Spain’s Housing Crisis Sparks a Revolt Against Tourism. Could America Feel the Fallout?

Millions of workers walked off the job across Spain on Wednesday, demanding relief from soaring rents, evictions, and housing speculation. It was the the country's first general strike in 14 years.

In Barcelona, protesters rattled house keys and chanted, “O baixen els lloguers, o cremen els carrers," which translates to “Either rents fall, or the streets burn.”

Over the past decade, rents in the City of Counts have climbed more than 50%, with tourism adding pressure on an already strained housing market.

In the coastal city of Málaga, Mónica Reino, 56, has watched that transformation unfold in her own apartment building.

“Every year it gets worse,” she told AFP, estimating that half of its 20 apartments are now tourist accommodations.

Tourism is far from the only force driving Spain's housing crisis. In popular vacation destinations, property owners can earn more from short-term visitors than year-round tenants, creating a financial incentive to convert residential housing into tourist accommodations.

A day after the strike, lawmakers narrowly approved a package of housing measures, including a new 10% tax on qualifying vacation rentals.

The conflict mirrors one already playing out in vacation destinations across the United States, where booming tourism has helped sustain local economies while putting housing increasingly out of reach for residents.

But as restrictions on vacation rentals make accommodations scarcer and more expensive abroad, could more travelers turn to U.S. destinations, intensifying the housing pressures those communities are already struggling to contain?

Fewer vacation rentals, higher prices

Spain's efforts to restrict short-term rentals were already changing the market well before this week's protests and housing vote.

Available short-term rental listings fell 5.9% in October compared with a year earlier, while average nightly rates jumped 12.5%, according to a new analysis from AirDNA, which tracks vacation rentals across platforms such as Airbnb and Vrbo.

Thousands of demonstrators filled the streets outside Valencia's bullring during Spain's Nov. 11 general strike, demanding affordable housing and higher wages. (Rober Solsona/Europa Press via Getty Images)

Part of the price increase reflects a shift toward more expensive properties as licensing restrictions remove rentals from the market. But even rates for comparable existing properties rose 8.2% over the past year.

Spain had an estimated 355,000 tourist dwellings in 2025, according to the Bank of Spain. Although they represented just 1.5% of the country's housing stock, they accounted for roughly 10% of its rental market, with much higher concentrations in tourist neighborhoods.

Research suggests those concentrations can have substantial consequences for local rents.

Airbnb's expansion pushed residential rents up 7% in Barcelona neighborhoods with the highest levels of activity between 2012 and 2016, according to a 2020 study published in the Journal of Urban Economics. Across the city, the estimated increase was 1.9%.

A demonstrator holds a sign reading "Reclaim the keys to our cities" during a protest in Spain, where opposition to tourism has become part of a bigger fight over housing affordability and residents' access to their own neighborhoods. (Rober Solsona/Europa Press via Getty Images)

"Short-term rental activity can crowd locals out of homes that might otherwise serve as conventional rental homes, reducing the number of options available for those living in the area permanently and raising prices," Joel Berner, senior economist at Realtor.com®, says.

But he cautions: "This effect is probably not the main factor affecting affordability."

Even so, Barcelona plans to let all 10,101 existing tourist-apartment licenses expire in 2028, while Málaga has suspended new licenses for three years.

The restrictions could return some tourist accommodations to residential use. Whether enough properties will become available to ease housing costs remains uncertain.

The wealth gap behind tourism's housing squeeze

Meanwhile, visitors just keep coming.

Spain welcomed more than 80.5 million international tourists during the first nine months of 2026—a 5.2% increase over the same period last year. Americans accounted for nearly 3.9 million of those visitors, with arrivals growing more than twice as fast as overall international tourism.

On its face, it's a counterintuitive trend: Higher accommodation costs have hardly deterred American travelers. But part of the explanation may lie in who can afford to keep traveling.

Travelers pass a housing protest encampment in Madrid's Puerta del Sol, where demonstrators camped for more than a month to demand affordable housing and stronger tenant protections. (Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images)

Higher-income households, supported by record household wealth, are driving a disproportionate share of U.S. travel spending, according to the U.S. Travel Association. While rising costs are forcing some households to adjust their plans, wealthier travelers are better positioned to absorb higher prices.

And generational wealth could add to the advantage, too. Visa estimates that $36 trillion will pass from baby boomers to younger generations over the next two decades, with housing and travel among the sectors expected to benefit.

