The housing crisis in Spain reduces apartments to rooms without a living room

None of the floors I visited had a living room. In the end you stop giving it importance. I thought, 'that's it, why do I want one?' Until I started living here. And I already realized that I really do need it," explains Alba (20 years old). "With a salon you interact more with your colleagues. In the end, the kitchen is not very big either and since there are two of us, the third one no longer fits," she details about living with her classmates - also university students - in an apartment in Malaga.

His room costs him around 360 euros per month. She feels satisfied with the result of a search in which, due to budget (student scholarships, family support and savings from a summer job), the accommodation options available in the Andalusian city did not include a living room. Most of them had been transformed into rooms.

The situation of Alba and her three companions in an apartment with a single bathroom and four rented rooms - despite the fact that originally there were only three - is legal: as long as the habitability conditions (clarity, ventilation, security) regulated by the town councils are maintained and certified, the landlords can carry out internal renovations of the apartments and dispense with common spaces in order to convert them into bedrooms. They are usually rented with individual contracts. The difference in the size of each room means that they have different prices.

But facing the opportunity that owners find when it comes to making their property profitable is the discomfort of the tenants themselves. In this apartment in Malaga, "it is frustrating not being able to have an adequate common space to be together." And that can also lead to roommates not talking to each other, "because there is nothing designed to foster the relationship and there is no space dedicated to it," says Clémentine (21 years old), who is Alba's roommate. He is in the city as part of his Erasmus studies. And it pays 410 euros per month with family support and the European scholarship. When searching for accommodation in Malaga, "I immediately realized that many apartments lacked a living room. So, due to the stress of not finding a cheap apartment, I chose this one to be on the safe side."

Despite the legality of these construction adjustments, sacrificing common spaces in pursuit of better profitability is a reflection of the serious and complex housing crisis that is developing at the country and continent level. Especially for young people. The latest data from Eurostat, published this week, reveals that in 2025 the overcrowding rate - that is, a household does not have a minimum number of rooms, such as one unit per adult or couple - of the European population between 15 and 29 years old was 26.9%, an increase of 0.4 points compared to 2024. "In all EU countries, young people were more likely than the total population to live in overcrowded homes. The overcrowding rate of young people was 10.1% higher than that of the total population (16.8%)", highlights Eurostat with data from the last year.

The gap between countries is wide. In the case of Spain, the data are bittersweet: while the overcrowding rate of the European population (16.8%) reduces 0.1 points between 2024 and 2025, the Spanish population goes from 9.1% to 9.5% in the same period.

In the segment of the adult population - from 18 to 64 years -, the European average increased from 18% to 18.1%. A ridiculous difference compared to the Spanish rate, which went from 9.8% to 10.2% in 2025. That is, if the European rate increased by 0.1 points, the Spanish rate increased by 0.4.

In Spain, these data are part of the current housing price crisis, both for buying and selling and renting. As a result of the precariousness in the real estate market - where the latest wave of protests has erupted following the eviction of Maricarmen Abascal (87 years old) on September 23 -, social pressure forced the Government to accelerate legislation to resolve the crisis. The result was two royal decrees, cut into pieces to prevent political discrepancies and the foreseeable rejection of certain measures from overturning the entire regulations... which finally fell in Congress. The first of the texts included the regulation of room rent, one of the measures incorporated through an agreement between PSOE and Sumar.

Since the measure did not succeed, there is still no specific regulation for rentals divided into rooms, or temporary contracts of less than one year. This is another formula to avoid rent regulation, because it does apply to long-term leases.

Sometimes there doesn't even need to be tension between colleagues to notice the lack of square meters; It is enough to see how the routine of those who sign a contract of less than a year in one of these adapted apartments constantly changes and begins to adapt to their new life. This is the case of Hilal (21 years old), who arrived from Austria, studies automotive computing and is Alba and Clémentine's third partner. He spends most of his time in his bedroom... which should really be the living room of the apartment. For this, he pays 450 euros per month and, although he assures that the stay is "comfortable", he misses a life outside the four walls of his room. "Sometimes just relaxing on the couch and looking at your phone is relaxing, and I miss that a little bit," she says. Without a living room to meet, coexistence is compressed into a small kitchen, where cooking with another of her three companions "is a little difficult due to the space."

Overcrowded youth

Returning to the European statistics, if we pay attention only to the data for young people of working age - aged 16 to 29 - the European overcrowding rate increased by 0.3 percentage points, from 26.3% to 26.6%. Meanwhile, in Spain it went from 15.3% to 16%. That is, it grew 0.7 points, more than double that of Europe.

On the other hand, this week the European statistics office also highlights the acquisition price data: in the second quarter of 2026, the cost of buying and selling in the European Union (EU) increased by 4.7%. In Spain, the flood was substantially greater: it rose by 12.1%.

In more detail, in the national market real estate tension is pressing on both types of ownership.

In sales, the price of housing registered an interannual increase of 14.7% in the third quarter of 2026, up to 2,129 euros per square meter, according to the IMIE Local Markets report for the third quarter of 2026 published by Tinsa by Accumin. The firm's data explain that these increases imply that a family unit must allocate, on average, 36.9% of total income to pay for housing, exceeding the limit recommended by experts and international organizations of 35%. And behind this situation is the imbalance between supply (low) and demand (high), for which the Bank of Spain is already expecting a deficit of close to a million homes by 2028.

This barrier to access to property shifts all the pressure towards renting, where the lack of supply has increased rents by 5.6% year-on-year, reaching 15.10 euros per square meter, according to the latest data from Idealista.

In this market, several voices were raised against the proposed decrees, both on the construction and rental sides, to warn that the new measures would have a reducing effect on the housing supply. Starting with the legal uncertainty that arouses in the owners, who could choose to withdraw their properties from the rental pool, but also because the management or construction projects (the build to rent model) could be postponed or paralyzed due to the uncertainty left by the accelerated regulatory swing.

And meanwhile, economists miss the application of more structural measures aimed at expanding the available housing stock and, especially, that of a social nature.

In this context, the situation is critical and pushes young people throughout the country to economize, whether in Malaga - where these four roommates live and the rental crisis leaves an average price of 16.5 euros per square meter after rising 2.8% in 2025, according to Idealista - or in capitals like Madrid and Barcelona, ​​magnets for job seekers and where the price per square meter exceeds 20 euros. In this breeding ground, fractional apartments are born to the extreme.

Although Spain is not one of the countries with the highest overcrowding rate (see Romania with 40.4% and Latvia with 38.9%) and is below the European average, the evolution of the Iberian country progresses in parallel with another problem for young people: the delay in emancipation. In fact, the Spanish woman is one of the latest average ages to leave the family home among her European neighbors. With an average of 30.2 years, in the last year emancipation is delayed twice as long in Spain as in Europe as a whole, and behind this is job and salary precariousness, but also the inability to access housing (in any form of tenure). In fact, renting alone is equivalent to 98.7% of the average salary of a young person and more than 33% in shared rentals, according to the Spanish Youth Council (CJE). Buying a home is not a real alternative for the majority, because it involves saving the entire salary for 15.6 years to be able to access a property (the free home reached the average price of 223,000 euros).