Housing has become one of the main social and political conflicts in Europe. The problem is no longer limited to the cost of renting, the difficulty of getting a mortgage or the impossibility of becoming independent. The housing crisis is producing something deeper. There are people who lose their homes, families who live under the threat of eviction, people who survive in temporary accommodation, those who sleep on the street, and a form of housing exclusion that statistics continue to capture only incompletely.
In this context, the elections held during 2026 in different European territories are showing a transformation of the left’s political map. Germany offers a particularly significant example. On 20 September, Die Linke became the leading force in Berlin while the AfD came first again in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The comparison does not allow us to establish an automatic relationship between social crisis and any particular electoral response. It does show that material discontent can be channelled towards very different political projects depending on the territory, the existing political structure and the conflicts that manage to occupy the centre of the debate.
There is a question that runs through this reconfiguration and that seems to me especially relevant for analysing the programmes of the European left. Housing has entered the political agenda with force while homelessness continues to occupy a much more secondary place. The proposals talk about rents, affordable housing, public housing, regulation of property markets, construction and protection against evictions. And there remains an enormous distance between talking about housing policy and developing a specific policy aimed at eradicating homelessness.
This is the central question of this text. I set out to ask what the European left proposes to lower rents, expand the public housing stock or stop evictions, and also to check what place the person who has already lost their home occupies in those programmes, how much is said about them and whether there is a concrete political plan for them to stop being on the street, in a shelter, in temporary accommodation, in insecure housing or in any other form of housing exclusion.
The difference is fundamental. A policy aimed at preventing a person from losing their home is a policy of homelessness prevention. A policy aimed at getting off the street someone who no longer has a home is a policy of homelessness eradication. Both are necessary and they are not the same policy.
The 20 September elections in Berlin made Die Linke the leading force with 25.7% of the vote, ahead of the CDU (18.8%), the AfD (16.3%), the Greens (14.3%) and the SPD (12.1%). Housing was one of the central axes of the debate. Among Die Linke’s proposals are intervention against large property owners and implementation of the expropriation initiative approved by referendum in 2021, which affects large companies that own thousands of homes. After the results, various forces of the Spanish left claimed the Berlin programme as a reference for their own housing policies.
Beyond whether that model should be reproduced in other territories, what interests me is observing what happens when housing stops being treated exclusively as an economic problem and becomes a central political conflict. Berlin shows that housing can articulate an important part of social discontent around perfectly identifiable material questions, such as how much it costs to live, who owns the homes, what capacity an administration has to intervene and what rights renters have.
Even within this debate, it is much less visible what happens to the people who have already been left outside the housing market. The Berlin left talks about rent control, affordable housing, property ownership and expropriation of large landlords. That a housing programme incorporates measures to expand or protect the housing stock does not automatically mean that there is a specific plan for people who today live on the street to leave that situation. Making rents cheaper can prevent future processes of housing exclusion, increasing the public stock can widen access to housing and regulating rents can limit certain processes of expulsion. None of those measures constitutes, on its own, a plan to eradicate homelessness. That is precisely the gap I want to point out in the programmes of the European left.
Berlin does not represent the whole of Germany. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania the AfD came first, the SPD second and Die Linke kept parliamentary representation, while the CDU fell below the 5% threshold and lost its presence in the regional parliament. Material discontent does not necessarily produce a single political response. There is no single European left and no single housing programme. There are different responses to a crisis with common elements, such as rising rents, insufficient affordable housing, the precarisation of households, the difficulty of access for young people and workers, and the growth of housing exclusion. What does seem common is that housing has become a central political issue. What remains much less common is for homelessness to appear as a political objective with the same clarity.
Europe has begun to formally incorporate homelessness into its housing policies. The European Commission identifies homeless people as one of the groups most affected by the housing crisis and in May 2026 presented a proposal for a Council Recommendation on housing exclusion, aimed at ensuring that everyone has a safe place to live and at acting early to prevent homelessness. If adopted, it will be the first European legislative instrument devoted specifically to this issue. The European Affordable Housing Plan also identifies homeless people as a priority group, and the European anti-poverty strategy incorporates homelessness.
