years the social-democratic municipality built tens of thousands of workers' dwellings with a special housing tax on luxury goods and large properties. Today rents in Vienna are much lower than in Europe's other capitals. Why? Because the greater part of the housing is outside the market. Vienna's lesson is simple: the most lasting way to bring rents down is to take housing out of the market.

Across the ocean: New York. Let us also hold up a mirror to Europe from outside. Zohran Mamdani, who last year won the New York mayoralty on the slogan "Freeze the rent," kept his word. According to marksist.org the city's Rent Guidelines Board in June 2026 froze rents, by 7 votes to 1, in about 1 million rent-stabilised flats — 27 percent of the city's housing. For the first time in the Board's history it also froze two-year leases. That the Eralp campaign in Berlin has a tie to Mamdani's team is no accident either: in cities where tenants are the majority, housing turns into the class question that wins elections.

Finland. Finland, the only EU country where house prices have fallen in ten years, is also the only European country that has greatly reduced homelessness with a "Housing First" policy. The homeless are first given a home without conditions; the other supports come after. This too shows that homelessness is not a fate; it is a political choice.

A class analysis: Homes in whose hands, under whose control, to whose benefit?

Now let us read this whole picture with our own three questions.

In whose hands?

Housing property in Europe has four layers:

  • Large institutional landlords: funds and companies such as Blackstone, Vonovia, Deutsche Wohnen, Heimstaden. After the 2008 crisis they gathered cheaply the housing in the hands of banks and states. The more than 200,000 flats to be socialised in Berlin are in their hands.
  • Mid-sized real-estate investors: companies such as Urbagestión or Lioness, which buy old buildings, empty them, renovate them and sell or let them dear. The company facing Maricarmen is of this kind.
  • Small landlords: pensioners, small shopkeepers, middle-class families who let a second or third flat. They are both partners in the crisis and its ideological shield. The large funds meet every attempt at regulation with "protect the small landlord."
  • Tenants: workers, the young, students, migrants, the old. The propertyless.
Under whose control?

The price of housing is no longer set only by local demand but by global interest rates, the funds' yield expectations and the flow of tourism. A rent committee in New York can decide the rent of a flat in Madrid. The state plays two roles: on the one hand it carries out evictions with police force; on the other it tries to soften the crisis by "buying the speculator with public money." In both cases the property relation is left untouched.

To whose benefit?

Rent is a share transferred from the worker's wage to the rentier. So long as wages stand still and rents rise, this transfer grows. Eurostat's ten-year figures show how far this transfer has grown. Every year that the rise in rent outruns the rise in wages is a silent transfer of wealth from the working class to the owners of property.

The fairy tale of "insufficient supply"

The explanation bourgeois economists and the European Commission like is that "there are not enough homes." There is a share of truth in this. But it is incomplete and misleading. Because in the same cities there are hundreds of thousands of empty flats, tourist flats, and flats held as investment vehicles. In Spain more than 3.8 million dwellings are completely empty. In Barcelona 10,000 tourist flats equal a year's construction. The problem is not only that there are too few homes. It is that the home is produced and held not to be lived in but to yield a return.

If more construction is done under market conditions, the new homes too will be sold dear by the same logic. Every solution that says "increase supply" must ask "supply for whom?"

The line of social democracy

The SPD–PDS Senate's 2004 sale in Berlin, the PSOE's 1985 Boyer decree in Spain, and Collboni's policy today of "rescuing" the speculator by buying him out are pieces of the same line. Social democracy tries to manage the crisis but does not touch the property relation. Steps such as a rent cap, a ban on tourist flats, a public purchase are valuable; they really ease tenants' lives. But capital finds an escape route from every regulation. That is why these steps can only be a beginning.

The tenants' union: A new class organisation

The most important development of this period is the strengthening of tenants' unions in Berlin, in Madrid, in Barcelona. These are not a classical association. They are organisations that stop evictions at the door, bargain collectively with landlords, discuss a rent strike, and talk a general strike with workers' unions. The people who spent the night at Maricarmen's door, the neighbours who defended Casa Orsola for years, the volunteers who gathered 350,000 signatures in Berlin in 2021 are doing the same thing: they are building a class organisation in the sphere of life.

