Barcelona's housing crisis did not happen accidentally. It is the product of decades of underinvestment in social housing, the explosive growth of platforms like Airbnb converting residential units into tourist accommodation, the arrival of large-scale real estate investment funds buying up entire neighbourhoods, and a legal framework that took years to catch up with the scale of the problem.
The result is a city where long-term residents are being pushed out of neighbourhoods their families have occupied for generations, where young workers cannot afford to rent within commuting distance of their jobs, and where the political response — rent regulation, tourist apartment caps, public acquisition of buildings — is creating a new set of stories about the limits of municipal power against global capital markets.
Barcelona is not just a city with a housing crisis. It is the city where Europe's debate about housing, gentrification and the rights of residents against investors is most visible, most contested and most richly documented. When international journalists come here to report on these stories, they need a fixer who has been covering this movement since its earliest days.