“How can it be true that there are so many poor people? If it were as they say, they would be seen”. These phrases were uttered not long ago by a political leader from Madrid, who was trying to refute what NGO reports point out about the ever-increasing inequality and social exclusion (in 2024, almost 9.5 million people). The answer is given by Caritas, through the Foessa reports, a reference in the study of the social situation in Spain: the vast majority of poverty remains hidden for citizens because they identify this situation with homelessness (the image of a person sleeping on the street is the most recognized with poverty), shantytowns or hunger queues. This is not the case.
The latest Foessa report makes it clear that there is a poverty that goes unnoticed, but it exists, and unlike previous stages where the lack of employment was the most relevant cause of exclusion, now it is closely linked to housing, given that the labor market has improved significantly.
According to this study, the housing cost burden now affects 14% more people than in 2018, “which means we can estimate that this issue affects 6.8 million people in Spain,” it points out.
In addition to this, there is the process of “decapitalization” of households excluded since the financial crisis: if in 2013, 57% of excluded households owned a home, even with pending payments, now that proportion has been reduced to 3 out of 10. “Families in social exclusion, therefore, have a harder time accessing or, to a lesser extent, maintaining home ownership, and are increasingly exposed to accessing a precarious housing situation, which significantly influences their legal and vital insecurity,” notes this study.
The Foessa report warns of a type of poverty that is often overlooked because it is not linked to slums or life on the streets
This results in an increase in households facing severe overcrowding, where each person has less than 15 square meters, reaching 7% of the population. Who are these households? They are those forced to share apartments with more people, return to their parents' or relatives' homes and live with them, resort to so-called nanoapartments, or have difficulty finding another housing when the family grows, even if it is a necessity. In this situation, a whopping 3.4 million people live.
The number of households that have resorted to housing in worse conditions from various points of view has also increased: with situations of unhealthiness (has increased by 82% since 2018), in marginalized neighborhoods with degraded environments (doubles), or lacking the most basic facilities (1.8 percentage points more than in 2018). And there is a lack of adaptation of housing to the needs of people with reduced mobility, for example.
Housing has become one of the most determining factors of impoverishment
Access to housing is one of the determining aspects of the current poverty situation, but there are other changes that are not so much related to this aspect and more to the lack of employment or job insecurity. Social exclusion is present both in urban and rural environments, in all communities, and in all types of neighborhoods and municipalities of different sizes and characteristics, as stated by Raúl Flores, technical secretary of the Foessa Foundation.
However, social exclusion is predominantly an urban phenomenon: 54.6% of households in situations of exclusion are located in urban environments, compared to 10.5% in rural areas, with the remainder in intermediate situations. The most recent evolution shows a worsening in rural areas, which have seen a particularly notable increase in severe exclusion, with its weight growing from 8.7% in 2018 to 11% in 2024," states this study.
Also, make it clear that although the most degraded neighborhoods are the ones that host a higher percentage of people in poverty, affluent neighborhoods are not exempt, even though most citizens may not realize it. This does not change the fact that severe social exclusion in degraded neighborhoods is more than double that which occurs in well-maintained neighborhoods, as explained by Foessa.
Older age groups experience fewer situations of poverty than children and adolescents
Caritas report reveals changes in the profile of exclusion in Spanish society. For now, and beyond cyclical fluctuations, differences in the incidence of severe social exclusion according to age have been increasing significantly, multiplying by six between the extremes: while older age groups show a clear trend towards gradual improvement, younger groups are the ones that have worsened the most. Specifically, childhood has seen how severe social exclusion affects them more than twice as much now as in 2007.
