TikToker vs. Spain’s PM: Housing costs devouring salaries

A TikToker criticizes the government over rent: 'PSOE and PP are the same'

How tight does rent have to get for anger to stop being a video and become an electoral bill? A TikToker with considerable audience has published her reckoning with the Prime Minister over housing costs, and the result is not a technical diagnosis: it is a slogan summarizing an entire cycle. 'PSOE and PP are the same,' she says.

The video brings no new data. That is its strength. Anyone who has searched for an apartment in a capital city in recent years recognizes the scene without needing graphs. Striking is not the anger — anger has been there for a while — but whom it points to and with what argument. She no longer asks to vote better. She demands explanations.

The unbalanced account: 900 euros for a poorly ventilated storage unit

The starting point is a price. 900 euros monthly for an unventilated storage unit: this is what appears in the video and what anyone can verify today on rental portals across much of Spain. With that figure on the table, the comparison is obvious.

For that same monthly amount, in a medium-sized provincial city — the example is Valladolid, 300,000 inhabitants — someone pays the mortgage for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, 156 square meters home with a terrace overlooking a park. The conclusion anyone draws is not that Madrid is expensive. It is that Madrid and the rest of the country no longer belong to the same real estate market, nor the same country.

Why not build more? The land bottleneck

Here the video falls short, and that is where the conversation becomes interesting. In Spain, you cannot build anything on your own land until a chain of administrations from local to state authorizes it. The landowner does not decide: he waits. And while he waits, he pays.

The most common calculation is the cost before the first brick: up to 40,000 euros spent before laying the first stone in licenses, reports, fees, and procedures. If this is true — and developers rarely deny it — any project starts with a backpack the tenant will eventually pay for. The repeated argument is not that politicians who build are missing, but that politicians who authorize are surplus.

25,000 public homes and a plan that reaches no one

The institutional response exists and has figures. The Community of Madrid has more than 25,000 public homes, although they are reserved for groups the regulation defines as most vulnerable. Madrid’s Plan Vive adds 10,500 affordable homes built and has facilitated 1,800 mortgages in collaboration with eight banks, with more than 3,000 young beneficiaries.

The problem is a funnel. If demand far exceeds protected supply, the queue becomes a selection mechanism where the winner is not the one who needs it most, but the one who signs up first. And here comes the uncomfortable question: who really gets it? Because the profile of the young woman in the video — Spanish, with a job — rarely fits the scoring system.

Are housing policies state or regional?

It depends on which part you look at. Land planning has a state framework, but its regional development turns the market, in practice, into seventeen distinct markets. The question no one answers clearly is the good one: what real difference is there between the land planning laws of communities governed by the PSOE and those by the PP.

If the answer is 'none,' the video’s thesis strengthens itself: it does not matter whom you vote for, because the framework does not change. If the answer is 'some,' no one has bothered to explain them with numbers. And without numbers, in housing, discussion remains a slogan.

Immigration, demographics, and rental supply: the factor sneaking in everywhere

Part of the analysis holds that pressure on rent cannot be explained without demographics: it is argued that in the last two decades Spain has received a population influx far exceeding housing built in the same period, and that, in a rigid supply market, this translates to price. The repeated figure is around 15 million people in twenty years, an estimate circulating without breakdown, which should be treated with caution.

The second demographic factor is less debated and more revealing: families of five or six members have given way to households of one or two people. More homes needed for fewer people per home. Added to this is the withdrawal of rental supply after each regulatory reform, which is the argument most often cited when asked why there are fewer apartments available than a few years ago.

The unresolved ending

No one disputes the anger. They dispute the target. Some believe this discontent is perfect fuel to justify new interventions on private property, while others argue the opposite: that what is needed is for the legislator to stop doing and guarantee legal security for owner and tenant alike. Both fit in the same discontent, and neither has won.

The only fruta fact is the arithmetic. If in twenty years much more people enter than housing is built, the excess demand does not disappear: it hides in price. The video will have been forgotten long before that price drops. And whoever filmed it, meanwhile, will have already been paid for telling it.