If that pattern sounds familiar, it's because inherited wealth is also helping determine who can afford to own a home at all. In Spain, parents gifted their children more than 30,000 homes last year, while in the U.S., a record 10% of first-time homebuyers relied on an inheritance for their down payment, according to a November report from the National Association of Realtors®.

And if rising accommodation costs abroad encourage more travelers to vacation closer to home, those pressures could intensify.

Throughout the summer, protesters took to the streets across Spain to denounce mass tourism, blaming short-term vacation rentals and surging visitor demand for driving up housing costs and displacing locals. (Clara Margais/picture alliance via Getty Images)

There's no evidence yet that the restrictions sweeping across Europe are redirecting tourists to U.S. destinations, but domestic demand is already growing fastest in smaller, relatively affordable markets.

Nights booked in small-city and rural U.S. markets increased 8.4% in October from a year earlier, compared with just 1.1% growth in urban markets, according to AirDNA.

"The closest parallels are American tourism hubs where housing is limited and the conversion of homes into STRs force tourism industry workers to live far away," says Berner. "Think Hawaii, Mountain West ski towns, or New Orleans.

"In the more urban locations (like New Orleans), the upward pressure on rent is more concentrated in tourist-heavy neighborhoods than in the metro area at large. But in the more remote destinations without suburbia to absorb displaced locals, the effect is stronger," Berner says.

Nantucket, MA, offers a particularly telling example. The tiny island of just 48 square miles hosts nearly 2 million visitors annually.

More than half of the housing stock (55%) is reserved for seasonal or occasional use, according to a Realtor.com analysis. That scarcity set against high demand has helped push the median home listing price to $4,925,000 in June—more than 11 times the national median of $430,000.

And it's not just lower-income workers being priced out, either.

Roughly 1,080 renter households, including those earning well above the local median income, were effectively shut out of homeownership without significant financial assistance, according to a 2025 housing assessment.

The shortage is so severe that it’s threatening the island's ability to sustain its workforce. A 2026 workforce housing study found that 64% of surveyed employers had lost or declined to hire workers because of housing challenges.

Nantucket Cottage Hospital has identified housing as the leading reason candidates turn down jobs or employees leave.

"Workers get displaced, but communities get hollowed out, too," Berner says. "Schools get weaker, tax bases become more fragile as they are more exposed to tourism downturns, and entry into the community through homeownership becomes more difficult."

The economic catch in cracking down on vacation rentals

For communities that depend on tourism, restricting vacation rentals presents another dilemma: How much visitor spending can they afford to lose in the effort to preserve housing?

On Long Island's North Fork, officials are considering restrictions that would cap short-term rental permits in Southold Town at just 119 properties, compared with approximately 640 active listings in October.

Those rentals generate an estimated $27.5 million in annual revenue for property owners, according to town figures reported by Newsday.

But reducing that business doesn't guarantee more housing for residents. Nearly 37% of the town's housing units were seasonal residences in 2020, and many owners purchased their properties primarily as second homes.

As Realtor.com previously reported, those owners may simply stop offering short-term stays rather than sell their properties or convert them into annual rentals.

Diane Mollica, a local real estate agent with the Gambino Group, says many owners primarily use their properties for their own enjoyment, making a widespread shift to year-round housing unlikely.

Yet the housing shortage is already threatening the businesses that depend on tourism.

"We cannot build a sustainable tourism economy on the backs of a workforce that can no longer afford to live here," Amanda Giuliano, a Southold business owner and co-chair of the town's Economic Development Committee, told Newsday. "If we don't have people working, there will be no tourism."

Spain faces the same conflict on a much larger scale.

Tourism contributed €200.7 billion (about $221 billion) to the Spanish economy in 2024, accounting for 12.6% of GDP, according to the country's National Statistics Institute. The industry supported more than 2.7 million jobs, representing 12.3% of employment nationwide.

That economic dependence helps explain why then, even against a backdrop of a nationwide general strike, the 10% tax on vacation rentals passed only in a 35 to 34 vote.

The new levy is scheduled to take effect on Dec. 1. But even so, the measure could be short-lived. Spain faces a snap election on Nov. 29, triggered by parliament's earlier rejection of the government's housing decrees, and the opposition Popular Party has pledged to repeal the measures if it takes power.

And even if the restrictions survive, reducing tourist accommodations could still come at a cost to the businesses and property owners who depend on them, without producing enough homes for local workers.

Berner argues that increasing housing supply offers a way to accommodate both.

"Encouraging more homebuilding is the only long-term solution to a housing shortage and has the ability to expand tourism capacity as well," he says.