Illustration by

Luis Alves.

By now, the story is well-known in left-wing circles. Two years ago, a handful of civic platforms won municipal elections in most of Spain’s major cities, including Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza, Cádiz and Santiago, among others. Spearheaded by prominent figures from the local social movements, they joined Podemos and various left-wing parties in campaigns that promised nothing short of a democratic revolution. In the aftermath of a brutal economic crash and an outbreak of corruption scandals, they would respond to the profound crisis of legitimacy affecting the Spanish state with a program of radical municipalism, channeling the bottom-up politics of the indignados movement that won hearts and minds in 2011.

Having reached the halfway point of their first mandate, it seems like a good time to ask whether and how the jump from the streets to the institutions has helped advance the demands of the social movements from which these candidacies derived their legitimacy. Have the possibilities for emancipatory systemic change grown and multiplied in this time? Or has neoliberal institutionality converted and absorbed an entire generation of its opponents into its structure? These are complex questions. To begin to answer them, we might first consider the scale of the challenges facing these cities in the current stage of global capitalism. We’ll focus first on the signature issue on which many of the activists who became politicians built their legitimacy: the right to decent housing.

The Great Wall of Money

Walking around Sants or similar working-class neighborhoods in Barcelona, you’re likely to see several flyers offering to buy apartments. Some are handwritten, others are printed out in Arial or Comic Sans fonts. They contain little information besides a first name and a phone number. Some are simply anonymous. But though their appearances may vary, they tend to lead to the same phone numbers.

An investigative report by the autonomous weekly La Directa revealed that these flyers can be traced back to a handful of companies that have been buying up entire residential blocks, often with renters still living in them. They then persuade tenants to leave their homes, renovate the building and either sell it or rent the flats out at higher prices. How the companies persuade tenants to leave varies. They might offer cash, drastically raise rent or simply refuse to renew a rental contract. When tenants resist, they hire companies like Desokupa (“Unsquat”) to forcefully remove them, providing gainful employment to beefy fascists and often breaking the law in the process.

This practice tends to be depicted in the media as a local problem in which a handful of unscrupulous businesses exploit loopholes and legal grey areas to turn a profit. But it goes far beyond Barcelona. Companies like these are the shock troops of a massive rent bubble that is affecting all of Spain’s major cities. According to leading Spanish property website Idealista, rental prices increased across the country by 15.9 percent in 2016 alone, with year-over-year growth rates approaching 20 percent during the first trimester of 2017 in places like Barcelona, San Sebastian and the Canary and Balearic Islands. At the neighborhood level, the numbers are simply staggering. In places like the Sant Martí and Sant Andreu districts of Barcelona, rental prices have increased by over 30 percent relative to the same time last year.

Few can deal with such sharp increases. As a result, longtime residents are being displaced from their neighborhoods by what real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield has dubbed “The Great Wall of Money,” a massive pot of capital for global real estate investment worth about $435 billion. As former UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing Raquel Rolnik describes it, the Great Wall of Money is a floating cloud of finance capital seeking to materialize in a way that evokes colonization. “I deliberately use the term ‘colonization’ because it involves territorial occupation and cultural domination,” she explains in a recent lecture at the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona. “This colonization has just one objective: to extract rent by opening up new frontiers that are capable of generating interest for finance capital.”

While the use of colonization as a metaphor is problematic for its erasure of slavery and genocidal violence, what is certain is that governments thirsting for foreign investment are competing to land this capital in their countries despite its distinct lack of interest in the lives of residents. In Spain’s case, the country recently attracted the Wall of Money by becoming an emerging market for real estate investment trusts, or REITs. These are companies owning income-generating real estate that can be either residential or commercial. The vast majority of that income must be derived from rent and paid out to shareholders as dividends.

REITs were introduced as a legal form in Spain in 2009 under a Socialist Party government. Initially, they were unsuccessful due to a corporate tax rate of 19 percent. But in 2012, Mariano Rajoy’s right-wing government exempted REITs from this tax. It was after this reform took effect that rental prices took off across the country. Alongside developments like the rise of rent-extracting platforms such as Airbnb — which blur the line between residential and commercial properties or formal and informal economies — the central government’s measure breathed new life into the very sector that provoked Spain’s economic crisis in the first place. The work of managing its most dire effects was left to the municipal governments.

