NICK’S VIEW - It was a scene that went viral. In late September 2026, police forcibly evicted an 87-year-old woman on a stretcher from her home in Madrid despite crowds of neighborhood protesters blocking the entrance to the place she lived in for over seven decades.
María del Carmen Abascal, known affectionately as “Maricarmen,” fell ill during her displacement and passed away in a hospital shortly thereafter. Her tragic death transformed her into a national symbol for the human cost of Spain's real estate crisis, triggering widespread protests, parliamentary gridlock, and an early general election.
The culprit was the real estate crisis — the collision of extreme housing costs with stagnant incomes, a chronically restricted supply, and a policy system too fragmented and slow to respond.
Maricarmen’s rent was originally 500 Euros a month (about $558.00). It was raised to 2,650 Euros per month (a 430% increase), later reduced to 1,650 Euros per month (still a 230% increase). Her pension: 1,350 Euros per month (about $1,506.00).
The protests are going global. They spread from Spain to France, Chile, Belgium, Albania, Greece, Italy, Portugal and India.
The cost of living is not narrowed to the left. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is trying to contain energy costs with gasoline subsidies. France`s Marine Le Pen is promising cheap Russian gas.
I wanted to explore if the same could happen in Los Angeles, and if so, how it can be prevented.
Certainly, housing costs become an affordability crisis when they consume an excessive share of household income. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is the U.S. federal executive agency responsible for national housing policy, affordable housing programs, community development, fair‑housing enforcement, and mortgage insurance. HUD measures the housing cost burden as follows: households spending more than 30% of gross income on housing are cost-burdened, while those spending more than 50% are severely cost-burdened.
According to the 2026 LA Housing Data, 57% of renter households pay more than 30% of income on rent and 30% (roughly 500,000 households) pay more than 50% of income on rent.
This means one in three renters is severely cost‑burdened.
Here is what I also observed: Los Angeles treats housing as a financial asset because its laws, incentives, and institutions were built to protect property values and investment returns, not human stability.
I believe that Los Angeles must redesign its housing policies to prioritize human stability over property values. This requires reforming laws, institutions, incentives, zoning, and public narratives so that keeping people housed becomes the system’s default rather than the exception.
Los Angeles’s housing crisis exacts a profound human toll, undermining stability, dignity, and safety. When housing is valued mainly as an investment rather than a basic need, steep rent increases and evictions become routine. Elderly tenants on fixed incomes are pushed out of homes they have lived in for decades and families are forced to absorb rent increases that devour half their paychecks.
Los Angeles’s real-estate market is not failing people by accident; it is operating as designed, with human harm embedded in its structure.
Maricarmen’s case in Madrid is fundamentally about affordability. Her eviction happened because her rent was raised to a level beyond her entire monthly pension. That is the purest definition of an affordability crisis.
Los Angeles is already living inside the same affordability logic with rents rising far faster than wages and corporate landlords optimizing returns.
Is it possible for Los Angeles to face a political or institutional shock like Spain’s, where Maricarmen’s eviction helped precipitate national elections? I believe it could, though the outcome would differ. Here the political impact would be structural rather than electoral.
In Spain, eviction laws, pensions, housing rights, and political responsibilities are all national. Its accountability is centralized. In Los Angeles accountability is distributed. No single agency owns housing governance. It is fragmented across many institutions like the city council, mayor, county board of supervisors, state legislature, the courts, and Federal HUD rules.
Yet the power of an outraged community is unpredictable. A tragedy on Maricarmen’s scale could spark protests and force political change in Los Angeles—not by toppling a national government, but by shifting local power, rewriting housing and affordability policies, and compelling reform across the city’s fragmented institutions.
When daily life becomes unaffordable, affordability itself is the crisis. In Los Angeles, the problem extends beyond housing, as overlapping expenses create compounding pressures. For example:
- Transportation costs rank among the nation’s highest, with households spending nearly $15,000 annually to commute because of long travel times, car dependence, and high fuel prices.
- Food insecurity affects roughly one in four households, showing how inflation that outpaces wage growth has made even necessities harder to afford.
- Healthcare adds further financial strain as premiums and out-of-pocket expenses continue to outpace wage growth.
- Childcare costs can rival rent, putting early education beyond the reach of many working families, while insurance premiums and out-of-pocket medical expenses force difficult choices between healthcare and other monthly bills.
Affordability in Los Angeles cannot be excused, seen as market fluctuation or temporary strain. The pressures I have outlined are not isolated but are the predictable result of a governing approach that treats affordability as a set of disconnected issues rather than a single, systemic failure.
City leaders must treat affordability as a governance failure, not an economic inconvenience or talking point. Los Angeles’s cost of living has outpaced local incomes so dramatically that it exposes structural flaws in the city’s planning, permitting, investment, and priorities.
The systems meant to make life livable have been allowed to fragment and underperform. By treating affordability as a market issue, leaders evade responsibility. They must recognize it as a governance failure that only coordinated, sustained city-led action can reverse.
Los Angeles must work to rebuild the civic machinery that ensures residents can afford to live in the city they serve and love.
(Nick Patsaouras is an electrical engineer, civic leader, and a longtime public advocate. He ran for Mayor in 1993 with a focus on rebuilding L.A. through transportation after the 1992 civil unrest. He has served on major public boards, including the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Metro, and the Board of Zoning Appeals, helping guide infrastructure and planning policy in Los Angeles. He is the author of the book "The Making of Modern Los Angeles.")
