Diario Sur portrays victims of the housing crisis in Málaga: vulnerable mothers rejected by real estate agencies, neighbours expelled to other provinces, and owners facing unpaid rent. The capital and the Coast are among the most expensive areas to rent or buy.
The housing crisis in Málaga does not discriminate by age, gender, or status. This is reflected in the snapshot published by Diario Sur, which puts faces to those suffering: from single mothers with children who cannot find a landlord to neighbours who have had to leave the province because they cannot afford rent.
The problem targets the most vulnerable, but it also affects divorced individuals, workers from other provinces who reject jobs in Málaga or the Coast due to a lack of rental options, and owners, generally older, who face tenants who stop paying rent and evictions that take years to resolve.
The capital of Málaga and the main municipalities along the Coast are among the most expensive places in Spain to buy or rent an apartment, very close to Madrid and Barcelona. The high demand due to the attractiveness of the destination, competition with citizens of higher purchasing power, the tourist use of many properties, and the legal insecurity of long-term rentals explain, according to experts, this situation.
The case of Cristina Bermúdez, 28, a victim of gender violence and mother of two children, one with a 48% disability due to autism, illustrates the rejection faced by vulnerable families. She searched for housing throughout Málaga without success: real estate agencies told her she did not fit the "profile of people that landlords are looking for." In 2020, she paid 450 euros a month for an apartment on Carretera de Cádiz; four years later, the prices she found ranged between 900 and 1,200 euros, with a salary of 1,400 euros and a benefit of 450 euros for her son. She temporarily moved to her mother's house in Lucena (Córdoba) and nearly two years later, she is still searching. She has participated in more than five draws for protected housing, and now the Málaga City Council has requested documentation after the latest one: "Until I see my keys in my hands, I won't believe it."
The writer and editor Francisco Javier Rodríguez Barranco, 65, left Málaga almost two years ago when the owner of the apartment he rented in the city centre decided not to renew his contract. He had four months to find an alternative, searched in the capital and in the towns of the metropolitan belt, and ended up in Algeciras. "They didn't renew my rental contract in 2025. I lived above a business, it closed, and another took it over. They made my life impossible; I filed several complaints about noise at late hours," he recounts.
The snapshot also includes healthcare workers who sleep in vans and caravans due to the impossibility of finding rental accommodation on the Costa del Sol, and citizens who have been expelled to other municipalities because they could no longer afford anything in Málaga. On the opposite side, owners who put their homes up for long-term rental to supplement pensions encounter tenants who stop paying and eviction processes that drag on indefinitely.
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