Two answers, two classes: A comparison table

What capital saysThe class's answer
"The crisis comes from a shortage of supply; more should be built."The crisis comes from the home being a commodity. A new home built under market conditions will also be expensive. Construction for whom?
"People come to Madrid to be investors." (Ayuso)People come to cities to work and to live. The city belongs to those who work it.
"Expropriation is an attack on the right of property."Paying a company again for a property the tenant has already paid for many times over is an attack on the right to housing. Article 15 of Germany's constitution already recognises this path.
"A rent cap distorts the market; listings fall."The market is already distorted. In Barcelona rent fell 7.6 percent. The escape routes must be closed; housing must be taken out of the market.
"The Supreme Court ruling must be applied."If a law that does not heed the UN's call legitimises putting an 87-year-old woman into the street on a stretcher, the source of the problem is the law itself.
"Tourism grows the economy."Tourism income goes to hotels and platforms. The rise in rent is left to the worker.
"Think of the small landlords."The target is the large funds and companies. In Berlin socialisation covers only those with more than 3,000 flats.
"To be a homeowner is everyone's right."To be housed is everyone's right. The ideology of homeownership binds the young to a 20-year credit debt.

Turkey: We Cannot House Ourselves

Now let us turn and look at our own country. In Turkey the housing crisis is not as visible a subject of political struggle as it is in Europe. But the figures are heavier.

Inflation and rent

According to TÜİK's August 2026 data annual inflation is 31.51 percent. But in the housing group the annual rise is 39.77 percent. So shelter is growing dearer faster than prices in general. For those who will renew a tenancy contract in September the legal cap on the increase is 31.79 percent (the twelve-month average).

Recall: in June 2022 a 25 percent cap was put on rents. That cap was lifted in July 2024. Now the legal limit is the twelve-month average of inflation. But this limit applies only to existing contracts. New tenant, new contract, new price. If the landlord succeeds in putting the tenant out, the limit disappears as well.

The net minimum wage in 2026 is 28,075 lira. According to figures compiled by Kısa Dalga the rent of a student flat in Istanbul is, depending on the district, between 30,000 and 80,000 lira. Around METU in Ankara it is 35,000–40,000 lira. So in the big cities a single minimum wage does not cover the rent of a single home.

The courts are full of rent files

According to Ministry of Justice statistics, in 2025 there were 216,800 files related to rent in the courts: 95,217 rent disputes, 82,222 eviction suits and 39,361 evictions by execution. In the mandatory mediation system brought in in September 2023, 383,502 applications had been made by August 2025. Behind each file there is a family, a fear of moving, a child's change of school.

In Turkey the eviction of the old, as with Maricarmen, does not come onto television as it does in Europe. Because here eviction is mostly silent. Before the police come to the door the tenant sees a rent that cannot be paid and leaves. Because the tenant's resistance is unorganised, it is invisible.

Homeownership is falling

According to TÜİK data, the share of individuals who own the home they live in was 57.8 percent in 2020. It fell to 56.1 percent in 2024 and rose to 57.1 percent in 2025. Roughly one in four people is a tenant; a further share live in a relative's home without paying rent. According to UN-Habitat's World Cities Report, for an average household in Turkey to buy a home it must save 12.6 years of income without spending any of it. The world average is 11.2 years. Turkey ranks 134th among 183 countries.

500,000 social dwellings: 8.8 million applications

The government's 500,000-social-housing project, announced under the name "Homeowner Turkey," received 8,840,000 applications, of which 5,242,000 were counted as valid. So only one in ten valid applications will be able to get a home. This figure shows the scale of the crisis more clearly than any survey.

But the project itself must also be looked at with a class eye. These social dwellings are not for rent; they are for sale. In Anatolia a 1+1 flat is 1.8 million lira, on a 240-month term. So the state answers the housing question not with "public rental housing" but with "a twenty-year debt." The dwelling remains a property; the household is bound again as a debtor. And 4.5 million of the 5 million valid applications are still condemned to the rental market.

Urban transformation and the earthquake

In Turkey the Haussmann method is applied under the name "urban transformation." The 2012 Law on the Transformation of Areas under Disaster Risk opened the way for the demolition of thousands of neighbourhoods on the ground of earthquake safety. But most of the transformation took place not in the poor neighbourhoods where the risk is highest but on the central plots where the rent is highest. The old tenants could not pay the rents that rose after the transformation and moved to outlying districts.

The earthquakes of 6 February 2023 showed the price of this distortion in a heavy way. Tens of thousands of people were left under buildings that were unsupervised and built for rent. The migration to the big cities after the earthquake sped rent rises still further.

Sales to foreigners and citizenship

Turkey is one of the rare countries that gives citizenship to those who buy 400,000 dollars of housing. In August 2026 1,938 dwellings were sold to foreigners, 1.5 percent of total sales. The share looks small, but the concentration of sales in particular districts of Istanbul and Antalya pushes prices and rents there upward. Here too the same logic as Portugal's "golden visa" is at work: citizenship and the right of residence are sold through the housing market.

