The Rental Market In Spain During The 20th Century: The Special System Of Protection Of Tenants. Successes And Weaknesses In A Parallelism With The Rental Market In Recent Years

Abstract

In February 1923, Francisco Franco (Generalissimo and head of state in 1936-1975) rented a house in Madrid. In doing so, he submitted to very specific lease clauses, like all Spaniards. The rent was the same for all people, regardless of the importance or the position that person held at the time. Lease clauses have been common in rentals at any and all times. And so it is today. For most of the 20th century, urban leasing legislation was based on measures that tended to protect tenants and merchants over landlords. The main characteristics of this regime, which modified the system of the previous century, were the forced extension and limits to lease price increase. The succession of different governments was not a factor that influenced the durability of these measures. Factors such as the First World War, generated inflation with the consequent increase in rents and the lack of a solution to the housing problem, and this, added to the new vision of property from its social function, led to the changes. After the Civil War and once the Franco dictatorship was established, the rules that had been regulating the urban rental market since 1920 were consolidated. Thereafter the system was maintained, in substance, with some partial reforms. The analysis that is attempted in this work covers those years from the 1920s, through the 1946 codification that ended up modeling the legal rental regime until up to 1985 when the forced extensions were suspended and then ceased to be contemplated in the 1994 Law, adding some reflections on the current context following the 2013 and 2019 reforms.