Recognising the problem is not the same as having a strategy to eradicate it. FEANTSA (the European Federation of National Organisations Working with the Homeless) estimates for 2026 around 1.44 million people sleeping on the street, using night shelters or temporary accommodation, and specific services for homeless people in Europe. The organisation warns that these figures should be read as orders of magnitude, because counting systems and definitions are not homogeneous across countries. It also warns that emergency services are reaching their maximum capacity, waiting lists are growing, long stays are increasing for lack of housing alternatives, and many people move from one accommodation to another with no prospect of a stable solution. Europe has reached a point where the problem can no longer be solved simply by increasing the capacity of emergency facilities. Housing is needed, and housing is needed for people who, in many cases, are precisely those who have the greatest difficulty accessing the ordinary market.
The problem is also not only in those who appear in a count of people sleeping on the street. The ETHOS typology, used by FEANTSA, distinguishes between people who are roofless, people who are houseless, people living in insecure housing and people living in inadequate housing. That means a person threatened with eviction, who lives in uninhabitable housing, who is staying temporarily with relatives or friends after losing their home, or who finds themselves in an extremely precarious housing situation can form part of the phenomenon of homelessness even if they have never slept on a bench or a pavement. FEANTSA also speaks of hidden homelessness, that of those who stay temporarily with other people or avoid formal care systems, and reminds us that there is no single profile of a homeless person. Among the structural causes it mentions poverty, insufficient affordable housing, the financialisation of housing, low wages, weak social protection and certain shortcomings in reception systems.
I think this should oblige us to review political language. Public policies tend to see homelessness only when its most extreme expression has already occurred. First residential stability is lost. Then insecure housing appears. Later the actual loss of the home may occur. Finally the street may appear. When the administration intervenes only at the last moment, a considerable part of social policy becomes the management of the consequences of a problem that began much earlier.
These realities are also distributed among administrative departments such as housing, social services, justice, employment, health, migration or international protection. And when a problem is divided among administrations, responsibility for the solution can also become diluted. This fragmentation is reproduced in political programmes. Left-wing forces may have extensive proposals on housing and at the same time lack an equivalent chapter on how to eradicate homelessness. They can talk about prevention and never say what the prospects are for someone already sleeping on the street. They can defend public housing and not establish what percentage of that stock will be earmarked for people experiencing homelessness. They can defend the right to housing and not set concrete targets for reducing the number of homeless people, deadlines, budgetary resources and indicators of effective exit from the emergency system. That programmatic void is what I want to name here.
In Spain, the government has tried to strengthen the tools of protection against loss of housing. The new decrees, which have not made it through Congress, included measures on the duration and renewal of contracts, protection against certain evictions and expansion of affordable housing mechanisms, and placed vulnerable groups more explicitly at the centre of housing policy. It was a significant change. If a family managed to avoid an eviction, public policy would have prevented it from entering a situation of homelessness. If a person has been on the street for years, six days in a shelter do not solve their housing problem, and neither did these measures. The necessary intervention is completely different, and Spain needs both.
The rule starts from a constitutional premise. Article 47 of the Constitution recognises the right to enjoy decent and adequate housing and entrusts the public authorities with promoting the conditions necessary to make it effective. That recognition does not mean that every person can go directly to a court and obtain a specific home. There is a difference between a constitutional principle and a subjective right fully enforceable on the same terms as other fundamental rights. Here one of the great paradoxes of the system appears. Housing is a material condition for the exercise of other rights. Without housing it is harder to keep a job, look after one’s health, send children to school, keep one’s documentation, access social services or develop an autonomous life. A person may have the right to social services, to be attended to, to apply for certain benefits and to protection against certain situations of vulnerability, and still have no home. The system progressively recognises the need to protect people against the loss of housing. It has yet to develop with the same intensity the policies aimed at guaranteeing a route into housing for those who have already lost it.
In Madrid, the housing crisis has ceased to be only a matter of institutional debate and has become a space of social mobilisation. The encampment set up in the Puerta del Sol, promoted by the Sindicato de Inquilinas (Tenants’ Union), has transformed the political centre of the capital into a space of protest against evictions and the housing crisis. By 4 October it had passed 1,500 tents and had organised structures for medical care, legal advice, cooking and care work. The protest spread to other cities and the movement announced new mobilisations. It began around the case of Maricarmen, an 87-year-old woman whose eviction became a symbol, and quickly took on a broader dimension. The Sindicato de Inquilinas, created in 2017 out of activists linked to the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages), has developed an organised territorial structure and centres a good part of its activity on defence against evictions, organising tenants and pressure on housing policies.