The student's housing examination

In September 2021 students spent the night in parks saying "We cannot house ourselves" (Barınamıyoruz). Five years later the situation is still heavier. The Credit and Dormitories Institution's dormitory capacity was around 993,000 in June 2026. But in the first half of 2026 the Ministry of Youth and Sports added 10,538 beds while closing 28 blocks (9,577 beds) and cutting 4,142 beds by a "building-capacity assessment." Private dormitories in Istanbul are between 25,000 and 76,000 lira a month. In 2025, 57,435 students froze their enrolment. Housing puts the university through a class sieve.

Turkey's real lack: Organisation

Turkey's greatest difference from Europe is not in the figures but in organisation. In Berlin there is a campaign that gathered 350,000 signatures; in Madrid a tenants' union that stops evictions at the door; in Barcelona a movement that discusses a general strike. In Turkey a lasting, widespread, membership-based tenants' organisation is all but absent. The housing question is lived either as an individual trouble or is turned, in election periods, into a promise of "a home for everyone."

This gap is also an opportunity. One of the most concrete tasks before young comrades is to fill this gap.

Comparison: Four cities, one problem

BerlinMadridBarcelonaIstanbul
Tenant shareAbout four-fifthsA minority of the city population, but a majority among the youngMore than a thirdRoughly a quarter (Turkey as a whole)
Present stateA rent-freeze and socialisation programme on the coalition tableRecord rent of 23.3 euros/m²; an 87-year-old tenant evicted on a stretcherRents down 7.6 percent with a cap; tourist flats end in 2028Housing inflation 39.77 percent; a student flat 30–80 thousand lira
GovernmentDie Linke first; a coalition with the SPD and Greens is being soughtThe right-wing PP (Ayuso); "a city of investors"Social-democratic PSC (Collboni)The central government's housing policy: social housing for sale, urban transformation
The property questionAsked openly through Article 15 of the constitutionNot asked; the door is open to fundsAsked indirectly through public purchaseNot asked at all
Tenants' organisationStrong; won the 2021 referendumStrong; meets evictions at the doorStrong; discussing a general strikeWeak and scattered

The housing crisis as a class programme: How we see it, how we solve it

At the end of this whole journey let us say this plainly:

How we see it

The housing crisis is not a market fault; it is a property question. The more the home is turned from a place to be lived in into an asset that yields profit, the deeper the crisis grows. That is why the solution to the crisis is not to "correct" the market but to take housing, step by step, out of the market.

Rent is the worker's second exploitation. The worker produces surplus value in the factory and pays rent at home. The wage struggle and the housing struggle are the same struggle. A wage demand that does not reckon with the rise in rent is a half demand.

The state is not neutral. In Madrid the police carried out the eviction. In Berlin the federal government is trying to block socialisation. In Turkey the urban-transformation law secured the rent. The state stands either on the side of the owners of property or on the side of the propertyless. Which side it stands on is decided by the balance of forces between the classes.

Reforms are gains, but they are not enough. A rent cap, a ban on tourist flats, a public purchase, an eviction moratorium are valuable gains, and all of them must be fought for. But capital finds an escape route from every regulation. The lasting solution is to change the property relation.

The housing crisis is international; the struggle must be so as well. Blackstone is the same fund in Madrid and in Berlin. Tenants too must have an organisation that crosses borders, like the "El Barrio" summit in Madrid.

How we solve it: A three-stage plan

First stage: Right now (immediate demands)

  • A lasting and binding cap on rent increases: in Turkey the rise in rent should be capped below inflation, and in new contracts the old rent should be the base, so that the landlord cannot break the cap by changing the tenant.
  • A ban on evictions in the winter months for the old, the disabled, families with children and students. No eviction should be carried out without a housing alternative being provided.
  • A tax on empty dwellings. A progressive tax should be put on flats held empty for a long time and held for speculation, and the revenue collected should be transferred to public housing.
  • A tight limit on short-term tourist lets. In the big cities the tourist use of housing should be tied to a licence, and the number of licences should be reduced.
  • The practice of citizenship in return for housing should be ended.
  • Free and sufficient public dormitories for students. Dormitory capacity should be raised in proportion to the number of students; the dormitories should belong to the public, not to religious communities and foundations.

Second stage: In the medium term (structural transformation)

  • A stock of public rental housing. The state should build rental housing, not housing for sale. Rents should be set so as not to exceed 25 percent of household income. The Vienna model should be the aim: an order in which half the city's population lives in housing outside the market.
  • Municipal housing companies. Every large municipality should found its own public housing company, produce rental housing and manage it. Municipalities should build for housing, not for rent-seeking.
  • The principle of "transformation in place" in urban transformation. All residents of the neighbourhood being transformed, including its tenants, should have the right to stay in the same neighbourhood at the same cost. Transformation decisions should be taken in neighbourhood assemblies.
  • Earthquake safety should be treated as a public duty. The strengthening of buildings at risk should be done with public resources, without creating rent; contractors should not be given a gift of a share of the land.
  • Support for housing cooperatives. Public land and low-interest credit should be given to non-profit housing cooperatives based on the members' common property.

