Thus saith the LORD of hosts, Behold, evil shall go forth from nation to nation, and a great whirlwind shall be raised up from the coasts of the earth.Jeremiah 25 : 32
JOSEPH WILSON
Sat, April 5, 2025 at 5:17 PM GMT+34 min read
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Spain Housing Protest
People gather during a demonstration to protest high housing costs in Barcelona, Spain, Saturday, April 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
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BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Tens of thousands of Spaniards marched in protests held across the European country on Saturday in anger over high housing costs with no relief in sight.
Government authorities said that 15,000 marched in Madrid, while organizers said 10 times that many took to the streets of the capital. In Barcelona, the city hall said 12,000 people took part in the protest, while organizers claimed over 100,000 did.
The massive demonstration of social angst that is a major concern for Spain’s left-wing government and town halls was organized by housing activists and backed by Spain’s main labor unions.
The Saviour’s prophecy concerning the visitation of judgments upon Jerusalem is to have another fulfillment, of which that terrible desolation was but a faint shadow. In the fate of the chosen city we may behold the doom of a world that has rejected God’s mercy and trampled upon His law. Dark are the records of human misery that earth has witnessed during its long centuries of crime. GC 36.2
Restore, I pray you, to them, even this day, their lands, their vineyards, their oliveyards, and their houses, also the hundredth part of the money, and of the corn, the wine, and the oil, that ye exact of them.Nehemiah 5 : 11
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The housing crisis has hit particularly hard in Spain, where there is a strong tradition of home ownership and scant public housing for rent. Rents have been driven up by increased demand. Buying a home has become unaffordable for many, with market pressures and speculation driving up prices, especially in big cities and coastal areas.
And as for the people, he removed them to cities from one end of the borders of Egypt even to the other end thereof.
Genesis 47 : 21
Through the working of trusts and the results of labor unions and strikes, the conditions of life in the cities are constantly becoming more and more difficult.
The intense passion for money getting, the thirst for display, the luxury and extravagance—all are forces that, with the great mass of mankind, are turning the mind from life’s true purpose. They are opening the door to a thousand evils. Many, absorbed in their interest in worldly treasures, become insensible to the claims of God and the needs of their fellow men. They regard their wealth as a means of glorifying self. They add house to house and land to land; they fill their homes with luxury, while all about them are human beings in misery and crime, in disease and death.
By every species of oppression and extortion, men are piling up colossal fortunes, while the cries of starving humanity are coming up before God 9T 90.2 – 9T 90.4
A generation of young people say they have to stay with their parents or spend big just to share an apartment, with little chance of saving enough to one day purchase a home. High housing costs mean even those with traditionally well-paying jobs are struggling to make ends meet.
“I’m living with four people and still, I allocate 30 or 40% of my salary to rent,” said Mari Sánchez, a 26-year-old lawyer in Madrid. “That doesn’t allow me to save. That doesn’t allow me to do anything. It doesn’t even allow me to buy a car. That’s my current situation, and the one many young people are living through.”
[19] Wherefore shall we die before thine eyes, both we and our land? buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be servants unto Pharaoh: and give us seed, that we may live, and not die, that the land be not desolate. [20] And Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh; for the Egyptians sold every man his field, because the famine prevailed over them: so the land became Pharaoh's. Genesis 47 : 19-20
Housing Minister Isabel Rodríguez said on X that “I share the demand of the numerous people who have marched today: that homes are for living in and not for speculating.”
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Lack of public housing
The average rent in Spain has almost 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 real estate website Idealista. The increase is bigger in Madrid and Barcelona.
Incomes have failed to keep up despite Spain’s recent economic boom, especially for younger people in a country with chronically high unemployment.
[6] For at the window of my house I looked through my casement, [7] And beheld among the simple ones, I discerned among the youths, a young man void of understanding, [8] Passing through the street near her corner; and he went the way to her house, [9] In the twilight, in the evening, in the black and dark night: [10] And, behold, there met him a woman with the attire of an harlot, and subtil of heart.Proverbs 7 : 6-10
Spain does not have the public housing that other European nations have invested in to cushion struggling renters from a market that is pricing them out.
The pursuit of pleasure and amusement centers in the cities. Many parents who choose a city home for their children, thinking to give them greater advantages, meet with disappointment, and too late repent their terrible mistake. The cities of today are fast becoming like Sodom and Gomorrah. The many holidays encourage idleness. The exciting sports—theater-going, horse-racing, gambling, liquor-drinking, and reveling—stimulate every passion to intense activity. The youth are swept away by the popular current.—Christ’s Object Lessons, 54 (1900).
Light has been given me that the cities will be filled with confusion, violence, and crime, and that these things will increase till the end of this earth’s history.—Testimonies for the Church 7:84 (1902). LDE 110.2 – LDE 110.3
Spain is near the bottom end of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries with public housing for rent making up under 2% of all available housing. The OECD average is 7%. In France it is is 14%, Britain 16% and the Netherlands 34%.
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Angry renters point to instances of international hedge funds buying up properties, often with the aim of renting them to foreign tourists. The question has become so politically charged that Barcelona’s city government pledged last year to phase out all its 10,000 permits for short-term rentals, many of them advertised on platforms like Airbnb, by 2028.
Marchers in Madrid on Saturday chanted “Get Airbnb out of our neighborhoods” and held up signs against short-term rentals. In Barcelona, someone carried a sign reading “I am not leaving, vampire,” apparently in a message to would-be real estate speculator seeking to drive him out of his home.
Authorities under pressure
The central government’s biggest initiative for curbing the cost of housing is a rent cap mechanism it has offered to regional authorities, based on a price index established by the housing ministry. The government says the measure has slightly reduced rents in Barcelona, one of the few areas it has been applied.
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Terrible shocks will come upon the earth, and the lordly palaces erected at great expense will certainly become heaps of ruins.—Manuscript Releases 3:312 (1891).
When God’s restraining hand is removed, the destroyer begins his work. Then in our cities the greatest calamities will come.—Manuscript Releases 3:314 (1897). LDE 110.5 – LDE 111.1
But government measures have not proven enough to stop protests over the past two years. Experts say the situation likely won’t improve anytime soon.
“This is not the first, nor will it be the last, (housing protest) given the severity of the housing crisis,” Ignasi Martí, professor with the Esade business school and head of its Dignified Housing Observatory, said in an email.
“We saw this with the financial crisis (of 2008-2012) when (a protest movement) lasted until there was a certain economic recovery and a reduction in the social tension,” Marti added.
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