Cornered by the State and the Market

It is safe to say that, in Spain, the degree of conflict between city governments and the territory- and rent-seeking finance capital of the Great Wall of Money is at its highest in Barcelona. This is unsurprising, since it is here that both the Spanish housing movement and the municipalist wave were born. Barcelona is also where the link between the movements and the electoral platform is most robust, and the line between activists and representatives is haziest. At the local level, this is common knowledge that can be written off as a talking point. For outside observers, however, it is helpful to consider what this looks like on any ordinary day.

Recently, Barcelona En Comú councilwoman Gala Pin went on the agenda-setting Catalan morning show Els matins and confronted the co-founder of MK Premium, the most prominent of the property vultures identified by La Directa’s investigative report. In a heated exchange, she characterized MK Premium’s work as violencia inmobiliaria, or “property violence.” Her choice of words matched the discourse of the housing platform she helped lead before becoming a representative, the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, or Mortgage Victims Platform (PAH). As a result of her choice of words, she was accused of demagoguery by the right-wing opposition and sued by MK Premium for slander.

Pin’s nods to the housing movement go beyond mere rhetoric. She often uses her large following on social media to make evictions visible and boost efforts to stop them. “Tomorrow we have five evictions,” reads a typical post. “Despite our efforts, we need collaboration to stop one. Arc del Teatre Street, 9:30am.”

These posts have been criticized in some radical-left circles as either being propagandistic or preemptively deflecting blame for the evictions that do take place under Barcelona En Comú’s watch. Others argue that Pin and other council members using this approach are simply being transparent about the limits of institutional power and calling on people to overcome them when this is unjust. What is clear is that the approach is effective. The resulting mobilizations have stopped numerous evictions, and even more have been stopped by the network of housing offices that the city government revamped to mediate between tenants and landlords.

This is just one example of how tension between social movements, local representatives and public administration can be used to strengthen resistance against the impositions of higher-level institutions and economic forces. And Barcelona is not the only city where the municipal government has become more porous to pressure from below. Manuela Carmena’s Ahora Madrid, for instance, have opened the city’s participation system up to citizen-initiated proposals and, like other cities, allocated a portion of the city coffers to participatory budgeting. In Valencia, where progressive green coalition Compromís governs with the support of Valencia En Comú and the Spanish Socialist Party, the city is undertaking a massive shift towards a pedestrian and bike-centered model of sustainable urban mobility. And in Zaragoza, grid electricity is now 100 percent renewable and energy spending has been reduced by nearly 15 percent.

All of these cities have disproven the European Union’s “no alternative” dogma about austerity by increasing social spending and expanding the public housing stock while maintaining balanced budgets and, in some cases, even reducing deficits. They are also pressuring the central government to take in more refugees, and some are defying Rajoy’s racist 2012 healthcare reform by providing universal healthcare regardless of one’s documentation status. In Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, city governments have repeatedly expressed their desire to close immigrant detention centers, citing human rights violations and taking symbolic and legal actions against them as a result.

These are by no means revolutionary measures. Taken together, they amount to a straightforward social-democratic program combined with green urbanism and participatory governance. But in Europe’s current political climate, polarized as it is by neoliberal technocracy and the ultra-nationalist far right, this is nothing to sneeze at. What makes their defense of the most basic social advances of the last several decades all the more noteworthy is that it has been carried out by minority governments in a highly fragmented political system.

But this success is fragile against the power of the state and the whims of the market. To impose austerity on cities with left-wing governments, the central government merely has to enforce the legislation it passed in 2013 to dramatically reduce municipal autonomy. Treasury Minister Cristobal Montoro has already made his intent to do so abundantly clear. Meanwhile, the rent bubble continues to expand, pushing residents out of their homes and further from the urban center. Cornered by these looming threats, cities cannot afford to limit their efforts to holding the fort — they must also push back.