(5 Apr 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Madrid – 5 April 2025
1. Head of the demonstration with banner reading (Spanish) "End the housing business."
2. Demonstrators with banner reading (Spanish) "Lower prices, go for the rent strike."
3. Demonstration marching
4. Flag reading (English) "Stop Evictions"
5. Man walking on stilts
6. Demonstrator with flare
7. Various of march
8. Protesters with sign reading (Spanish) "Apartments, not graves."
9. Protesters with banner reading (Spanish) "It could be my home, but it’s your Airbnb."
10. Protester with flare
11. Various shots of march
12. Protesters jingling their house keys, UPSOUND chanting (Spanish): "We have the keys to all the houses"
13. Woman playing drum
14. Protesters
15. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Tito Spinola, NGO worker:
“I came here because we’re fed up with spending our wages on rent, and we want that to change. We’re basically tired of transferring our income to people who simply own property, which we don’t. We believe that’s unfair and wrong. Housing is a fundamental right and must be protected. It depends on all of us. We’re here to demand that right.”
16. Protesters
17. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Alfredo Anton, photographer:
“Rents are very high, mortgages are inaccessible, and salaries are also very low. People cannot save, and of course, housing is a basic necessity.”
18. Protesters
19. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Leticia Blanco, social worker
“(Housing) is a business and the rent is rising more and more and I think it is important to know our rights regarding housing and to set limits for the owners, for the landlords.”
20. Banner reading (Spanish) “Expropriation”
21. Banner with the logo of the demo and text reading (Spanish) “Let’s end the housing business”
STORYLINE:
People returned to the streets of Madrid and scores of other cities across Spain on Saturday to protest stubbornly high housing costs that are strangling family budgets with no relief in sight.
Thousands marched in the Spanish capital behind the banner reading “Lower The Prices.”
The protest was organized in a total of 40 cities by housing activists and backed by Spain’s main labor unions.
A major march is also expected in Barcelona on Saturday evening.
While rents and property prices have risen across developed countries in recent years, the housing crisis has hit particularly hard in Spain, where there is a strong tradition of homeownership and scant public housing for rent.
Rents have particularly been driven up due to a small supply of rental properties and increased demand as buying a home has become unaffordable, with market pressures and speculation driving up prices, especially in big cities and coastal areas.
An entire generation of young people now feel they have to either remain with their parents or spend big just to share an apartment, with little chance to ever save enough to one day purchase a home of their own.
High housing costs mean even those with traditionally well-paid jobs are struggling to make ends meet.
The average rent in Spain has doubled in the last 10 years. The price per square meter rose from 7.2 euros ($7.90) in 2014 to 13 euros last year, according to the online real estate website Idealista.
The growth is even more acute in Madrid and Barcelona. Incomes, meanwhile, have failed to keep up, especially for younger people in a country with chronically high unemployment.
Nor does Spain have the public housing that other European nations have invested in to cushion struggling renters from a market that is pricing them out.
AP video by Alicia Leon Perea
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