BarcelonaThe classic confrontation between the cities of Barcelona and Madrid has experienced a new chapter this Wednesday in the Senate at the expense of housing. The mayors of both capitals, Jaume Collboni and José Luis Martínez Almeida, have appeared before the Spanish upper house to explain the recipes that each is applying to deal with the residential crisis in both cities. It wasn’t a face-to-face as such – they intervened separately – but it served to confirm that today the models of Barcelona and Madrid in this field are diametrically opposed.
The main difference in criteria between the two mayors soon became apparent. While Collboni has been boasting for some time that he is “changing the rules of the game” and that he has made Barcelona the spearhead of rent regulation, Almeida has begun his intervention by criticizing the regulation of the market. The popular leader has considered that the state housing law and measures such as the rent ceiling represent a “strangulation”, an “excessive interventionism” and consolidate a disproportion between the obligations of “the landlord and the tenant”.
According to Almeida, the recipe should be completely different and should be based on expanding the offer by building housing. For this reason, he has defended “making life easier for real estate developers from a fiscal and regulatory point of view” by encouraging “rapid construction”. In this sense, he has boasted that Madrid is the city in Europe that has more land ready to build on and has assured that the City Council has the capacity to grant 60,000 licenses to build flats.
Beyond private activity, the mayor of Madrid has also taken advantage of the public bet that, he has defended, the Spanish capital is making. Thus, he assured that last year Madrid built more public housing than Catalonia, Asturias, Navarre and Castile-La Mancha together, and went so far as to say that the public municipal company is, with 10,000 homes, the “biggest public housing developer in Spain”. A fact that the groups have rebutted by recalling that Barcelona has more public flats right now and that, in addition, if the population of each city is taken into account, the weight of public housing in Madrid is lower.
Although both mayors have remarked that they did not want to “confront” the cities, they did have time to question some decisions. Thus, Almeida has been opposed to applying the rent cap in Madrid claiming that “there is no place” where the price of rent has fallen without at the same time the supply of this type of housing has not been substantially reduced. Collboni, for his part, has defended that the Barcelona model works and has recommended that Madrid also “apply the law”.
Regulate the purchase for non-residents
In fact, during his intervention in the upper house, the mayor of Barcelona went further and asked for more regulation. Collboni stressed that a significant part of the purchase of housing in large cities is made by non-EU non-residents in Spain who “only want to spend a few days on vacation”. “We should also do something about this,” warned Collboni, who emphasized that it is a phenomenon that not only affects Barcelona but also happens in cities such as Alicante, Palma or Malaga.
Although he has admitted that everyone agrees that housing must be built and that private supply must also be encouraged, Collboni has defended that “in the meantime, more measures are needed to enable access to housing”. In this sense, he argued that thanks to the application of the housing law, the increase in rental prices has stopped. He explained that while between 2014 and 2024 the price of rent in Barcelona rose by 78%, since the application of the cap it has fallen by 4.9%.
Collboni has also claimed other measures that Barcelona is carrying out to intervene in the housing market, such as the decision to eliminate all tourist flats by the end of 2028, or the purchase of entire buildings through trial and retraction. Measures that, he said, together with public construction must allow the city to make 15% of its housing stock public.