The institutional response shows the different political positions that exist. The Community of Madrid (the regional government) has announced an administrative-law appeal to request emergency precautionary measures and the dissolution of the encampment, while the Government Delegation (the central government’s representation in the region) maintains that it must act within the legal framework applicable to the right of assembly and demonstration. Madrid also has specific policies aimed at homeless people, including Housing First and Housing Led programmes, as well as services to prevent the loss of housing. Preventing a person from losing their home is essential. Providing a home to a person who has already lost it is too.
Barcelona shows another combination of institutional policy and social mobilisation. Mayor Jaume Collboni has defended rent regulation and the progressive elimination of 10,000 tourist flats as instruments for increasing the residential use of housing. The city also maintains a specific network for homeless people, and social organisations that work with models of shared housing, temporary accommodation, support and Housing First.
The harshest dimension of housing exclusion appears in the data. Arrels Fundació recently reported that 83.3% of the 670 people interviewed who were living on the street in Barcelona during 2025 had suffered some crime, assault or discrimination since being in that situation. Arrels distinguishes between victimisation and aporophobia, and points out that not every assault suffered by a homeless person necessarily has a motivation of rejection of poverty. Violence thus appears as another consequence of the loss of housing. It is not enough to ask where a person sleeps. We must ask what security they have, how long they have been without housing, what real possibilities they have of getting out of that situation and what resources exist to do so.
On 1 October, a court suspended the eviction of a woman in Sant Andreu, in Barcelona, after the legal team of the Sindicato de Inquilinas requested the application of the new national housing decree. The case lets us see the distance between a rule passed at national level and its concrete application in a person’s life. The law stops being an abstract declaration when it manages to prevent someone from losing their home. And it immediately raises the next question. What happens to those who have already lost it?
Aragon, the region of which Zaragoza is the capital, offers an especially interesting example of the tension between available resources and effective execution. The Government of Spain transferred in August €30.4 million earmarked for housing policies in the region, and in September a conflict arose over the deployment of those funds and the instruments needed to put them to use. Meanwhile, the housing market continues to put pressure on households. Housing can no longer be analysed solely from the standpoint of extreme poverty, because it also affects workers, families and people who, even with an income, cannot afford market prices. Precisely for that reason the central question reappears. What happens to those who cannot even enter that market?
The crisis, moreover, is not limited to the big capitals. Small municipalities and rural areas live a different contradiction. There are empty or underused homes that are often not available on economic and legal conditions that would allow access for those who need to move. Depopulation and housing exclusion should be tackled together. It is not enough to attract population to rural municipalities. It is necessary to guarantee habitable housing, affordable rents, public services, transport, connectivity and economic opportunities. Otherwise, the discourse of repopulation may end up becoming a policy of attracting people with sufficient economic capacity to settle, leaving out precisely those who need affordable housing.
Zaragoza lets us observe how the crisis manifests itself in housing, in housing exclusion and in homelessness, three related but not identical realities. During 2026 there have been neighbourhood mobilisations in the city against evictions, showing how the loss of housing can mobilise whole communities. One recent case was that of a woman with a child in her care, whose situation of non-payment and risk of eviction provoked a neighbourhood mobilisation that managed to postpone the eviction. When a family loses its home, the problem does not end on the day the eviction is halted. Residential continuity has to be guaranteed. If the only subsequent solution is a temporary facility, public policy simply moves the problem from one place to another.
The city has a Plan Integral de Sinhogarismo (Comprehensive Homelessness Plan) that expressly incorporates the ETHOS categories, recognises that there are different situations within homelessness and defends flexible and diverse models of accommodation, with emergency facilities, temporary accommodation and models of access to housing. The City Council has a municipal shelter with 60 rooms for men, 12 for women and one for users with a pet. The ordinary stay is set at six days every three months, with exceptions linked to each person’s circumstances. There is also Casa Abierta, for people who have been living on the street for a long time and show a serious deterioration that makes a conventional process of reintegration difficult. On paper, there is a differentiated network. The political question is whether that differentiation is sufficient to respond to a reality that has also changed.
Shelters perform an essential function. Nobody should be forced to sleep on the street when there is a resource capable of providing accommodation, food, hygiene and social care. An emergency facility also cannot become a substitute for a housing policy. The question is what role the shelter should play within a much broader system.
