How Housing Speculation Created Environmental Crisis in Spain
The floods that hit Spain last year were more than just a natural disaster. They were exacerbated by housing developers who built homes in the most flood-prone areas.
A woman walks along a street full of mud and waste from houses after heavy rain and flooding hit large parts of the country, on November 2, 2024, in Paiporta municipality in Valencia, Spain. (Pablo Blazquez Dominguez / Getty Images)
In October 2024, Valencia was hit by a weather event known as a DANA, a Spanish acronym for high-altitude isolated depression. The unfolding storm proved to be one of the deadliest in Mediterranean history. Torrential rains and ferocious winds overwhelmed neighborhoods, obliterated infrastructure, and left 225 dead. With economic damages soaring past €18 billion, this catastrophic DANA is the region’s most devastating in half a century. However, labeling such an event a “climate disaster” — as many commentators have done — obscures its true nature. It was not an unavoidable occurrence but rather the result of human-made systems.
Social scientists and geographers have long drawn attention to the political nature of natural disasters. In There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster, Neil Smith argued that disasters don’t emerge from nature alone — they are shaped and amplified by political and economic decisions that dictate which communities and territories are left vulnerable.
In Valencia, decades of real estate speculation, cuts to public infrastructure, and unchecked urbanization have created an environment unable to deal with extreme weather events. These conditions magnify the damage and deepen existing social inequalities. In the aftermath, access to mortgages in affected areas is expected to tighten, as banks shift climate risk onto borrowers in the form of higher premiums.
The political handling of the crisis has drawn sharp criticism. Carlos Mazón, president of the Generalitat Valenciana, a political and administrative unit governing the city, has faced scrutiny for his lack of leadership and ineffective response during the emergency. But beyond revealing glaring political incompetence, this crisis has lain bare the structural consequences of a development model driven by private profit.
How Spain’s Housing Boom Created Climate Vulnerability
In Spain, a vast urban expansion and infrastructure frenzy during the 1980s and ’90s, driven by transnational capital radically transformed the country. Between 1994 and 2008, Spain’s economy boomed. Over those fourteen years, the country built more than four million homes — surpassing the construction rates of Germany, Italy, and France combined, despite having a smaller population. This didn’t just reshape cities. It turned Spain into Europe’s largest per-capita cement producer. By 2006, developers were building 2.5 homes for every new household, a speculative wave of construction that increased regional inequalities.
Valencia stood out during this period. By the early 2000s, the region accounted for 25 percent of all housing built in Spain, making it one of the most densely developed areas per square kilometer in Europe. Housing policies promoting homeownership fueled real estate financialization, drawing working-class families into the private market. Public rentals were slashed, leaving households dependent on mortgages and vulnerable to speculation and debt. What came to be known as “popular capitalism” didn’t, despite the claims of its supporters, have the effect of democratizing housing. Rather, the construction wave deepened inequalities.
Not only did this speculative model fail to meet the housing needs of the majority of Spaniards, it ignored any notion of sustainable urban planning. In Valencia, developments on floodplains or protected coastal areas like Albufera destroyed critical ecosystems and increased local communities’ vulnerability to growing climate risks. One telling statistic captures this political failure: three out of every ten homes damaged by the DANA floods were built in flood zones during the housing bubble. The result is a region physically and economically eroded.
As the construction by private developers was encouraged, there was also a decline in the supply of public housing. This transition often involved the outright privatization of profitable public companies and the sale of public assets like land, diminishing the public housing sector. These changes aligned with a homeowner society model.
Housing policies promoting homeownership fueled the financialization of real estate. Meanwhile, public rental options were slashed, and an expanded private sector for housing left more people reliant on mortgage credit, vulnerable to cycles of speculation and at risk of taking on unsustainable debt. This “popular capitalism,” which promised to democratize access to housing, only deepened social and economic inequalities.
Not a Natural Disaster
The Mediterranean is experiencing a sustained rise in water temperatures. This has fueled increasingly intense and destructive storms. However, the impact of these events is far from evenly distributed. The DANA in Valencia ravaged working-class neighborhoods, where families lacked the resources to rebuild their lives after the disaster. The most affected zones were in neighborhoods where the real estate market displaced working-class populations to high-risk areas, such as floodplains and poorly connected regions reliant on outdated infrastructure.
What the floods have made clear is the profoundly political nature of infrastructure. In Valencia, the management of water, energy, and transportation must shift away from serving private interests and become central to the fight for social and climate justice. This requires making infrastructure a political priority that connects collective well-being with the ecological transition.
The right to infrastructure means recognizing essential goods — water, energy, food, and housing — as indispensable commons. This right demands democratic management that prioritizes collective needs over capital’s interests. Designing and managing infrastructure for collective well-being will be critical to addressing both the climate crisis and social inequality.
However, building the social power needed to transform these dynamics is far from automatic — even in the face of growing chaos. Immediate concerns about survival often overshadow the slower moving ecological crisis, creating fertile ground for regressive, right-wing political responses. This makes it essential to frame the ecological crisis as a class struggle.
Scholars like Matt Huber have argued that the key to an ecological transition lies in decommodifying basic goods like electricity and treating them as public goods, not commodities. He has suggested that the public sector must play a central role in investing in and managing energy infrastructure, drawing parallels between a class-struggle-based approach to climate change and the New Deal’s large-scale public works.
One model for how this fight could be waged is through the recreation of something similar to the wage-earner funds proposed by the Swedish economist Rudolf Meidner in the 1970s. Meidner’s model allowed unions to acquire rights to dividends, voting power in executive appointments, and influence over corporate policies — redistributing corporate power and anchoring the economy to local land. Though its implementation faced fierce resistance from business interests and remained limited, the Meidner Plan offered a radical vision: democratizing the economy from the ground up. While the conditions of that era cannot simply be replicated, collective participation and social control over productive assets remain critical to addressing the ecological crisis.
Building an ecosocialist politics requires broad alliances between class-based and climate movements. The future of land cannot be dictated by capital but must be shaped by strategies that integrate collective well-being with the planet’s limits. The right to infrastructure is not just a political proposal; it is both a survival tool and a strategy to forge an ecological class capable of governing its own future.