How Spain's minimum income and smartphones are reshaping urban poverty

The IMV and the smartphone are redrawing the face of urban poverty

In 2026, the classic image of the homeless man shouting at the door of a Mercadona supermarket has changed. According to an argument circulating on the forum, many of those who sleep on the street or barely get by in shared flats receive the Ingreso Mínimo Vital (Spain's minimum living income), use a smartphone and, in many cases, own a laptop or even a desktop computer. Technology and the benefit have not solved the problem: they have made it less visible and harder to categorise.

The diagnosis doing the rounds in economic gossip circles is uncomfortable. Some argue that IMV coverage has turned the street into a fuzzy administrative category, where classic homelessness coexists with pensioners living alone, heirs to modest flats and people with untreated mental illnesses. The result is an urban landscape that can no longer be read with the codes of twenty years ago.

What has changed in extreme poverty since 2020

The spread of the IMV and the widespread use of low-cost mobile phones have broken the automatic association between social exclusion and digital illiteracy. Someone begging outside a supermarket may carry a mid-range phone in their pocket and manage their benefit online. That does not miccionan they live better: it means their hardship is less legible to passers-by and more opaque to statistics.

In this context, the blame narrative has shifted. Part of the discourse attributes the situation to Brussels and Ursula von der Leyen, and flirts with idealising Russia as an alternative paradise. It is a childish fantasy, yes, but it works as an ideological painkiller for minds that no longer process nuance.

The inherited flat and loneliness as a risk factor

The profile has diversified. Some inherited a property and live alone; others share a flat with another precarious tenant, or with an isolated elderly person and their dog. The forced coexistence of different kinds of fragility creates a cocktail that no public policy has designed and that nobody evaluates.

The irony of the matter is that the tool meant to integrate people — the benefit — sometimes entrenches their situation. Without support, the IMV covers the rent for a room and the mobile phone bill, but it does not rebuild the support network that broke down before.

Given this picture, the question is not how many there are, but how many appear in no register at all. That is the figure that really unsettles.