I have been in the municipal shelter and from the inside I have been able to observe something that the figures do not reflect. Recently there has been growing pressure on certain reception facilities from very different profiles, including applicants for international protection and newly arrived migrants, while other homeless people with long trajectories of exclusion need completely different housing responses. I do not intend to make migrants responsible for the problem. It would be a legally incorrect and socially simplistic interpretation. The municipal documentation itself includes them among the different profiles of homelessness, alongside chronically homeless people, temporary workers, people with health problems, families and people who have recently lost their home. If different profiles have different needs, the resources must also be sufficiently differentiated. When a single facility ends up absorbing situations that should be resolved through different policies, the result can be competition for scarce resources between people who share a situation of exclusion and need different responses. That is a matter of public planning, not of nationality.
I do not intend to equate Berlin and Zaragoza electorally. Germany and Aragon have different political systems, different institutional structures and socioeconomic realities that cannot be transferred mechanically. What is comparable is the capacity of politics to turn housing into a recognisable material conflict. In Berlin, housing was at the centre of a regional election and Die Linke managed to become the leading force. In Zaragoza, the 2026 regional elections drew a much more fragmented map, with PP, PSOE, Vox, CHA and IU-Movimiento Sumar among the forces represented. CHA increased its representation, IU-Movimiento Sumar kept a parliamentary presence and the PSOE remains a central force of the progressive camp.
Any significant transformation of social and housing policies in Zaragoza must take into account the institutional and electoral weight of the PSOE, while the organisations to its left have historically maintained a greater presence in social movements linked to housing, public services, feminism, migration and social rights. The possibility of agreements between left-wing organisations does not automatically amount to political unity. An electoral confluence can resolve the fragmentation of candidacies and does not by itself resolve the differences over housing, social services, economic model, municipalism or institutional management. Nor does it guarantee that homelessness becomes a programmatic priority. Presence in the struggle for housing does not automatically equal having a comprehensive strategy against homelessness. One thing is to defend tenants against landlords, halt evictions or demand affordable rents. Another, different and far more complex, is to establish how a person who has been living on the street for years obtains stable housing, what support they need, what housing stock is allocated to it, what budget is reserved and within what time frame the aim is to reduce and finally eradicate homelessness.
Here lies, in my view, the main contradiction of current politics. Europe, Spain, the big cities and the social movements are talking about housing, and a part of the people who most need it continues to appear in another administrative category, that of homeless people. The person who sleeps on the street does not need only social care. They need a home. The person who has spent months in a shelter does not need only temporary accommodation. They need a way out into housing. The person who lives in uninhabitable housing needs adequate housing. And the person who lives under the threat of eviction needs protection before becoming a homeless person. That is why housing policy and homelessness policy cannot function as watertight compartments.
It is not enough to say that housing is a right. We have to explain how that right is guaranteed to those who lack the economic capacity to enter the market. It is not enough to promise thousands of public homes. We have to determine how many will be earmarked for people who currently live on the street or in temporary facilities. It is not enough to regulate rents. We have to establish what happens to those who have already been expelled from the market. And it is not enough to expand shelters. We have to establish the route that allows people to leave them.
The Housing First models start precisely from a different logic. Instead of requiring a person to pass through a succession of facilities until they prove they are ready for a home, they provide stable housing first, together with support adapted to their needs. FEANTSA defines it as a model based on immediate access to stable housing with personalised support, especially suitable for people with complex needs, and defends strategies centred on housing, prevention and individualised support as opposed to excessive dependence on temporary accommodation. It also maintains that policies should aim to end homelessness rather than merely manage it.
Managing homelessness means increasing places, expanding emergency services, organising street services and ensuring that nobody sleeps rough on a given night. Eradicating it means establishing a political pathway aimed at people ceasing to need those facilities. The difference is not semantic. It is a difference of objectives. The point is not to eliminate shelters. The point is to prevent the shelter from being the last station on a journey with no exit. An emergency facility should be just that, for an emergency. When a person passes repeatedly through an emergency facility without managing to access stable housing, the system is not ending homelessness. It is administering it.
Social emergency also generates an institutional paradox. When the number of people needing a shelter rises, places are expanded. When evictions rise, mediation services are reinforced. When demand for housing rises, new developments are announced. All these measures may be necessary and none resolves the structural problem by itself. Social policy runs the risk of becoming a permanent administration of scarcity, with more places, more benefits, more reports, more referrals and more emergency services, while the person goes on waiting for a home. The aim of a homelessness policy should not be to ensure the system can look after more homeless people. It should be to ensure that fewer people need those services.