Third stage: In the long term (transformation of the property relation)

  • The socialisation of large housing capital. As Berlin is doing, the housing of companies that own more than a set number of dwellings should be taken into public ownership and managed under democratic control.
  • The socialisation of land. The rent on city land is the product of society's common labour. City land should be in public ownership; a right of use should be given, but it should not be opened to speculation.
  • Tenant and resident control. Socialised housing should be answerable not to a bureaucracy but to tenants' assemblies and elected managements. Public ownership, without the residents' control, can turn into a new bureaucratic landlord. The way to prevent this is democracy.
  • Housing as a right under constitutional guarantee. Article 57 of the Constitution already gives the state the duty of taking measures to meet the need for housing. This article should be turned into a concrete right that can be claimed before a court.
Who will do it? The question of organisation

Not one step of this plan will come about of itself. What made the socialisation programme in Berlin possible was not a party's election victory but the tenants' movement that five years ago gathered 350,000 signatures and won a referendum. What stopped Maricarmen's eviction three times in Madrid were the neighbours at the door. What brought the cap that lowered rents in Barcelona was years of pressure from the tenants' union.

The same road must be walked in Turkey:

  • Tenants' organisations must be founded. Neighbourhood by neighbourhood, building by building, university by university. The first task is that tenants know their rights and that the neighbour facing the threat of eviction be shown that they are not alone.
  • An alliance must be built with workers' unions. Unions should put the rise in rent on the collective-bargaining table as a part of the wage demand. The housing struggle and the wage struggle should be joined.
  • City councils and neighbourhood assemblies must be used. The tenants' voice should enter the municipalities' housing policy. What we have written on local organisation offers a road map here.
  • An international tie must be built. Through gatherings like the "El Barrio" summit in Madrid, tenant organisation in Turkey should be bound to the experiences in Europe.

Concrete tasks for young comrades

  • Reckon your own rent. What share of your income goes to rent? Talk this rate over with your friends, with your workmates. The unseen burden becomes visible as it is spoken.
  • Learn your rights. The cap on rent increases, the conditions of eviction, mandatory mediation. Ignorance is the landlord's strongest weapon.
  • Build a small tenants' network at the building and neighbourhood level. Even a WhatsApp group is a beginning. Tenants who live in the same building or on the same street should know one another.
  • Open a housing forum at your university. Found student assemblies that put dormitory, rent and transport problems collectively.
  • Carry the housing question into your union. Speak with your union representative to put the rise in rent on the collective-bargaining agenda.
  • Follow the tenants' movements in Europe. Follow the publications of Sindicato de Inquilinas, Sindicat de Llogateres and Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen; learn from their experience.
  • Question your municipality's housing policy. Does your municipality produce rental housing? Whom does urban transformation serve? Ask these questions in the city council.
Dear Young Comrades,

Maricarmen's stretcher and Elif Eralp's promise of a key are two faces of the same question. In one the home is torn from its seventy-year resident in order to be added to an investment company's portfolio. In the other the home is to be taken from the funds and given back to those who live in it. The difference is that in one city the organised power of tenants has reached as far as the table of power, and in the other it has remained a resistance at the door.

In Turkey there is as yet neither the crowd at Maricarmen's door nor the 350,000 signatures in Berlin. But TÜİK's figures, the 216,000 files in the courts, the 8.8 million people who applied for the social-housing draw, and the students who spent the night in the parks show the potential of that crowd.

A home is not four walls and a roof. A home is the child's being near school, the old person's knowing the neighbour, the security on which the worker lays their head when they come home tired. If we leave this security to the market, the market will sell it to the highest bidder.

Cities belong to those who build them, who clean them, who work in them and who live in them. Madrid is not for sale. Berlin is not for sale. Istanbul is not for sale either.

The home is a right, rent is an exploitation, the city is a commons.

Update

25 September 2026, 13.30: The "El Barrio" counter-summit in Madrid runs until 27 September. In Spain the decree that would suspend the eviction of vulnerable tenants is expected to come to the Council of Ministers on 29 September. That same evening there is an action in Santander. In Berlin Die Linke will today, at its congress, vote on the preliminary talks with the SPD and the Greens. We will go on watching developments under the heading of housing and socialisation in the coalition negotiations, and the course of Maricarmen's case, and adding them to this piece. Regular updates will follow.

Sources

In this series at Knowledge Commons:

Berlin:

Madrid:

Barcelona and Spain:

Europe:

Turkey:

Theoretical reading:

  • Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (1872)
  • David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (2012)
Tags:#housing#class#realestate#tenant#europe#spain#turkey#berlin#madrid#barcelona

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