I would look first not at the price of housing but at what housing has become under these conditions: a commodity whose production and sale are separated in time from the realization of its price, and a field in which the profit of the builder is made less from the building than from the ground beneath it. The article tells us that Spain built the most during the boom and now faces a deficit of accessible housing, that rents and purchase prices have risen, and that the pressure falls on young people and families. The question is not merely why prices are high, but who controls the conditions under which dwellings are produced and let.
In speculative building, the main profit comes from raising the ground-rent, not from the houses themselves. The builder takes a piece of ground, lays it out, and his gain is the increased rent rather than the profit of the buildings, which he scarcely looks at. Where the funds are procured by mortgaging and the money is placed at the disposal of the contractor as the buildings proceed, a crisis that interrupts the advance instalments causes the enterprise to collapse; the houses remain unfinished until better times, or are sold at auction for half their cost. The 2008 crash, identified in the article as a key factor in the reversal, is exactly such an interruption. The consequence is not a natural scarcity but a scarcity produced by the form of the enterprise itself.
I see in this the ordinary movement of capital: a boom in construction, a crisis, and then a shortage that raises rents for those who hold the ground. The protests in the streets express the pressure on those who must pay, but the mechanism lies in the relation between ownership of the ground, the credit that finances building, and the demand of those who need a place to live.
