The 2008 financial crisis marked a turning point in global capitalism, as it led to a profound restructuring of the financial and real estate sectors. In Spain, where banks had accumulated large amounts of toxic assets that threatened to cause a systemic crisis in the eurozone, the impact was particularly acute. This situation gave rise to a political-financial arrangement: state intervention aimed at restoring capital profitability by transforming the built environment, which turned the crisis into a new cycle of accumulation. 

This arrangement deployed regulatory, fiscal and financial reforms that facilitated the entry of asset managers into the real estate market, giving rise to a new phase of accumulation centred on rental housing. From this perspective, the article offers a structural interpretation of the so-called housing crisis, understanding it not as a temporary market imbalance, but as the result of a new urban-financial regime of accumulation by dispossession. It analyses its effects on the rental market, the concentration of property ownership, the rise of rentierism and the consolidation of a generation of tenants who, excluded from property ownership, face an increasingly expensive, unstable and unequal market. 

Based on the concepts of spatial arrangement, financialisation, rentier capitalism and political capitalism, it offers a critical reading of the transformation of the Spanish real estate landscape in the post-crisis period.

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This project has received funding from the HORIZON-MSCA-2023-SE-01-01 under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101183165.