That is why counting only the people who sleep rough is insufficient. If an administration measures only the final situation, it will arrive late to prevention. And if it measures only how many people have been attended to in a shelter, it may confuse attention with solution. The truly important questions are others. How many people have obtained stable housing? How many have definitively left the emergency system? How long does a person remain in a temporary facility? How many return to the street after going through it? How many live in insecure or inadequate housing and do not appear in the statistics? Without these answers it is hard to know whether a policy is reducing homelessness or simply managing its consequences. And without quantifiable targets for reduction and eradication, it is equally hard to claim that there is a strategy to end it.
Housing movements have succeeded in changing political language. For years, eviction could be presented as a private conflict between landlord and tenant. Today there is a much more widespread understanding that when a person loses their home without an alternative, the consequences affect fundamental rights, public services, childhood, health, employment and social cohesion. A second step remains to be taken, which is to include the people who are already outside the housing market. If the struggle for housing ends when an eviction is avoided, part of the problem is left out. A housing policy truly oriented towards human rights should build a bridge between the person threatened with the loss of their home and the person who has already lost it, so that the latter is not relegated exclusively to social services and emergency facilities.
The campaign #NoEsCasa (“#ItsNotAHome”), announced by HOGAR SÍ for this month of October, coinciding with World Homeless Day, sets out precisely the need to change the way homelessness is looked at. It insists that there is no single profile of a homeless person and that the causes are related to structural factors such as the lack of affordable housing, poverty, discrimination and the absence of support networks. The debate should not focus only on how many people are sleeping on the street. The question should be why a society with available housing allows certain people to be unable to access it.
The European left has managed to turn housing into one of the main political questions of the moment. The rent crisis has provoked mobilisations, public housing has returned to the centre of programmes, price regulation has become a political question, evictions have ceased to be seen exclusively as private conflicts and intervention against large landlords is once again part of the debate. All this constitutes an important transformation of the political agenda. A contradiction remains unresolved. The homeless person appears as a consequence of the housing crisis and not always as the central subject of housing policy. The programme can explain how to stop a family losing its home and not how to ensure that a person who has been on the street for five years gets one. It can explain how many public homes it intends to build and not how many will be earmarked for homeless people. It can defend Housing First without turning it into a quantified strategy of eradication. It can expand shelters without setting a reasonable maximum length of stay or a subsequent housing route. It can talk about prevention and not about exit.
Zaragoza can observe what happens in Berlin, Madrid and Barcelona without needing to copy any of those models. Berlin shows that housing can become a central political axis. Madrid, that it can become a social movement capable of occupying public space. Barcelona, that regulation, mediation, mobilisation and attention to homelessness can coexist within the same city, with their conflicts and limitations. Zaragoza has its own instruments: a Comprehensive Homelessness Plan, a municipal shelter, Casa Abierta, social services, Zaragoza Vivienda (the city’s public housing company) and social organisations with decades of experience. And it has a housing reality that demands connecting all those tools, so that this institutional architecture does not end up becoming a succession of administrative doors between which the homeless person moves without ever arriving at stable housing.
For me, the question that should mark the next stage of social policy is: What happens next? After the eviction, after the shelter, after emergency aid, after temporary accommodation, after the first social care contact, after the police intervention, after the referral, after the report, after the emergency. If the answer continues to be another temporary facility, the person remains within the system of housing exclusion. The true measure of a housing policy should not be only how many homes it builds, how much aid it grants or how many evictions it manages to suspend. It should also be measured by how many people who were outside the housing system manage to enter it and remain in adequate and stable housing. That is the point at which housing policy truly becomes policy against homelessness.
Now the question I ask myself is whether the European left will be able to turn political recognition into concrete programmes, with targets for reducing homelessness, specific budgets, housing earmarked for those who are outside the housing system, Housing First and Housing Led models, prevention of the loss of housing, social support and evaluation mechanisms that make it possible to know how many people have really stopped being homeless. The political agenda is talking about housing. It remains to be seen whether it will be able to talk also about those who no longer have any. Because housing policy should not begin when a person still holds the keys to their home. It should also include those who have already lost them. A homeless person does not need only a place to spend the night. They need a home. And between the two lies the whole difference between administering exclusion and building a policy truly aimed at overcoming it.
Talita de Fátima B. Moreira is a jurist and human rights activist.
The Spanish original of this article by Talita de Fátima B. Moreira first appeared in Afroféminas. This English translation first appeared on the Left Renewal Blog. Translated and published with permission.
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